Mara > Recent Status Updates

I really want to love this book, but it's off to a slow start. It's hard to follow when every character and place has a really bizarre name that sounds like it was chosen from random Scrabble tiles, and almost every other word is "magic." I'm hoping things will get more interesting.

Caught a few minutes of the film version on TV a couple weeks ago, and I was intrigued. The book is enthralling so far.

30 pages in and aside from one girl being an alcoholic and constantly drunk dialing her ex and the other quitting her job, absofreakinglutely nothing has happened. I give it ten more pages. If it hadn't trekked me in by then, I'm done.

This is the first novel I've ever read that doesn't have chapters, just one big, long narrative. Makes it really tough to choose stopping points when I've got things to do.

Not to use a cliched term, but I am having a really, really hard time putting this one down.

Excellent research material. My favorite Elizabethanism so far: "The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon!"

Not sure what I think just yet - it's a little too soon to tell.

My high school English teacher used to rave about this book, and about Emma Bovary in general, but this book is literally putting me to sleep. I don't typically abandon books partway through, but I'm about ready to throw in the towel. What say you, friends? Should I stick with it, or ditch it?

Lots of fun so far - reads like a classic detective novel without all the cheese.

I forgot how nice it feels to be holding an actual book in my hands.

Yay research!

I don't know if it's the mimosa I'm sipping at or what, but this book is getting funnier and funnier.

Rather tongue in cheek, and I'm finding myself snickering through most of it. I think I'm really going to like this one.

There was a twist about 80% of the way through that I wasn't expecting. Up to that point, I'd been able to identify with the central character in many ways. I was almost tempted to abandon it after that happened, but I'm glad I saw it through to the end.

Downloaded two nights ago, and I haven't been able to put it down.

I absolutely loathe Anne Boleyn, it at least, this fictional version of her, which, I think, is precisely as the author intended.

I love it already.

Had to abandon it. it just wasn't holding my attention.

When he's not describing his characters' deaths in grisly detail or planning depressing endings for them, I truly do love Stephen King.

There comes a moment in several books when I realize "Yeah, I'm definitely going to like it. For this book, that happened to me on page sixteen, where the protagonist talks about people who have no English grammar skills making his job as a teacher all the more difficult.

The heartbreaking true story of a remarkable young man who looked at the world a little differently, and dared to give un to the inner wanderer that lives in all of us.

Marvelous.