Category: play

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Native Tongue

Here is what Hiaasen does better than anybody I’ve read: he combines hilarity and satire with relatively thrilling crime. He’s funny, and I’m not talking wry humor or subtlety, I’m talking over-the-top, laugh-out-loud funny. The crime is relatively light and is outshone by the humor, but still contains enough “thrill” to keep it interesting from a crime standpoint. This effort was worthy, although not as good as Skinny Dip, which I read last year.

Hiaasen lives in South Florida and he clearly loves it. Any encroachment on the purity of this region gets skewered maliciously. He takes no prisoners. The brunt of his attacks this time are:

  • Tourists
  • Theme Parks (especially with animal kingdoms)
  • Golf Course Developments

Other slices of Americana also get highlighted by Hiaasen; like steroid use and phone sex operations. He just kind of pokes fun at them. I’m not sure what his agenda is, but it’s funny as hell.

In this book, an ex-newspaperman named Joe Winder is now the public relations man for the Amazon Kingdom of Thrills in North Key Largo, which happens to be owned by a ex-mobster in the witness protection program. Everything is clipping along fine, until the ex-mobster decides he wants to expand his holdings by wiping out a huge chunk of natural Florida habitat, next to the Kingdom of Thrills, for a golf course community. This just happens to be the same natural Florida habitat that Winder goes to a few nights a week after work to engage in some catch-and-return fishing. All hell breaks loose.

I probably won’t read Hiaasen again until 2009 because of my backlog, but I’m looking forward to the next one. Maybe I’ll read his golf book next.

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Then We Came to the End

This whole office life is hell theme has played out for a few decades now. My earliest memories are from the late 1980s and Dilbert. Even as a college kid I found Dilbert kind of funny despite my lack of experience in a corporate environment. Fast forward more than a decade to the UK version of the office. Now that was pretty damn funny stuff. Side splitting funny actually. Around the same time came the American movie Office Space. Awesome, I loved it – that scene where they destroy the printer with gangsta rap in the background is one of the greatest scenes ever in American film. Then we had the US version of the office, which hooked me early on. However, about half way through the second season I got bored with it and quit watching.

Was I just jaded by the office life is hell genre? Actually, this occurred at a point when I quit watching just about all comedic, reality, or dramatic TV, so maybe there were larger forces at work. Whatever the case, I wasn’t going to pass up Then We Came to the End, despite its linkage to the office life is hell genre and my apparent discouragement with it. Heck, it was getting killer reviews everywhere and the NYT called it one of the top 10 books of 2007. So here we are. It’s a day after finishing it and despite struggling early on, I ended up liking it.

It’s a story about a Chicago advertising firm set during the tech bust. Cushy marketing jobs at the Michigan Avenue based firm are being trimmed and the best way for the employees to deal with the stress (and lack of work) is to gossip, play jokes, and complain. There is a host of kooky characters and the situations they get themselves into are described in great detail by Ferris. The weird and humorous stuff Ferris comes up with is very creative and the depths in which he describes them is amazing, but early on it feels like recycled office life is hell material.

Eventually though, there are strong moments and solid themes that raise this book above the standard material out there today, which invariably degrades into making fun of the stupid boss and casting all consultants as evil beasts. Ferris goes beyond this tired act.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

The interlude (I didn’t come up with that term) about Lynn Mason (the boss) and her last night before surgery to remove a cancerous tumor is well done. Ferris changes the perspective and the chapter title styling and just launches into it. I really couldn’t tell what was going on, but I couldn’t put it down. It held my attention well. And the way Ferris linked up this interlude with the rest of the book was smooth, really smooth. The interlude was actually a book written by one of the characters, a reading of which brings the whole crew together at the end. Great stuff.

The other memorable scene occurred when Joe (the #2 guy) tells the story of his trip to jail to visit Tom Mota (the office villain who everyone feared would one day come back to blow away the floor after being let go). Joe fired Tom. Not because Tom wrote FAG on Joe’s wall (nobody was really sure who did this). Nope, Joe fired Tom because they were cutting back. Tom, in turn, hated Joe, but not really. Tom just hated being at the firm. To make a long story short, it turns out that Tom figures out that he admires Joe for staying above it all. You had to be there, but it’s a great scene. The last thing that Tom says to Joe before he is taken back to his cell is:

“Yeah.” Tom raised his manacled hands abruptly. “Stay up here, you f&%#,” he said.

