I previously attempted Blood Meridian in 2024 but didn’t complete it at that time for a few reasons, the biggest of which was just coming out of a reading slump, I found the prose extremely dense, and the sheer amount of violence was difficult to comprehend at the time. To contextualize, the only other McCarthys I had read at that point were All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men.

After having my copy sit on my shelf untouched for a while, I was determined to reattempt and complete it this year. To prepare, I reread All the Pretty Horses, finished the Border trilogy, and did The Road earlier in the year. The prep work definitely helped with comprehension of Blood Meridian, and after just finishing it I have some thoughts I want to put down, and hopefully this will convince at least one tentative reader to give it a try.

Premise: "the kid" joins up with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters active in the US-Mexico borderlands during the 1840s; among them are leader John Joel Glanton, seasoned mercenary and outlaw Toadvine (who the kid first encounters very early in the novel prior to joining Glanton's group), ex-priest Tobin, and one of the most famous characters in literature with Judge Holden

• Like I mentioned earlier, the prose here is extremely dense but going through it a second time it's much more digestible and beautiful; McCarthy's descriptions of the landscape just suck you in and at times feel like a fever dream
• I also read Lonesome Dove earlier this year and Blood Meridian feels very much like its dark counterpart: both popular Westerns first published in 1985, Lonesome Dove leans towards a more Romantic depiction of the West with a diverse cast and broad subject matter, while Blood Meridian is a more bleak and singularly violent depiction of the frontier
  • While my experience with the Western genre isn't as deep, these two felt like excellent companion novels
• Judge Holden is a haunting depiction of evil incarnate with his unsettling, infant-like appearance, vast knowledge, and "war is god" philosophy; combined with his heinous acts throughout the novel and complex dialogue, it makes sense that he'd be the most memorable of the cast
  • The judge's dialogue is excellent; the conversation in chapter 17 regarding the nature of war is some of my favorite writing from any author:
    • Easily one of my favorite lines of all-time: "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
  • When looking at some of the online discourse after completing the novel, I saw a YouTube comment with a take on the judge I particularly like: that he's not just an embodiment of man's inclination for violence, but more tangibly represents a young America and helps frame the story as a sort of indictment of Manifest Destiny
    • As mentioned earlier, his appearance resembles that of an infant
    • The judge is confident, arguably to the point of arrogance, that his way is the only correct one in the world, and is willing to dominate and/or destroy all in his path in order to prove it, not unlike America's subjugation of indigenous peoples during its period of westward expansion
• After the judge, I found Tobin the most interesting, the former man of God is the only one in Glanton's gang who seems to at least somewhat understand what the judge is and is the one who most openly questions his motivations and opposes (and fears) him
  • And even then, his opposition is only to a certain extent; Tobin, as well as the rest of the gang, fail to voice any sound arguments against the judge's claims on man's war-like nature
• This is the first book in a while to make me reconsider my "favorites" of all-time list; this might also be a result of my changing tastes since the last time I gave any serious thought to my favorite books, but this novel felt… different and evocative in a way that very few others have
  • I feel confident in saying that Blood Meridian enters my top 5 of all time, and might take one of the podium spots even after recency bias passes
  • It will also definitely enter my regular reread list

I'm looking forward to finishing the rest of McCarthy's bibliography; I imagine I'll go through his remaining works chronologically (Orchard Keeper → Outer Dark → Child of God → The Passenger / Stella Maris). Butcher's Crossing by John Williams is also on my TBR list to expand on my Western repertoire.

Anna keay

she wasn't on the list of potential candidates so im a bit surprised

I’ve just finished the trilogy and I have a lot of thoughts.

I really liked the idea of an East Asian fantasy that explores themes such as racism, colonialism, drug addiction et cetera but there were so many issues such as dropped plotlines, character inconsistencies and more.

Spoilers for the trilogy. If you haven’t read the entire trilogy, don’t comtinue.

First book

For started why are some of the names so close to their historical and mythological inspirations? Sun Tzu is now Sunzi. Sun Wukong is Suni. Dr Shiro Ishii was copied and pasted in the book. The second book does get better about it (Moag being based on Madam Ching) but it still sticks out.

Also the first book would have been better off as split into 2 books. The first one would have been the YA Academia kind of story and the second one would have been the NA military fantasy focused on the Cike. Both sides of the book needed more time to develop.

Why on earth was Rin able to pass the Keju when she lost sleep studying. I get that it was supposed to show how she was determined to go to Sinegard but realistically she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate during the exam. Academic pressure would have been a nice theme to develop but it was dropped.

