#40 Winter of the World by Ken Follett

Was anyone else overly excited about the release of Book Two of The Century Trilogy?  Just my friend Andi and I?  Okay.

I've been a Follett fan for many years and still love, love, love Pillars of the Earth and World Without End.  His books are long, character driven works of historical fiction.  I've said it before, but any of these story lines could stand on their own.  I knew just what to expect when I downloaded Winter last week.

I spent the first fifty pages or so wishing I would have had the time to reread Fall of Giants first.  There are so many characters and interconnections that I was struggling to keep up a bit, but I managed just fine after all.  My favorite characters reappeared, though more often than not you're following the next generation which is neat.

He picks up in the thirties and 960 pages later you're closing out the forties.  It doesn't matter how many times I read about World War II and the holocaust, I'm never prepared, I'm always emotional, and I can never fully believe that it was all just seventy-ish years ago.  It blows my mind.  Follett doesn't shy away from the graphic, raw stories either; although I was surprised that his accounts stayed primarily in the periphery of the concentration camps.

I do have to reiterate my gripe I had from the first book about the s-e-x.  Last time it seemed super-male fantasy land-ish and this time there was just a whole lot of it.  Don't get me wrong, much of it is pertinent to the book and paints a picture about attitudes and relationships, but I swear there were as many blow jobs as battle scenes.

So, now we sit and wait for the final book.  We have at least a couple years to speculate about how Ken is going to fit fifty years of human history into one book.  And who all he is bringing back to make it happen.