Good stuff. All in all, it was a labor at times, but worth the read.

One more thing, Ferris has Chicago down pat. He knows about the long lines at Potbelly, the weather, the neighborhoods, the suburbs, the lake … you name it. If you live in Chicago, it will all be very familiar to you.

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The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

This is another suggestion by Nick Hornby (from reading Housekeeping vs. The Dirt). Hornby hasn’t done me wrong yet. In December of 1988, a group of terrorists planted a bomb on Pan Am flight 103 from Heathrow to New York. That plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland shortly after takeoff. None of the passengers survived. On that plane was a gentleman named David Dornstein. He was a 25 year old writer, actor, brother, son, boyfriend, Brown graduate, and all-around tortured soul. He was on his way home to Philadelphia to see his family.

David’s brother, Ken, was 19 years old when this happened. This book is partly Ken’s autobiographical account of how he dealt with David’s early death and partly Ken’s devotional to David, whom Ken loved very much. It’s sad man, really sad. But not sad in a way that you get choked up while reading it. In fact, the sadness of the story really didn’t hit me until I started banging this out.

Ken spent about 15 years going through David’s journals, talking to David’s friends and acquaintences, and visiting the places that David had been. David was a starving artist of epic proportions and he left a vast estate of journals. Ken pieces these journals together to give the story of David’s life and tells his own story along the way.

Ken doesn’t sugar coat anything. There is plenty of pain and suffering. For example, their mother had emotional problems and left before Ken and David were teen-agers. Around this time, David was apparently abused by an adult neighbor, which Ken does not find out about this until he starts reading the journals. There is an especially tense moment when Ken meets the perpetrator, but never brings up the accusations.

Ken also ends up building lasting relationships with two of David’s old girlfriends. In fact, he ends up marrying and starting a family with one of them. Ken loved his brother. And he finds out after his death just how much he loved him and how much that love was returned by David, even after his death. It’s not touching necessarily. I didn’t necessary feel any sympathy. It didn’t strike those chords with me. But I loved this book. It’s a slice of humanity that I just found kind of interesting.

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3 Nights in August

Buzz Bissinger wrote Friday Night Lights, which is on of my favorite books and movies, and clearly the greatest football film of all time. But Bissinger, it turns out, is actually more of a baseball fan than a football fan and 3 Nights in August is the baseball book he’s always wanted to write. It’s the story of a three game series in St. Louis between the Cubs and Cardinals in 2004, told mostly from the perspective of Tony La Russa, the Cardinal’s manager and collaborator on the book.

Bissinger starts when the players begin wandering into the clubhouse for game one and finishes with the last out of game three. But the book is more than just a description of the preparation, the strategy, the pressure, and the decisions made during the series. It’s about the people and personalities involved in baseball – human beings doing something that they love, often at the expense of their health and their relationships.

The MLB clubhouse is different from the locker rooms of the NFL and NBA. Baseball is a complicated game, as complicated as American football, but the baseball regular season is 180 days long with only about 20 off nights. Engaging in something this involved requires more than a locker room and some offices. It requires a clubhouse. And the Cards gave Bissinger unlimited access to the clubhouse, which made for a richly detailed book about baseball. The Cards also gave Bissinger unlimited access to La Russa, which made for a richly detailed book about management of any sporting endeavor.

It makes me want to spend more time with baseball. I’m a golf and college football guy, you know that. Those are my sports. But what you probably don’t know is that I was a baseball junkie from the ages of about 13-18. Don’t believe me? Well, ask my buddy Zu about how quickly I could regurgitate the top hitters, pitchers, or starting lineups from any major league team back in the 80’s. Ask Zu how often we would haul our tails to Cleveland or Detroit to catch a game. Heck, ask Zu what we would eat without farmers (inside joke, sorry).

This book is rich; it’s full of great sporting questions and assertions that transcend baseball. If you call yourself a sports fan, run to the library or bookstore and grab this book now. I’m just going to go through some of my favorite parts.

Dave Duncan, the pitching coach and La Russa’s main confidant, sits the starting pitcher down before every game and goes through “the binder” with him. Here’s what Bissinger has to say about the binder (page 46-47).

