Read this book
I mentioned on Friday that I was reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Well, I finished it today and feel a little bereft. It was such a beautiful book. There were so many times that I would come across a sentence or a paragraph and want to mark it or copy it down. Often I would read it twice just to enjoy it. There was just so much I loved about it.
On the surface, it doesn't seem as though it would be much of a story, especially not one to carry a story for nearly 500 pages. An aristocrat is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. If he were to leave the hotel, he would be shot. The story follows this man during the 30+ years of his stay at the hotel.
See? It doesn't sound riveting, does it? Man stuck in hotel for thirty years. I wasn't convinced I would like it, but it had received such good reviews I figured it couldn't hurt to try it. Ah, the beauty of libraries. So I started the book wondering how far I would get until I decided I couldn't finish it and put it aside.
I got all the way to the end, and then wished there was more. I will miss the characters. They were each unique and I liked them. It seems as though it is so rare for a current book to have truly likable characters. (Why is that? I find it particularly annoying to read books populated by one annoying character after another.) The ending caught me by surprise, but as I thought about it, it made total sense given what I knew of the count (the main character), and I thought it was a beautiful and perfect ending.
It took me about a week to read it. This is pretty slow reading for me, but it was not a book I wanted to rush through. I would have happily spent hours reading it at a time, though my schedule never allowed it, but it was a book which I happily read slowly. A rare occurrence for me.
I guess my whole point is to say, read this book. I don't think you will regret it. There are a few books that are at the top of my list of books I am so glad I read and that I rank as my very favorites... A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Possession by A. S. Byatt are a few of the others that have risen to that exalted place. It is one of the few times that I am sad that I checked it out of the library and don't own it. I will have to keep my eyes open for a used copy, because I plan on adding it to my library.
It's going to be very difficult for whatever book I read next to follow it.
On the surface, it doesn't seem as though it would be much of a story, especially not one to carry a story for nearly 500 pages. An aristocrat is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. If he were to leave the hotel, he would be shot. The story follows this man during the 30+ years of his stay at the hotel.
See? It doesn't sound riveting, does it? Man stuck in hotel for thirty years. I wasn't convinced I would like it, but it had received such good reviews I figured it couldn't hurt to try it. Ah, the beauty of libraries. So I started the book wondering how far I would get until I decided I couldn't finish it and put it aside.
I got all the way to the end, and then wished there was more. I will miss the characters. They were each unique and I liked them. It seems as though it is so rare for a current book to have truly likable characters. (Why is that? I find it particularly annoying to read books populated by one annoying character after another.) The ending caught me by surprise, but as I thought about it, it made total sense given what I knew of the count (the main character), and I thought it was a beautiful and perfect ending.
It took me about a week to read it. This is pretty slow reading for me, but it was not a book I wanted to rush through. I would have happily spent hours reading it at a time, though my schedule never allowed it, but it was a book which I happily read slowly. A rare occurrence for me.
I guess my whole point is to say, read this book. I don't think you will regret it. There are a few books that are at the top of my list of books I am so glad I read and that I rank as my very favorites... A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Possession by A. S. Byatt are a few of the others that have risen to that exalted place. It is one of the few times that I am sad that I checked it out of the library and don't own it. I will have to keep my eyes open for a used copy, because I plan on adding it to my library.
It's going to be very difficult for whatever book I read next to follow it.
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