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I surrender. I throw in the towel. I was not going to rate this novel because I did not read all of it, and I ordinarily think it unfair to rate a book as "do not like" if you didn't read the entire book. But this book was 509 pages in length and I read 293 pages. I gave it my best shot. 1 star for me. ��

I tried two separate times to read it. I returned it to the library the first time after reading the first three “chapters�� �� “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,�� “Letters from Zedelghem,�� and “Half Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery�� �� because I was having a hard time following it, and thought the writing was pretentious. But I returned to the novel knowing that so many GR folks liked it. I read the next chapter, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish��, and it was sort of OK but again the writing, to me, was full of one-liners��. it seemed to me David Mitchell was saying “see what a clever writer I am!�� with practically all sentences that were written in that chapter. Then I got to “An Orison of Sonmi-451�� and that was torture. Language was used that were not real words (e.g., conurb, AdV, handsony). I did not even try to read the next chapter, “Shousha’s Crossin�� An�� Ev’rythin�� After��, because the first paragraph contained gobble-dee-gook language and this chapter was 70 pages full of such language.

So then I was at that part of the novel where supposedly things were supposed to be tied in to prior chapters (supposedly what made the novel different and clever) and I thought maybe things would get clearer. Things only got worse. I had to bail early on in the second manifestation of “An Orison of Sonmi-451”…I just couldn’t take it anymore. Then I went to the second manifestation of “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish�� and after reading the first several pages just skipped to the last 3 pages to get its ending. Then I went to “Half Lives �� The First Luisa Rey Mystery�� and read that second manifestation in its entirety and I honestly do not know what Mitchell’s point was…there were so many twists and turns and unexpected events and killings that I just couldn’t understand why he was writing the way he was writing. Left unread were the last two second manifestations of “Letters from Zedelghem�� and “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing��.

I admit it �� I could not understand what point or points David Mitchell was making in this very long novel. Well-respected authors including David Eggers and Michael Chabon loved it. It was a Man Booker Prize finalist…book reviews from newspapers and magazines abounded on the back cover and the first few pages of the book extolling its brilliance.

I feel bad because I bailed on this novel two separate times, and because other people got it and I did not. However, I think I would have felt even worse had I tried to read this entire novel.

Reviews (uniformly positive):