…. He also had a red binder in front of him. This particular one is marked “Cubs,” but he has one for every team in the league. He stores them in a red steel case that goes on the road with him. It looks a little bit like a vault on wheels, maybe because the knowledge it holds is priceless.

The binders contain his charts, a packet for every opposing player, a remarkable Rohrschach in which he has tracked every pitch each batter has been thrown by his pitchers and what that batter did with it. Using a system of grids, three up and three across dividing the hitting zone into nine sections, he has made small notations that record the type and location of every pitch. …

That’s the type of inside-the-clubhouse detail you can expect from this book.

I love this stuff. I get caught up in the preparation and recording aspects of competition. Related to golf, the act of preparing my equipment and studying the next course I’m going to play is as enjoyable as playing the game. The act of going through my round after the fact and attempting to learn something about my game is as enjoyable as playing the game. I get caught up in the process, maybe to a fault. But if La Russa’s post game actions are any indication of what it takes to achieve excellence, I’m severely lacking.

Here is what LaRussa does after the game (pages 94-95):

… He will eat in silence at J Bucks restaurant several miles from the stadium. He will have a book with him, Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, about the battle of Iwo Jima. He will climb into his Cardinals-red Cadillac Escalade. He will return to where he lives in St. Louis, a residential suite in a hotel in the city’s west end. And he will follow the routine that he has followed since he first went into the foxhole. He will pull out the little lineup cards that he uses to keep score during the games. They help him keep track and stay ahead when he manages, and now he’s reviewing certain situations the players faced – the count, an RBI situation or a steal situation or a hit-and-run situation – and whether he reacted appropriately. …

… He learned to keep a list from Dick Williams, the manager of the A’s when they won world championships in 1972 and 1973. Williams told him that if you don’t make notes about a game as it’s occurring and review them afterward, you will forget what happened, because of the daily grind of the season. …

I played golf today and I’m looking at my scorecard, going back through the round trying to recall where I made the right decisions and the wrong decisions. I need to take better notes on my rounds if I’m going to achieve the kind of excellence that La Russa has. This is important. La Russa has inspired me to be more copious.

La Russa certainly has his act together from a baseball perspective, but this book delves into the personal, and Bissinger doesn’t sugar coat the life of a manager (or player). Bissinger explains how difficult it was to live with La Russa from his wife’s perspective. So difficult in fact, that they don’t even attempt to live together. La Russa’s wife and kids live in California and spend very little time on the road with him. La Russa is very frank about a situation early in his managing career where he decided to stay with the White Sox rather than fly home and help his family while his daughter was hospitalized with pneumonia. He regrets it to this day, but baseball is his life, and living away from his family for 8 months a year is just part of it.

This isn’t the end of the personal stories told by Bissinger. One of my favorites was about a pitcher named Carl Eldred, on oft-injured pitcher whom the Cards helped stage a comeback. Eldred left the game for a little because of injuries but was tinkering around one day and found that his arm didn’t hurt. He tossed around the idea of getting back with a team and here are some of his thoughts (pg 168):

Eldred missed the competition. He missed being part of a team. Those are the things that you expect an athlete to mention when you ask what he misses. But there was something else. He knew that his wife might have a difficult time truly understanding it, as would anybody who hasn’t done it. It was the feeling of what it felt like to grip a baseball, know the grip felt right in the fingers because you were coming with a full-heat hothouse four-seamer, throw that four-seamer to the very spot you intended, then watch it pop into the back of the catcher’s glove as the hitter swings through it. It wasn’t a macho feeling to Eldred. It was simply one worth trying to have again.

In one small paragraph Bissinger captured why I will play golf for the rest of my life – why I love the game so much. I do so because of something that happens about once or twice per summer (out of about 3,000 strokes on average). It’s the perfect execution of a stroke that gives an unexplainable feeling of satisfaction (that something else mentioned above). It’s the 5-wood (maybe 3 years ago) from 205 that found the green after I worked it right to left around some trees and over the marsh on number on 17 at Royal Melbourne. It’s the 4-iron (maybe 5 years ago) from 190 into a stiff wind on the 15th at PGA Ryder to a back pin that hit pin-high and ended up about three feet behind its ball mark, never wavering from its line. I will hack it around for an eternity as long as I have a chance to feel shots like these even once a year – even at a ratio of 1/3,000.

