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Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Cutting for StoneCutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I found very little to like, and lot that I could barely tolerate, in this book. I finished it as a book club read with a huge sigh of relief. Then I read the reviews on it on Goodreads, and I have lost hope for the literary community. What are all of these people thinking? The writing was distracted and disjointed, the medical descriptions were gory and extraneous. There was a huge theme of overblown sexuality that taught nothing of value. Since I have to give it at least one star, the star I will give it is for the brief looks into Ethiopian life and culture, although I don't know how much of that content is fiction vs. reality.

This book was awful, and I now trust the entire Goodreads community less. Or at least, I think that we are all out there reading "our" types of books and giving them high ratings, which means that if I step outside of the genres I normally read I am unlikely to be steered well by trusting ratings. I think that is sad, because that would be a key benefit of such a rating system.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

It is rare for me to stumble over a novel of such a high caliber, one that creates the kind of characters I have never met before, characters who now are as vividly alive in my mind as any of the real individuals who populate my world. May this be only the first of many novels that Verghese produces for us, his lucky readers.

Zia
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