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I finished this journey into the world of rowing, tea drinking, turtleneck wearing, yoga stretching vampire-witch pretentiousness and the best thing I can say is "Hooray for reaching the final page!" timing doesn't add up but several times throughout the book I wondered how she managed to take Christian Grey from 50 Shades of "I can't get my life back after reading this" and Edward Cullen and mash them into the World's Most Annoying Vampire of All Time. Disappointment is being halfway through the book and accidentally learning there is a second (and third book) and reading the first line of said sequel's synopsis to learn that both of these horrible creatures survive. Maybe I am just not smart enough to respect the historian in the novel. Maybe if I was smarter, I would think it was engaging and fascinating. But I am not that smart and I kept wondering how she got paid to spend her time researching alchemy, for the 3 people in the modern world who may actually know what alchemy even is - much less give a turd about it. And while we are at it - the cooonstant quoting of ancient writings and awkward name dropping of really old scientists made me want to stab myself in the eye. I tried in vain to conjure up physical characters for Diana and her vampire Christian Grey and I came up with 17 year old Bella Swan and (you got it) the same person Christian Grey my mind put together while reading that book.

As for all of the filler context, the pages upon pages upon pages of useless descriptions of yoga poses, of rowing, of scientists in the middle ages, of tea, or of the map of Oxford, etc, lacked flow and felt out of place. It reminded me of Stephanie Meyer's style of writing that felt as if she typed out Twilight with a thesaurus next to her and randomly inserted "big words" to sound smarter. This to me felt like "I wiki'd oxford, let me show off how much I learned."

I read this in a book club and half of the club liked it, so clearly my opinion isn't the popular one. But if you felt EL James owed you an apology and $20 for having tricked you into reading her book, I'd go ahead and skip Discovery of Witches.