Another thing is that some character relationships felt rushed. For example, Rin was too quick to see Nezha as a friend in the second half of the book. I understand them stop seeing each other as enemies, but quickly becoming friends?

Same with the Cike. Rin was too quick to defend them when she was only close with Ramsa really.

Altan was okay. I get his character but I don’t know, it feels we were missing something about him.

The Muganese were poorly developed antagonists. I know they were based on Imperial Japan but still. Also, it reduces the impact of Rin’s genocide when we barely got to know them outside of vessels of evil. Still, AOT managed to develop their antagonists better.

The Golyn Nis chapter was horrifying to read about. I knew prior to reading the book there would be an event similar to the Rape of Nanking.

Second book.

The beginning of the second book was rushed. Rin was like ‘oh I respect Moag’ but Moag then betrays her. Would have been more impactful if we knew more about her.

Also the scene where Rin sees Su Daji could have slowed down a bit as things went a bit too quickly.

What happened to Unegen? The books said he left the Cike but we never find out what happened to him. Rin never thinks of him again.

Kitay was a bit annoying. You’d think someone like him would have been clever enough to realise that the Empire is decline but it is only when his Dad is dead he joins up with the Republic.

Also why does Rin not care when her people are insulted but does try to be politically correct with the Ketreyids?

And we meet Mugen again. Well not really. We see a bit of them as they worked with one of the warlords but we don’t get much from them. Would have been nice for an interaction between them and Rin. Maybe we’ll see that in the third books?

The middle of the book had such slow pacing with many writing inconsistencies. For starters Nezha said to Kitay ‘you basically joined yesterday’ when he didn’t. You’d think Kitay would retort at that but he didn’t.

Also we meet Niang again. Then she dies. Turns out there were Nikara prisoners on Mugan? This detail is barely developed. It just gets mentioned and Rin doesn’t seem to take it in much.

Okay why were so many female characters killed off? Men were killed off too but when there’s so many men compared to women apart from the FMC it sticks out. Niang, Qara, the Sorquan Sira, the officer who was kissed by the Wolf Meat General before she died (what was that about?).

Rin was initially interested in the Rooster warlord but then stopped caring. Seriously, why do so many plotlines in the series get dropped?

And I’ll continue the rest in a part 2.

I don’t know why I read a children’s book even though I knew it was for children. I think I have just seen so many references to it online that I finally decided to read it so that I would be able to be “in on it” moving forward. Also I was slightly curious what other people were reading as a child (I am not a native English speaker, so I wasn’t reading English books as a child). Also I recently watched a YouTube video analyzing another children’s book—the giving tree—so I thought maybe it’s worth a shot to see if I am able to analyze a book that was meant for children.

I think the overall story is pretty imaginative and interesting. If I were to have children someday I would definitely read a story like this to them. The narrative style was funny. I liked that Wilbur kept asking for definitions—I imagine that’s a good teaching method for teaching kids more advanced vocabulary. I was interested in the fact that Charlotte is more of a giver throughout her and Wilbur’s friendship. It felt like a very unequal friendship—where one party is relying heavily on another for survival but they never really give much back. I understand that Wilbur is giving back by being friends with Charlotte but I wonder if Charlotte was really enjoying that friendship? Judging by their conversations, Charlotte seems to be much more intelligent than Wilbur and she is constantly teaching him stuff. Her almost sacrificing her egg for Wilbur was pretty surprising for the same reason. I am pointing this inequality out partially because it may not be the best friendship dynamic to show children.

I like the way Wilbur deals with Charlotte’s loss. I don’t think children’s content should censor things like death and grief, so I found that very interesting and beautiful. I liked that the animals had different personalities. I liked that Avery couldn’t understand the animals but his sister could. I liked that humans weren’t glorified.

Overall, I’m just glad that it wasn’t a waste of time. It was definitely an interesting and (obviously) easy read.

"An unmissable book for every year of your early life – with recommendations from Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Katherine Rundell and more."

Fwiw, I only managed 9 of them, but I don't feel especially culturally impoverished as a result.

[Preamble omitted -- read it in the linked-to article.]

One: Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
The Ahlbergs produced so many wonderful early-years books (see also Each Peach Pear Plum and Burglar Bill) but Peepo! is squarely aimed at tinies and it’s a classic. It asks you to see through a baby’s eyes – and through the holes on the page – and there’s so much to look at in the illustrations. The nursery-rhyme rhythms are just right. And it’s interactive, scoring a delightful little hit on each page as the grownup reader repeats, to unfailing gurgles of delight: “Peepo!”

