This book was everywhere last year. Everyone I knew was reading it for book clubs and raving about it. One of my book clubs finally chose it for our April pick, and I’m just finishing up (its long!). The verdict in my book club: Most did not finish. One finished and hated it. One finished and put it in her top 5 books of all time. And what about me? I was just annoyed. This is a nice story for the most part. Amor Towles […]
A Gentleman in MoscNO
A Gentleman in Moscow is one of those books that you feel like you should read, one of those future classics that everyone will say they loved even though they hated it or didn’t finish it. It was just so long and bloated. My eyes glazed over one too many times. Did I even read this? What did I even spend the last 5 days doing… So Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel by the Bolsheviks for being an […]
This book is a delight.
I picked this up because it was on everyone’s to-read lists. I thought it was probably about Cold War spies, maybe something along the lines of John le Carré. This is not a book about Cold War spies. This is the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who has been sentenced to house arrest in the Hotel Metropole, where he is in fact already a resident, for writing a poem. (It could have been worse–it could have been a bullet to the head.) Rostov is […]