Around the World Reading Challenge: ITALY
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Fuck, but that was a slog and a half. Frankly, it only started getting bearable around the 75% mark, and it only started to almost approach mildly interesting at the 85% mark. The concept and summary made it sound so interesting, but fuck if the execution didn't nearly bring me to tears of boredom. So goddamn pretentious and over-flowing with minutia and details that it felt like I was reading and incredibly dry history book. Anybody who describes this book as "thrilling" or a "roller-coaster ride" is just flat-out lying. Any sense of excitement and tension is squashed to death by the insufferable prose, and the over-abundance of dialogue and background. Truly, they don't even start ~The Plan~ until about 2/3 of the way through the book--up until then it's entirely set-up, which is nearly 400 pages of set-up, and incredibly uninteresting set-up at that. I've never read Eco but he's been on my list for ages, which made him seem the perfect pick for Italy, despite many people warning me off him--I think I'll take their advice going forward and skip the rest of Eco's works. Not for me.