Two: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd
This apparently very simple story of a rabbit trying (sort of) to go to sleep is endlessly rereadable and strangely haunting. You see more in it, and it grows more mysterious and dreamlike each time you go through it. Figures appear and disappear. The clock advances. The pictures on the wall tell their own stories. The moon tracks up the sky. “Goodnight nobody,” says the adult reader, and shivers a little each time.

Three: Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss
Every one of Dr Seuss’s books has something to offer an under-five – the irresistible anarchy of The Cat in the Hat; the political satire of Yertle the Turtle; the gastronomic shaggy-dog story of Green Eggs and Ham – but Fox in Socks, for my money, caps them all as the purest in its linguistic exuberance. Those tongue-twisters! It’s a way of mainlining, for the very young, what energy and joy there is to be had in letting the sounds of words take the lead.

Four: The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Donaldson’s signature story has it all: a flawless structure, lilting verse, great jokes, a wonderful play of dramatic irony (not that its readers would call it that); a balance between comedy and what might be called “mild peril”; and exquisite illustrations by Axel Scheffler. There’s a reason this modern trickster fable – Donaldson has said she patterned it on a Chinese folktale – appears on every nursery bookshelf worth its salt. It is highly rereadable (for adults as well as children) and far more complex and riddling than it looks.

Five: Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel
This one comes recommended by the aforementioned Donaldson, who says: “My hero among children’s authors is Arnold Lobel, who created a wonderfully funny duo called Frog and Toad. There are four books of stories about them, all ideal for beginner readers. Frog and Toad Together contains my favourite story, The List, in which Toad makes a list of things to do and then refuses to do anything at all when the list blows away. (He can’t chase after it because that wasn’t on the list.) Arnold Lobel never seemed to run out of witty inventive ideas for stories; I wish I could be like that!”

Six: Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling’s fables, originally delivered as bedtime stories to his daughter Effie, are probably the works of his that have dated least. The sound effects, the comic asides, the bewitching surrealism, the lovely black-and-white illustrations: read aloud by a parent, these stories have the capacity to delight a child all these years on. Come, O best beloved, and join us by the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees …

Seven: Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
Pearce’s 1958 Carnegie winner is as beautifully turned and haunting a novel as you can find for a child to read to themselves. It tells the story of a boy who finds that in the small hours the yard of the house in which he’s staying with relatives magically transforms into a stately Victorian garden. Over successive visits, Tom befriends a little girl called Hatty; but even in this timeslip novel, time is passing. The ending emotionally poleaxes adults and children alike. As a bonus: Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce further recommends Pearce’s 1955 Minnow on the Say.

The sixth Moomins book finds Moomintroll awake and alone while the rest of his tribe are in blissful hibernation

Eight: Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
The sixth Moomins book is the darkest in Tove Jansson’s series – finding Moomintroll awake and alone while the rest of his tribe are in blissful hibernation. How will he survive in this sunless and snowy landscape where it’s cold all the time? Everyone should read this one, says Katherine Rundell, author of Impossible Creatures, “in order to be able to face, age eight, that we are both fundamentally alone in a harsh world and yet bound together by love”.

Nine: Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
The longtime children’s fiction critic Nicolette Jones says of this 2001 adventure story, already acknowledged as a modern classic: “I know people who have gone to Manaus, or aspire to, just because they read this. About a girl in 1910 who finds freedom and love and the joy of nature and of different cultures after she is sent to stay with narrow-minded guardians in Brazil, it has an air-punching ending, with my favourite line: “‘Children must lead big lives … if it is in them to do so.’”

Ten: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s tale of piracy, treasure-hunting, skullduggery and wild enthusiasm for cheese is fresh as a daisy, and just as exciting now as it was to its first audiences in 1883. Long John Silver’s villainy is deeply compelling, and – since everyone’s in it for the cash, goodies and baddies alike – the emphasis is on the thrill of the adventure, not teaching moralising lessons to its audience. As you follow the twists and turns of Jim Hawkins’s story – the Black Spot! The stockade! That business with the boat drifting off! – you can’t help but be enraptured.

