Ken Follet, The Pillars of The Earth

The copy of The Pillars of the Earth that I read--loaned to me by a friend who had read it in her book club--was 983 pages long. Still, I polished it off much more quickly than the far shorter Mrs. Dalloway.

I finished the book in April, and am only just getting around to writing my review, but other than it being long, I mostly remember it as being not at well written, nonetheless highly engaging, and overall rather violent. It was rather like television, actually--perhaps an extended miniseries. It was highly descriptive, and certainly a page-turner, while still being almost unabashedly fluff. Almost, that is, because of its passages on Gothic architecture, which, although it's not my specialty, I at least found non-egregious if not particularly enlightening either.

Additionally, although the characters weren't always believable--the villains, in particular, being fairly consistently one-dimensional--the book did paint a fascinating portrait of life in the 12th century, and how much modern technology allows us to take for granted. Again, not precisely quality, but a quick-paced and interesting story that did get my heart pounding at times.