Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, it won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is also ranked 462nd on The Greatest Books of All Time – for more reviews you could check my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, it won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is also ranked 462nd on The Greatest Books of All Time – for more reviews you could check my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html

 

 

8 out of 10

 

Marilynne Robinson https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/housekeeping-by-marilynne-robinson-one.html is the wonderful author of Housekeeping, which I found exhilarating, and that now makes the failure to engage with Gilead ever more frustrating, I do not know why, for this is a Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Literature

 

It is also on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list and then you find it in the 462nd place on The Greatest Books of All Time site, yet, mea culpa, though I could see there is value here, it did not shine its light upon yours truly, one reason might be (it surely is) the fact that what I found was an audiobook for…kids

Religion is at the heart of the narrative, so I think of CS Lewis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/surprised-by-joy-shape-of-my-early-life.html and maybe I expect the linearity, limpid prose of that magician, Magister Ludi, it is also a question of a decreasing concentration

 

‘The novelist has an infinity of choices, He chooses what is to happen, to happens, and in what way he will relate what happens, the picture he constructs is complete on its own terms…when he says this is the story and the whole story, we must accept it…perhaps novelists are the only people telling the truth’Concluding hence that the writer is god…’

This quote is from According To Mark by Penelope Lively https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/according-to-mark-by-penelope-lively.html and I look at it and say that the reader is also God -like, in that he or she is able to reject whatever they dislike, or else fail to understand

 

Which is the case here, furthermore: “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.” If we take this along, then we have the chance to meet the five thousand, minus twenty let us say, when we put aside an oeuvre that does not appeal, or is cryptic for some reason

We could juxtapose Schopenhauer to Umberto Eco https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-name-of-rose-by-umberto-ecco.html the latter gives readers hope of eternity, while the former tells you to avoid the bad books, as being the only way you could read the bad one, ergo, I have to drop Gilead right now

 

Not because it is bad, but it does not bring me to Flow https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi.html one of the conditions for reaching Maximum Experience is to be between boredom and burnout, with Gilead, I am either not too excited, or else, fail to follow the plot, the characters: mea culpa

 

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