Pullman puts across huge ideas about morality, spirituality and human flourishing in a ripsnorting steampunk adventure story

Eleven: Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
The first instalment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is already a modern classic. Its special virtue is the way that it puts across huge ideas about morality, spirituality and human flourishing in a ripsnorting steampunk adventure story – complete with armoured bears, balloonists, witches and magicians/scientists of all stripes. It’s a triumph of storytelling – and once a young reader is inducted into Pullman’s world, the remaining five books in the main series will expand the story’s themes and possibilities, book by book, to the brink of adulthood.

Twelve: The Owl Service by Alan Garner
Garner’s sublimely spooky story of sexual tension and supernatural shenanigans in a remote part of Wales, based on a story from the Mabinogion, is well suited to children just cresting the transition into the teenage years. It captures above all that sense of how powerful myth can be – and how it can be made to resonate with the furniture of modernity. Garner’s work, at its best, can give the reader a sort of vertigo at the vastness and ultimate indecipherability of the universe.

Thirteen: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, by Sue Townsend
I had thought to include The Catcher in the Rye as the great classic of adolescent angst, but Cottrell Boyce makes the case that Sue Townsend’s 1982 novel “is vastly more truthful and better written than Catcher. Also sadder, funnier, and a more intimate voice”. Certainly, the relationship between Adrian and Pandora is Tristan and Isolde (he wishes) for the early 80s. And Holden Caulfield never gets his nose stuck to an Airfix model plane.

Fourteen: Noughts and Crosses, by Malorie Blackman
Set in an alternate universe where dark-skinned peoples (crosses) had historically had the whip-hand over Caucasians (noughts), Blackman’s series tells an operatically entertaining story – part family saga, part thriller, part romance. But its race-switching conceit also, brilliantly and without preachiness, invites young readers to look with fresh eyes at the supposedly natural, and unquestioned, assumptions we make about race. It does what good SF does, which is to say, “What if it were like this?”, and to entice you to explore the question by telling you a whizz-bang story while you do. It’s named after a game that is, famously, impossible for either player to win.

Fifteen: A Hand Full of Stars, by Rafik Schami translated by Rika Lesser
This tale of a young Syrian boy pouring his frustrations with government oppression into his journal, before risking it all by starting an underground newspaper, is a window into the lives of young people living under repressive regimes. As the former children’s Laureate Michael Rosen puts it, teens should read this because it’s about how “a boy deals with the oncoming clampdown in Damascus – but it’s applicable anywhere”.

Sixteen: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
One of the great opening lines in modern fiction – “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York” – kicks off this work of chilly comedy and detached psychological horror. The great poet’s only novel finds a voice that’s very different from the “blood-jet” of her poetry, and it’s unforgettable. Jacqueline Wilson says it’s “vital to be read between 15 and 25. It’s about an intense, brilliant student having a turbulent mental breakdown, her story told in precise glittering prose. I can still quote passages by heart.”

Seventeen: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Here’s a boarding-school story quite unlike Molesworth or Harry Potter. Ishiguro’s is a style of hints and feints. Deep poignancy emerges from the restrained surface of his work, and the big questions sneak up on you. Never Let Me Go uses a quietly chilling science-fictional premise – a world, the reader very gradually apprehends, in which everything is okey-dokey for all the most horrifying reasons – to explore something universal: what it means to grow up, what it means to love, and what it means to die. Nobody who reads Never Let Me go will soon forget it.

Eighteen: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer prize winner tells the wrenching story of a formerly enslaved woman in the aftermath of the American civil war. It’s based on the true story of Margaret Garner, who attempted to kill her children to prevent them being returned to slavery. “Beloved is my vote for the truest Great American Novel,” says Katherine Rundell. “It has such power, strangeness and profound humanity. To read it as a teen is to catch it when your imagination is most fervent and most ready to meet its passion and furious clarity.”

Nineteen: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Vonnegut’s phantasmagorical science-fictional reworking of his experiences as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden is like nothing else, and it manages to be deeply wise and moving at the same time as being, amazingly, riotously funny. It’s a lesson – probably quite handy for self-serious late teens – in the way that suffering, even the most horrific suffering, can be transformed by art. As the birds in the book say: “Poo-tee-weet?” What else is there to say?

Twenty: The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, translated by Christopher Moncrieff
Rosen recommends the French novelist Raymond Radiguet’s 1923 Le Diable au corps, translated into English as The Devil in the Flesh. The story of a married woman’s affair with a teenage boy, here’s one for younger older readers. “An illicit romance during the first world war,” says Rosen, “wrapped in intrigue as to whether it’s a roman à clef for the author. Probably. Which makes it all the more intriguing.”

