But Ken Follett is obsessed with ladies breasts! Once you realise this it kind of alters your appreciation of the book as you start to see the pattern that all the good women have big boobs and the badies and non-important female characters have flat chests. Also there seems to be a disproportionate amount of narrative given over to describing what the main female character’s boobs are up to at every given opportunity. It’s still a good book though and there is a good mix of storytelling and interesting factual information. I’m reading the sequel World Without End at the moment which is also good. However I do find it a bit dissapointing that he feels the need to mention the breast size of every female character, also, he’s done a U-turn in this book and the badies have large chests and the goodies have small, firm breasts which just makes me suspect that someone pointed out his underlying obsession in the first book and now he’s tried to over-correct the issue.

Generally an enjoyable book, with an engaging story. It could’ve been much better, though. While I developed empathy for a few of the characters, I never quite shook the feeling that the characterizations were off, somehow (although one would have to bend relationships in order to present any reasonable cross-section of society – it worked for that Titanic movie, I suppose). The two things that most bothered me, though, were: there was much less coverage of the cathedral-building than I hoped for. I was promised a book about building a cathedral, and I felt let down.

The repetition. I mentioned this before, and was disappointed that it didn’t let up. If anything, the micro-repetition just grew up, so we had larger cycles of repetition. Heck, even one of the characters complained about it.

So ultimately a good but flawed book, and I’d generally not recommend it to people due to its length – one could easily consume two better books in the time it would take to go through this one, and with a potential great increase in actual content.

About 1/5 of the way through. I’m generally enjoying the story so far, although I’m not convinced that all of the characterizations are accurate, and there’s an awful lot of people coincidentally running into one another. Ah well, I guess that’s what we have to take for interesting stories.

The one thing that’s bothering me so far is the repetition – Follett seems to like hammering a few points home over and over again. Hopefully it doesn’t continue at the current rate, or I’ll become annoyed by what could’ve been a mere 850-page book…

Abandoned — I just found the writing awkward and unengaging, so I had no reason to read further.

Finished this in four days, couldn’t put it down and stayed up until 5am for two nights actually.

I like this because it doesn’t go overboard in describing the time (the Middle Ages), the architecture (the story centres on cathedral-building) and the people (spans generations). The storyline is fluid, and mixes politics, hope, religion, war, romance and architecture. I knew I would like it – as I generally like these kinds of books, like Foucault’s Pendulum, Name of the Rose – but I think those who haven’t an interest in period literature would still be interested.

Inside this book are characters which I loved to hate – and those that I realised, by the middle of it, had started to admire. It’s been some time since any novel I’ve read has led me to be less than ambivalent about the characters.

I finally finished this book! It took me nearly a month, but I did it.

There’s so much to this book, that I can’t really give it a good book review. I was never good at book reviews anyway. It’s a story about a group of people from all walks of life that find themselves living in the cathedral town of Kingsbridge Priory.

While a cathedral is being built, politics and pettiness of enemies get in the way. People fall in love. People make bad decisions. People die.

The book was nearly 1000 pages, yet I still felt rushed at the end. I’m wondering if the author would have told the story better if he made this a trilogy or series. Overall, I felt it was a good book and would recommend it.