tarahann 's review for:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

2.0

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I have actually abandoned this book because I was reading it in the bathroom, but as we were borrowing it from a friend, Christopher didn't want it to be in the bathroom (apparently we're only un-hygenic with our own books), and I couldn't get myself to read it off the nightstand. I really enjoyed reading this book in-between things (as a break while in the bathroom), but I'm not compelled to return to it as a reading project in and of itself. It is beautifully wrought, and the prose are lovely, but I'm not particularly interested in the book for anything other than its beautiful prose... which is why is was so well-suited as a bathroom book. I could pick it up for a minute and put it down and return to it intermittently, and really enjoy it while I was reading it. But I'm not drawn back to it, not hurried to pick it up again to finish it. Part of the book's beauty is, of course, the temporality of the prose, the rhythm of the reading itself, the background quality of the story/plot/characters to the words themselves. I get that. And I can appreciate that. But I'm not drawn into that "feel" of the book enough (like, say, I am with Woolf or other experimental writers) to pick the book up again to read in full.