Purity in 100+ Books in 2025

Mar 02, 2016 Dolly rated it liked it

Shelves: read-but-not-finished-reviewing, other-usa, germany-german, education-school, 2016, south-central-america-mexico, new-england, van-noy-book-club

This book was chosen by my local library book club for our March discussion. I got more than three-quarters of the way through the book before our discussion was scheduled to meet, but then our youngest got sick, I missed the meeting, and I virtually lost all interest in the book.

I thought the narrative was creative, although a bit confusing, weaving the lives of the various characters back and forth through time and crossing paths in intricate ways. The insight into life in East Germany was re This book was chosen by my local library book club for our March discussion. I got more than three-quarters of the way through the book before our discussion was scheduled to meet, but then our youngest got sick, I missed the meeting, and I virtually lost all interest in the book.

I thought the narrative was creative, although a bit confusing, weaving the lives of the various characters back and forth through time and crossing paths in intricate ways. The insight into life in East Germany was revealing, as was the lush compound in Bolivia.

But I definitely lost steam and ignored the book for several weeks before finally finishing the last 100+ pages by listening to the audiobook.

One benefit to the audiobook was the interview with the author at the end. Some of the discussion was helpful in understanding why the story was created as it was, but it still didn't really change my mind about it. It was an interesting tale and a good read, but not terrific. The ending was satisfying, but I feel like the plot dragged on a bit too much in the middle.

interesting quotes:

"She'd always considered herself immune to celebrity - had even, to some extent, resented it, for reasons hazily akin to her resentment of people with siblings. Her feeling was: what makes you so much worthier of attention than me?...But now she saw that what mattered about celebrity was that other people were not immune to it: that they might be impressed with her connection to it, and that this might give her somewhat more than the zero power she currently felt she had." (p. 61)

"Walking the trails, Pip could imagine how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent, to experience the world as a seamless many-dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated scents. Wasn't this a kind of heaven? Like being on Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy?" (pp. 242-3)

"I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter." (p. 255)

"She was experiencing stronger symptoms of being in love, a queasiness more persistent, a heart more racing, than she remembered having had with Stephen. But the symptoms were ambiguous. A condemned person walking to the gallows had many of the same ones." (p. 284)

new words: fricatives, sicklied, orgone, jeroboam, dipsomaniac, leitmotif, flocculence, uric, nugatory ...more

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