sarahxify's Reviews (703)

This is frequently recommended for fans of The Secret History, but I think this is a totally inaccurate comparison. It is a campus novel, but it's much more along the lines of a standard contemporary/mystery than TSH. The writing is quite obvious and lacks the beauty and subtlety of Donna Tartt's prose. I think anyone who has been led to this book in this way will be disappointed. 

I read about half of it but found it just didn't really hold my attention. 

I found this overall to be pretty disappointing. Coates is a really wonderful writer, and I will be rushing to read his fiction for sure. But as a non-fiction piece, I found this overly long and quite rambly, without much structure or direction. 

 It's worth keeping in mind that this is supposed to be a letter from the author to his son, so there is not really the amount of exposition or explanation for the reader that you might expect from an essay. I read this with some American friends, and realised that I missed a lot of what Coates was doing, playing with stereotypes and talking about classism and racism in America. I wouldn't really recommend this to a non-US reader, I think it's a bit too US-centric to get much out of unless you are particularly familiar with regional tropes and stereotypes in the US. 

I read about 50 pages of this, I found the descriptions altogether too much for my taste. Extremely detailed descriptions of bodily functions and semen I can live without 

I really liked this, a really fun example of David Mitchell doing his thing. It was creepy and atmospheric, particularly the audiobook. I did think that the first half was tighter and better executed than the second half, it petered out a bit towards the end. But overall really enjoyable. 

I would really recommend this to people who want to get into David Mitchell's books but are maybe a bit intimated by them. This one is shorter and easier to follow than the other books of his I've read, and is a bit closer to being more traditional genre fiction. 

 This was a wild ride! It went by really quickly and was surprisingly fast-paced. On the whole I really enjoyed it. I found the men in this to be almost universally unlikeable and awful, and I am not entirely sure if that was Charlotte Brontë's intention or not. 

I read this because I want to read Wide Sargasso Sea next month, and I hadn't read JE before. The parts of the book with Birte in it were pretty uncomfortable to read, and the overwhelming feeling I had when finishing this was that I just felt really sad for her. 

I might come back to this at a later time, but for now I'm find the writing just too boring and obvious for me. I know a lot of people enjoy this book but I need something a bit more to keep my attention at this time 

 This was just really boring and I didn't feel like it was going anywhere. I think I read about 150 pages and gave up. 

 he original locked-room mystery. Simply brilliant. 

Nothing egregiously wrong with this, just not at this time ty