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Kindle edition has LOTS of typos
“I absolutely love this book.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-11-05.
But.
The Kindle edition is terrible. It has a huge number of typos, mis-spellings (e.g., the first letter gets left off of random words), and in places there are no spaces betweenthewords so itishardtoread.
It's a great book. Too bad the Kindle edition doesn't live up to the paper version.” -
Ride & Read
“Great book with a super narrator. My wife and I listen to the book when in our car on the way to work, driving to the country, or even on our Saturday food run. We even listen to it when we are grading tests at home.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-20. -
0 of 3 members found this review helpful.
Kindle Edition: Higher Cost than Paperback?
“The paperback is available for $7.99. The Kindle edition costs $2 more. I'm looking forward to reading this book, but will wait for paperback parity at least. ”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-08. -
2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
A wonderful read!
“I'll keep this brief because many people have said it better than I could. However, I LOVED this book! Some say the beginning was difficult to get through, but I loved it from the first word. It's a brilliant blend of many of my favorite genres, and not only is it astoundingly detailed and well realized, but amazingly original. I know that it is long, but it went by quickly for me because I couldn't put it down, and I've actually read it three times now and it is as fresh and interesting on each read. I'm not saying this book is for everyone, but if you like Jane Austen and fantasy, at least give this a try.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-21. -
5 of 18 members found this review helpful.
I wish I had never picked it up.
“Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was a 700+ (for the hardback) page novel about..... yeah, that's just the thing. I read this entire stupid book, and I still couldn't give you a clear answer what it was about.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-27.
After searching around online for an answer to why I just wasted more time than I should have reading this bland Dickens knock-off, I discovered that the question of "what is this book about?" is even in debate among people who actually liked it. It's either about the relationship between Strange and Norrell, the relationship between reason and madness, a little of both, some other drivel, or... whatever because by page 500 I really stopped caring and started skimming my way through the rest of this thing just to get to some kind of god forsaken conclusion to this jumbled mess by an obvious amature author.
I can see the reason why so many people like it. It's long, there are a lot of characters, and a lot is going on creating the illusion of a book that should be considered "important". I flat out hated it, and here's why:
-It is unnecessarily long. This isn't really a point of it's own as it ties in with the ones I'm about to make, but I just wanted to start by saying this should have been at least half as long. I absolutely hate the trend of believing "longer is better". NO! It is not. If you're just adding filler to your book in order to make it longer, you are diluting the quality.
-There are entire plot lines which are introduced and just go nowhere.
-There are characters who are introduced, and given a good deal of page space, who add nothing to the plot. Mainly because, once again, their plot lines are introduced and go nowhere, or because it is ended so abruptly you wonder what was the point of introducing it to begin with.
-The point of this book is so hard to pick out because it seems to keep shifting focus throughout the novel. I swear it's like I read five different books. The flow of the book is clunky and lacks cohesiveness.
-The book is so overburdened with "side characters" that once you get around to the ones that actual do matter (and their story lines) end up getting choked by all the rubbish that fills the book.
-The footnotes are distracting and add nothing to the story line. Yeah, I get it, they add background information in a cutesy kitschy way. It's not needed. It's just another distraction.
-With the exception of Strange, there is NO character development. And it's even a stretch to say there's any with Strange's character. If you are going to write a book that focuses more on character relationships than "story", at least have some kind of character arc or something. For a book that spans more than a decade it's pretty unbelievable that almost every single one of the characters have exactly the same voice/opinions/story/goal/etc near the end as they do in the beginning.
It's not the fact there this is a character driven book with many interlocking plots going on throughout it, which makes me hate this book. I love character driven novels! It's just that this is written so badly that I'm not really sure where Clarke was going with this.
So, as a brief summary, this book is unfocused, cluttered, and has no immediate point. I think it suffers from the classic rookie author mistake of Clarke trying too hard and taking on more of a book than she could successfully handle (a la "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova, but at least that had an actual plot, albeit ridiculous, unlike this novel). I don't know how else to express exactly how much this book sucks. It just does. It's really awful and an incredible waste of time. I cannot believe the crap got published, and it makes me even more astounded that it got such good reviews (then again, The Da Vinci Code and Twilight are also critically praised... so there you go...).
Oh, and did I mention (no, I did not), that there is no conclusion after all. It basically leaves you by opening another plot line (big friggin' surprise), and a "Too be continued" type cliff hanger. Not an open ended "form your own conclusion" type ending, but an obvious set up for a sequel. God, do I hate authors who pull this stunt. If you can't wrap up your story line in your original novel (especially one this long), then it's probably because it's not good enough to continue into another one anyway. By the end of the book I'm left wishing I owned a fireplace for which I can chuck this trash into.”