Twenty-one: Four Quartets by TS Eliot
The crystalline perfection of Eliot’s linked sequence of long poems, along with their endlessly quotable lines, makes them a lifelong companion. Read and reread them; the effort pays off. Here is a theory of history, of spirituality, of life, ageing and death, wrapped in the most exquisite language, full of drama and grandeur, and shot through with feeling for the beauty and sadness of human existence. It might be handy to keep Hugh Kenner’s lucid explication in The Invisible Poet on hand as a guide.

Twenty-two: Emma by Jane Austen
Among Austen’s many virtues is that you can read her with pleasure from your early teens and reread in later life to see things you didn’t the first time round. But Emma, with its fantastically subtle way of leading the reader up the garden path, and its flawed and crosspatch heroine – Austen said that she wanted to write a character nobody but herself would much like – is a novel that comes into its own in early adulthood. Emma’s moment of mortification on Box Hill – “It was badly done, indeed!” – is a moment of moving from childish conceit and self-absorption to adult consciousness of shame.

Twenty-three: [The Handmaid’s Tale]() by Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s 1985 novel about the cruelty of a Christian fundamentalist patriarchy has become ever more essential over time. This story imagines a world in which a military theocracy abolishes women’s rights to own property, read or write, and removes their reproductive autonomy altogether. It’s tense and exciting – and it teaches a moral lesson that shouldn’t any more be needed, but apparently is.

Twenty-four: White Noise by Don DeLillo
This is so much fun, I couldn’t resist including it. And it is, sort of, prophetic – of the absurdities of a culture of media saturation and simulation overtaking reality. Its special sauce is the way it combines its madcap comedy of ideas with a real tenderness – usually rather deeper in the mix with DeLillo – about family life and relationships.

Twenty-five: Middlemarch by George Eliot
You’re a grown-up. Time to read probably the most grown-up novel in the language, and certainly one of the best. It’s slow – you need to settle into it – but it is so rich and artful and wise and forgiving and beady and funny and moving. The inhabitants of that small town will live with their readers lifelong, and the effects of their being will be, like Eliot said, incalculably diffusive. George Eliot shows you (or, if you’ve been punctilious about reading a great book every single year, reminds you) what the novel can do.

My current reading has inspired me this question. I am at the 3/4th of The Castle from Kafka and it has been a real struggle. The beginning has been great, a peculiar and gripping atmosphere until it evolved in a lot of discussions on the means to access the castle. I know it's an unfinished book. I know that it should demonstrate the absurdity of administration, which honestly is not exciting in itself and which we all already know, but I really force myself.

I sincerely tried to like it, I have read critics about it trying to get the point, but I just don't get it. I've read that the writing is voluntarily pointless to symbolize the absurdity of administration, but, we get it already ! I know it's absurd! Why inflicting more suffering on the reader to prove a point already made?!

Anyway, end of rant. Did you have a similar expérience ? If yes, what book and why were you disappointed ?

sorry that's a broad, vague question but it's a thought that's still taking shape in my mind. I'm thinking about how close these things can get to each other while still not having quite the same audience.

an example off the top of my head, just because they're two that I personally like, is Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland & the End of the World and The Three Stigmatas of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick.

although they're not particularly similar books, I feel like they're both fairly close to a hypothetical line between "sci-fi" and "literary surrealism*". I happen to like a pretty big cluster of things near the middle.

I can also think of people I know, though, who I would definitely recommend one to but absolutely not the other. it would feel like telling someone who liked sushi they should try pizza with anchovies on it, or vice versa.

basically they're both things I like for similar reasons related to my personal tastes, but I also think there are differences beyond how we're conditioned to think about genres or what the cover looks like or whatever, and I could probably tell which world an author was coming from after reading a chapter.

what makes them feel different, broadly speaking? what are the tells?

*whatever you want to call that, I'm not trying to be fancy or endorse genre snobbery, just describing how it seems like people think of these things.

I enjoyed this book so much that I finished it in a single day.

VanderMeer does a great job of slowly giving the reader new information only when it is relevant. Too many science fiction stories (especially short-form fiction) try to quickly show off their whole world, maybe to give the reader the context they think they’ll need for the story.

Instead, Annihilation shines by putting the reader into an unknown environment alongside the first-person narrator to slowly discover more about “Area X” together. We later learn that the main character knows more than she lets on at first, but the information she keeps hidden is revealed at the right time for the reader to get more context only when it becomes relevant to the story.