So many cool things; just so damn many. Bissinger relates a conversation where La Russa thinks about “… how many players La Russa had managed who have had that rare combination of talent and fiery heart (page 129).” It came to seventeen all total. Bissinger lets La Russa ruminate about how great Pujols is, on every front. Bissinger contrasts keeping notes on paper (La Russa), keeping them digitally (the video guy), or using both mediums (Duncan, the pitching coach). Then, back to the game, Bissinger comes up with lines like this (page 240):

Morris retires the side in order in the sixth, the final pitch a sweet 12-to-6 curve that Sosa misses by so much, even the Arch smiles.

Finally, in the version I have, Bissinger finishes with a strong afterword. He compares and contrasts his book to Moneyball – managing by instinct versus managing by numbers – “humanistas versus the statisticians.” It was a good way to finish, be it a little self-indulgent. I read Moneyball and liked it and I’m a big Michael Lewis fan. Take a hint from a guy that has read both – read them both, back-to-back, in any order. It’s on my list of things to do some day after retirement.

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The Ruins

I haven’t read any sci-fi/fantasy/horror yet this year so it’s about time I do so. I saw that my sister read this book and she is a reader par excellence. I asked her about it and even though she didn’t say it was a must-read, she didn’t appear to hate it.

I would like to take this chance to give some props to Shelfari because I wouldn’t have known that she read it if I had not gone through her Shelfari bookshelf. Shelfari is a cool tool.

I’m not sure I have a good definition of the horror genre. For me, horror books have two ingredients; a supernatural evil and gore. This book has both, in abundance. It’s not necessarily in my wheelhouse, but I needed a change of pace.

It was fun, engrossing, tense; but it left me kind of empty. There isn’t much to reflect on as I sit here after the fact. I could sort through the character flaws of the people that got killed and try and figure out what Smith is trying to say about our times. But I won’t. I could think about the evil that pervaded the book and try and draw parallels to evil in the world today. But I won’t. I’m moving on with very little reflection actually.

* PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW *

The evil in this book is a plant – a vine with a thirst for humans and their excretions. So a bunch of young vacationers venture into the Mexican outback in search of a friend, and they end up getting surrounded by this vine. They can actually touch and walk through this vine because it seems the vine really can’t kill them until they get an open wound or let the vine into their body through some orifice. So as long as they are alert, they can survive the vine. However, there’s another problem beyond the vine that surrounds them. Outside of the vine’s perimeter is a tribe of Mayans who will kill them if they try to escape.

Without food and water, their days are numbered. It goes from bleak, to really bleak, to bleaker than you can imagine, to everyone is dead.

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The Long Goodbye

We’ve already talked about One Book, One Chicago. My wife just checked it out from the library, unbeknownst to me. She let me read it first. Thanks honey.

The Long Goodbye is private investigator Philip Marlowe’s first person account of his run-in with cops and gangsters after he assists a down-on-his-luck acquaintance, Terry Lennox. Marlowe just gives Lennox a ride to Tijuana, that’s all. But shortly thereafter Marlowe finds out that Lennox’s millionaire wife has been bludgeoned to death with a bronze statue in their guest house. Marlowe suspected nothing less anyhow, oh well.

This is gritty. It’s like sleeping on sandpaper. It makes L.A. Confidential feel like a romantic comedy; makes the City of Angels feel cold and rainy all the time. It’s full of dark jail cells, cops that slug you, and dry, humorless commentary on the state of the justice system in Los Angeles. And paragraphs like this (page 249, chapter 35):

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich – small-town rich, an eight room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

Just look at that second sentence in the cited passage. It’s huge, but it feels the same now as it did when I first read it. Marlowe could not survive outside of the LA trenches. But in the trenches, he rises above the greed, corruption, lies, and ugliness associated with the city.

Chandler certainly got a load off his chest with this rant. It’s a glimpse into the psyche of Philip Marlowe and probably Chandler also. When I read it Gail was a few feet away and I couldn’t wait to have her to take a look. She was impressed. I really hope she reads it so we can talk about it.

This is such a cool book. The ending rocked. The title makes perfect sense. If you have any affinity for the crime novel, give this one a whirl.

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Woe is I

It’s time to revisit the craft – the craft of writing. Yes, I’m a craftsman. Actually, I’m not, I’m a hack. So I’m reading this book to make improvements. In fact, I’m adding Woe is I to the list of books to have around if you want to improve your writing.

