Well after a week and a half of horrendously long hours at the office (not to mention on the train, at home, and pretty much anywhere else I can check email), I finally finished this book. It's a little early in the year to make such bold statements, but I'll just go ahead and make one anyway: I predict that this will make it to my top 5 books of 2011.
The book is less about what happens in an action sense, and much more about who we are as people and the events in our life that shape us. It begins with the birth of Daisy Goodwill in 1905 in a small town in Canada. Subsequent chapters are called Childhood, Marriage, Love, Work, Sorrow, Ease, and Illness and Decline, so I think you can see where this book is going. But it's not as predictable as it sounds. Years, decades even, sometimes elapse between chapters, leaving you wondering what you missed.
There are many characters, each with their own very distinct personality, who pop in and out of the story, always reappearing just in time to tie something together you were on the verge of not understanding.
It astonished him how these books were stuffed fully of people. Each one was like a little world, populated and furnished. - From the chapter Marriage, 1927.
I highly recommend this one for all audiences. If I have anything negative to say it's that there are some pictures in the middle and I wish I hadn't looked at them because it changed the way I thought about some of the characters. Otherwise, it's a phenomenal piece of literature and barring a 60 hour work week, shouldn't take too long to read.
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