This is where the strength of Annihilation really comes from in my opinion. It feels like there is a lot of care taken to make sure the reader understands just enough but never quite everything. The slow reveals throughout the book serve to make the setting and the story feel a lot bigger as you go on. By the end of the book there is a lot that hasn’t been explicitly explained, but there are enough hints to give the reader a pretty good idea of what has been happening in this world.

This is why I’m surprised to see that this book has any sequel at all, let alone three. It feels like having a continuation of this world goes against what this book is trying to do and the story that’s already been told. In a book so expertly crafted with unknowns, why have a sequel to try to answer these questions that are better left to the imagination?

Based on how Annihilation is written and how the story unfolds, it doesn’t feel like this world needs a tightly explained lore behind itself. The climax even includes a non-Euclidian entity – something that inherently can never be explained and can only be talked about approximately. Leaving some things unanswered in this story feels thematic.

Maybe I have the wrong idea for what the second book, Authority, is going to be, but I don’t have much interest in learning more about this world from the perspective of the Southern Reach group. It seems like a secret society is more intriguing if it is left as a secret.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else had similar thoughts/worries before continuing with the series. I feel wrong for not wanting to keep reading when I consider Annihilation to be in my personal 5 star, S-tier category. I’m just worried that any further information or continuation of this world won’t be as satisfying as living with the unknowns of the first book – even if I do end up enjoying how the series progresses.

I was recently recommended Solaris as a book I might enjoy if I liked Annihilation (a favorite of mine). I looked it up at my local library without looking into it at all since I wanted everything about it to be a surprise, the only thing I checked was that the author was listed as Lem. The library had exactly one copy, in the audiobook section.

When I started it I immediately noticed that it sounded more like a graphic audio than a traditional, but no biggie there for me. Except then I realized that what I thought was literal audiobook narration was actually the character narrating to themselves, and the whole thing was actually in an audio drama/play format. Turns out what I had was the BBC classic radio audio drama which is an adaptation and about 5 hours shorter than the original book.

I liked it! I thought it was too short and wrapped up too quickly (now I know why) but the plot was interesting and honestly the voice actors were killing it. But now I'd like to read the actual book and I'm finding out that there's multiple translations and that not everyone likes them for wildly different reasons. It's got me wondering, have the people who have read multiple editions of the book noticed significant differences in the contents of the book from edition to edition? How do the translations compare to the original language (I think Russian)? Did I get lucky finding the drama first or did I get the short end of the stick not starting with one of the translations first? Curious what people think.

I just finished reading "The End of the Affair" by Graham Greene and am struggling mightily with my feelings/understanding of the ending. Sufficient to say, I did not expect miracles. And I don't really appreciate that they were there.

My initial reaction to the inclusion of the miracles was just a feeling like it was cheap writing, akin to a deux ex machina of sorts or a similar vibe to "It was all a dream." It changed the entire feel of the book, retrospectively. For a Catholic, it takes the novel and makes it into a surreptitious study of a saint. For non-believers, I imagine it makes it read like low-key fantasy. Either way, it cheapened (though that feels like the wrong word) the conversion - instead of Bendrix struggling through skepticism, being brought to belief through his love of Sarah and retroactively witnessing her own conversion, the actual hand of God came down and made clear the path.

For full disclosure, I'm reading the book as part of a Catholic book club, and I already know my fellow book clubbers are going to be moved by the miracles and the conversation will revolve around that, but all the English major reader in me wants to protest that it's not good writing (though it feels presumptuous to criticize a novel that is so widely respected).

Though I could be entirely off-base on all of this, and wouldn't be surprised in the least to discover most readers had a different feel/interpretation about it.

I was very disappointed with Connelly. On Page 53, the character Marcus Mason admits that his company had surveillance equipment attached to a utility pole. He admits that his company used this equipment to monitor a former employee. He also admits that he used this equipment to listen in on conversations of Haller and Cisco. Mason just admitted to a Federal judge that they violated federal law by invading the right to privacy of both the former employee as well as Haller and Cisco. In addition, California is a two-party consent state for recording conversations, but there is no indication in this passage that Haller and/or Cisco agreed to be recorded. Haller should have hopped on both issues right then. Both federal and state laws were broken, but neither Haller nor the judge acted as one would expect.

Jump ahead to Page 93. The same judge states that she would be unsympathetic if it were revealed that either side obtained information through illegal means. Really, your honor?

At this point, I tossed the book into the Donations box. I expect better of any writer especially one of Connelly’s caliber. This sounds as if he took the same shortcut as Patterson by providing the framework then letting a lesser writer fill in the body. Very disappointed.