Right now, if I look at this little space on my shelf that I keep reference materials, I have:

  • The Elements of Style (aka Strunk and White)
  • The Chicago Manual of Style
  • On Writing Well

I will add this to the shelf because it’s worthy. It’s short and has bulleted hints, tips, and explanations. It has a Strunk and White feel but is more focused on grammar, spelling, usage, and punctuation. They’re good complements, I’m glad I have both.

In fact, I may get Strunk and White in hardcover, just because.

I loved the chapter on clichés. In fact, I had a tag line for my business that encapsulated all aspects of Steffen Consulting that I wanted to convey, but the tag line was listed in the cliché chapter as overused. And you know what, O’Conner was right; it is overused and I’m not going to use it (btw, it was “leveling the playing field”).

The question is, how do I use these books in real time while writing? I do most of my writing when they’re outside of my reach, so even though I have questions, I usually just reword the sentence or jump through hoops to avoid the issue. This needs to change. Also, I haven’t gone through the The Chicago Manual of Style yet. Gail seems to think that one encompasses all of the books. Maybe I just haul that one around, but it’s massive.

I need time, time to concentrate. I need to rework things.

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The Shape Shifter

I’m about a year behind on Tony Hillerman. My reading has really bogged down as of late. I’ve been busy at work and I’ve been consumed with uploading all my digital photos to flickr. I was unmotivated, so it was a no-brainer to bang through a short Hillerman that has been sitting around for awhile.

It was another great effort – crime fiction in a particular setting that I gobble up. Besides the mystery, Hillerman always tosses in some cultural surprises. He is clearly infatuated with the belief systems of all peoples and cultures. In this book the main character, a retired Navajo Tribal Policeman named Joe Leaphorn, uses his knowledge of the Hmong deity to befriend a potential enemy.

** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **

Let me back up a bit. The bad guy is a Vietnam vet and he has a Hmong servant named Tommy Vang whom he met while serving in Asia. At first you sense that Vang is an evildoer with special, far east killing skills. In the end it’s clear that Vang is an innocent who was taken advantage of for most of his life. The way Hillerman builds the rapport between Leaphorn and Vang after the two meet in a potentially contentious situation is pure genius.

Leaphorn uses a combination of kindness, firmness, and understanding (Leaphorn majored in some sort of anthropology) to break down the barriers between the two cultures and it really worked well. The slow, methodical, question and answer session between the two men as they make their way towards a potentially violent conflict with a third party is very rewarding for the reader.

The conversation was about their individual belief systems, basically their religions, and how they’re different but the same. It was about listening rather than telling – two adults from opposite ends of the world finding a common thread in a topic that few agree on, and the result was trust. In the end, they team up and emerge alive.

I need Hillerman to keep churning these out but he seems to be slowing down (no new hardcover in 2007). It’s difficult to explain why they’re so great. The cultural commentary, the human drama, or the seedy crimes on the reservation. It’s all good. Maybe I’ll just read crime dramas all year, screw it.

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Heaven’s Prisoners

This is book two of Burke’s crime novel series. I wasn’t so sure that I was completely sold on Burke when I read The Neon Rain last year, but when I reflected on it at the end of the year it was clear that I was going to press forward with the series.

This is more crime noir than just crime. The main character, Dave Robicheaux, is a dark and self-destructive alcoholic ex-cop. But he doesn’t sit in a dark room and brood, he actually has someone who loves him and a relatively stress free life (he runs a bait shop about an hour away from New Orleans). Stress gets added though in short order when he and his wife see a plane go down in the bayou while they’re out relaxing. They are lake people so they slap on the diving gear and manage to save a young girl from certain death. But the other stuff they see in the submerged plane leads Robicheaux back into the world of law enforcement, and puts him and his family in grave danger.

**PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW**

Burke throws tension into his writing more than any of the crime writers I read. Every time Robicheaux leaves his house I think someone is going to come in and kill his family. And that’s what happens. About a quarter of the way through the book, Robicheaux steps out in the middle of the night to clear his head and two hoods break down his front door and blow his wife away. This sends him on another bender, described by Burke in searing detail. I was shocked by the alcoholic binge in the first book, and this one was just as bone jarring.

