Goodreads Book Review - Ragtime

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I could see a lot of brilliance in this book, but I'm afraid I couldn't get into it through my hatred of the author's particular style enough to actually enjoy it. I hate the overly long paragraphs that compose the book; they make for intimidating blocks of text full of run-on sentences and asides that seem to have very little bearing on the story. I also didn't care for the author's lack of conversation and dialogue as a storytelling device for the most part or for the exclusion of quotation marks on the rare occurrence when he did use dialogue. I can enjoy the sort of co-mingling between fiction and history that goes on here (personally i think Ken Follett does it much better) but for me the book didn't get interesting until the last third where it became mostly about the author's own created characters, but by then it was too little, too late to really make me like this book.



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