The Blogging of a Book Addict

I am fully aware that I'm not supposed to like this book. If you scroll down and look through reviews, almost all of them tell you not to like this book. The author himself says, in the Author's Foreword at the beginning and the Author's Note at the end, that he can't really understand why anyone would like this book (he uses more eloquent words). The consequence of this is that I began this book expecting not to like it. I plodded my way through, not quite understand the point of it all, bored out of my mind in places, and fully aware that the seemingly endless pages I was reading were going to amount to nothing in the end: no ending, no revelations, no real plot or point to speak of. And when someone I know referred to this as "The Boring Regard of Stupid Things," I agreed, because how could anything that includes eight pages of soap making and is, essentially, 100+ pages of random things moving to different rooms, NOT be boring?

But here's the thing. This book is boring, and silly, and pointless, and utterly painful to read in parts. If you want to enjoy yourself, you should probably pick up almost any other story.

And yet, I loved it.

I can't really explain WHY I loved it, mind you. But something about the beauty of the language and the simplicity of the story mixed with the complexity of the emotion, something about the heartbreaking and fascinating character of Auri, and the painful reality of her sad-but-somehow-happy life, spoke to me. It didn't make me jump up and down and eagerly flip through the pages, desperate to keep reading. But it made me feel emotions, it made me care about the words on the page, and it made me realize that, crazy as it sounds, there are more important things about a story than whether or not it's any good.

Rating: 3 Stars (because when you love a story and think it's utterly horrible all at once, how are you supposed to rate it?)