World Without End

World Without End is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth, which I read last June and reviewed here. Pillars of the Earth followed the townspeople of Kingsbridge, England in the 1100's. World Without End picks up in the same town with a new cast of characters in the 1300's. In every way possible, this book is the same as the first one. It has medieval romance, royal scandal, cathedral building and gothic architecture, and it is very, very long. I believe in my review of Pillars of the Earth I awarded it the title of longest-book-ever. Well, it will now have to release that title and hand it over to its sequel because this book is 1014 pages long.

I finished this book yesterday afternoon while wearing my cloak and sipping a goblet of Meade. It's rare that I let my medieval side win out, but this book was worth it. It's not the best book ever, but it's very entertaining in a mildly educational way. The book appears to be well researched, and I found the story line following the nuns and monks in the town to be highly entertaining. In general I think Ken Follet paints a very thorough and seemingly accurate picture of life in the 1300s. The book explores the difficulties of being a woman during these times, the struggles the Catholic church faced, war and the politics surrounding battle, and the plague that ravaged Europe in the mid 1300s.

Probably because the book is so long, Ken Follet is able to really take a story lower than you think possible. By page 500 or so, you're thinking, "Dude, this book is a DOWNER, is it ever going to get better for these people?" But then you realize that the book isn't even half over yet, and he still has plenty of time for things to improve. At times, the simplicity of the "bad guys" and the goodness of the "good guys" gets tiresome, but after my second goblet of Meade, I forgave this.

Basically, if you liked Pillars of Earth, I can pretty much guarantee that you'll like World Without End.

Wish me luck

Well, the night isn't over yet, but it certainly doesn't look like I'll be finishing World Without End tonight. But not because I'm not enjoying it! The book is great, but since I'm only at page 620 and there are over 1000 pages total (and because maybe I'm watching Center Stage for the second time this weekend on the Oxygen Channel) I'm gonna say it's not happening.

I have to get up painfully early tomorrow for the conference I'm running for work this week. It only happens twice a year, but I'll be working an average of 15 hours a day tomorrow through Thursday. Wish me luck that everything goes well (and maybe that I'll be so busy running around that I lose the 5 pounds I've gained in the last month stuffing my face with Halloween candy and chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer). I'll be back to post on the 21st!

PS: After I finish this book, I'm officially out of reading material. Can you leave recommendations of what I should read next in the comments?

Update

If you are observant, you may have noticed the more infrequent posting I’ve been doing recently. In the real, non-blogging world, work is CRAZY while I get ready for a giant conference I’ll be running next week. I normally get a good 20 pages in during my lunch break every day but lunch breaks are soooo three weeks ago and as a result, my reading has been making tortoise-like progress of late.

The situation probably isn’t being helped by the fact that I am slowly chugging my way through World Without End, which is the sequel to Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet that I reviewed here and this hefty tome is over 1000 pages long! Unless a miracle happens and I breeze through World Without End in the next two days, a review is going to have to wait until after my conference is over on the 20th. Starting Sunday I’ll be sleeping just 4 miles from my house at the Grand Hyatt so as to be on call and will likely be reading nothing more interesting than the conference agenda and hotel rooming list. In better news, it will all be over just in time for me to wait in line with a hoard of gothy 15 year olds wearing cloaks to see Twilight.

To Do List

Here is a list of books that I keep meaning to read but never get around to:

1. The Brothers K - not to be confused with The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, this book is by David James Duncan. My friend Jessie gave me this book a long time ago and said it was her favorite book. Since then many people have told me that it's really good. The problem is - the first 100 pages or so are all about baseball. This is a problem because I hate baseball. So after about 75 pages of reading about dudes loving baseball, I quit the book. But people keep telling me to try again and to just skim the baseball stuff and that it will be worth it. So I've decided I need to try again.

2. The World Without End - this is the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, which I just finished. I'm worried I'll forget that I want to read this if I don't add it to the list.

3. Run - this is the new Ann Patchett book that will be released July 29th. The whole book takes place over the course of 24 hours and is described as "Suspenseful and stunningly executed, ...ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children."

4. Upside Down Inside Out - I thought I'd read all of Monica McInerney's novels, but it turns out I haven't! She's Australian and her books are perfect vacation reading. I'm thinking I might buy this for our Guatemala trip in August. This will be perfect because we're travelling with our friends Todd and Erin and Erin happens to like Monica McInerney too. This way, maybe we can swap books midway through the trip.

5. This Charming Man - Marian Keyes has a new book! Who knew? Not me. But now I do and I'm very excited. I predict this will take me all of 1 day to read.

6. The Beastiary - this is fairly new book by Nicholas Christopher. At one point, his book A Trip to the Stars was my favorite book. But then I recommended it to a few other people and they didn't really like it. This made me doubt whether it was really that good to begin with. That was 8 years ago, but I think his new book might still be worth a try. It sounds a little "mystical" which I know my friends Maggie and Heidi will not like, but it might be worth the risk.

7. Midnight in Manhattan - A year ago I randomly bought this book called Ask Me Anything by Francesca Delbanco at Half Price Books and ended up really liking it. My expectations were pretty low, I'd bought it in a hurry, but it turned out to be cutting and smart and observant. After I finished it I looked to see if she'd written any other books at Barnes and Noble. The guy at the info table told me that she had another book called Midnight in Manhattan but that it was coming up in their system as "unorderable". He said he'd never seen that status before and that it meant that it was out of print and my best bet was to find it at a used book store. For a day or so I felt spurned, like the world was set against me reading a book that sounded kind of good. I think I may have looked at Half Price Books once but it wasn't there. Then I promptly forgot about it. Well guess what?! Turns out I'm retarded and it was available used on amazon.com for $3.10 all along! And I just happen to have a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com that I got for participating in some random phone survey a month or so ago. Long story longer, I just ordered it online and should have it in the next week. I hope it's not a big let down.

Am I missing anything?