So Robicheaux seeks vengeance. While doing so, he reforms a drugged-out hooker and takes care of the young girl he rescued from the plane. The violence carried out between Robicheaux and the bad guys is strongly in contrast with the loving relationship between Robicheaux and the women in his life. It’s a vengeance story and a love story. Burke plays both almost to the extreme. Sometimes it’s an absurd extreme and it’s almost too much to cover in 274 pages.

I can’t wait to read the next one, mostly to see if they pick the storyline up with the ex-hooker and the young girl. Plus, how does Burke weave this guy’s life into crime dramas? He was a cop in book one, then quit. In book two he was an ex-cop that got deputized then quit again, so what’s next? Does he go private?

Like I said, pretty extreme. But good stuff.

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The Pillars of the Earth

I cleared the decks for this thing. One book, about 1,000 pages – complete focus. I’ve had good experiences with Ken Follett. Triple was one of the earliest thrillers that I recall reading. I read it back in the mid 1980’s and enjoyed it, then I read it again about five years ago. I didn’t enjoy it as much the second time around but still thought it a solid thriller. I’ve read a few other Follett books and I’ve always considered myself a fan, but I’ve never felt compelled to read ’em all.

But in the last few months or so, I’ve heard a lot of people talking very favorably about The Pillars of the Earth – people I know and trust. Additionally, especially with the Oprah publicity, it seems to be popping up in the front of bookstores a lot lately. Which is odd because it was first published in 1989 and I could have sworn that this thing spent years in the discounted section. In fact, I actually think I owned this book in hardcover sometime in the 1990’s, but gave it away without reading it. This longevity made me curious, so I grabbed it in January with a Christmas gift card from Borders.

Let me go off topic a little right now. For some reason, I like English period pieces. Earl this, lord that … kings, queens, bloodlines … Elizabeth Bennet, Queen Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett. It makes for a good story or two. In fact, as long I’m being forthright, I will admit that every Sunday this winter I’ve been watching the Complete Jane Austen on PBS with my wife. I’m just saying … try it.

So these forces aligned and I devoted my singular focus to reading The Pillars … starting on March 1st.

It lived up to expectations. To use phrases from reviewers (and the book jacket); it’s a “sweeping epic” of “gripping readability” with “majesty and power.” I’ll tell you, it didn’t disappoint.

Not to keep going off topic, but this type of book makes you understand why we read. I spent 20 hours during the first few weeks of March reading this thing and it struck me that there is no competition in the entertainment world for books like this. There is no movie, TV show, play, game, opera, podcast, radio program, song, or sporting event that combines such an engaging experience with such a high level of convenience. A good book stirs your emotions as much as any of these mediums but comes with much less baggage. You don’t need much electricity. It’s highly portable. It’s inexpensive (or free if you go to a library). You can do it any time, in any place, at whatever pace you choose. The book will never die. It may change in its form, but it will not go away. I digress, this booklove is material for another post. We’ll get to that.

There are five protagonists in this book and any one of them is worthy of their own book. Their names are Tom, Ellen, Philip, Jack, and Aliena. Follett combined and intertwined their fictional stories with some historical fiction from 12th century England. Follett uses the friction between church and state as the backdrop. In fact, this book spans a period almost identical to the life of Saint Thomas Becket, who figured prominently in the often bloody battles between (and within) the Catholic Church and English royalty.

But it wasn’t only an apparent fascination with 12th century history driving this work, it was Follett’s love for cathedrals, castles, and stonework in general that provided most of the back-story. He has a touching forward (in the edition I read) and it’s clear that this book was truly a labor of love. He loves writing and he loves touring cathedrals, and it’s fitting that this labor of love is finally yielding some fruit after about 19 years (copyright date is 1989).

The central part of the book is Philip’s quest to build a beautiful cathedral. All of the action and antagonism comes back to the cathedral, time and again. I’m not a big epic reader; I usually get confused or frustrated with all of the characters, times, and places. That didn’t happen here because the cathedral keeps things simple. The characters keep coming and going, and each of them partake in some act of violence, treachery, kindness, greed, or heroism. But I was able to keep them straight because Follett tethered everything to Philip’s quest to build the cathedral. It was also helpful that Follett used the reflective nature of Philip’s thoughts to review and realign things.

It was a very fast and enjoyable 1,000 page read and I look forward to reading the sequel sometime over the next few years.