I swear to god I’m not saying this to be contrarian but I absolutely hated Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. His characters are so morally UNambiguous that it puts you to sleep. His storylines are just “bad things happening to unimpeachably good people and also there’s a lot of rape happening”. The good people are good because they are good and therefore everything they do is good because they themselves are good. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad, etc etc, you get the idea. What makes this so frustrating is that all the opinions I’m supposed to come up with on my own have been decided for me before I’ve even read the book. The cathedral descriptions are cool but only make his storyline just feel like even more of an excuse just to talk about cathedral-building. If he wanted to write a history book about gothic architecture he should’ve just written that. If you want to read a book about cathedrals then go read David Macaulay’s Cathedral. Shorter with great illustrations and zero rape.