final post

                This book for the most part was enjoyable.  The character’s life story that although wasn’t extraordinary, I felt intrigued to learn more about his story the further I read into the book.   The ending was definitely my least favorite part.  The title sums it up very well; the author leaves you during one of the most exciting parts of the story with absolutely no sense of a good ending.  While I don’t need a perfect happy ending to the novels I read, I hate abrupt endings.  They make me feel as if the author just stopped caring about his work, and finished early and then gets praise for writing a creative ending.  It isn’t fun to read an entire story about a character, and then come to the conclusion that a letter he wrote when he was 20 ended up causing his best friends suicide, and it took the main character 40+ years to figure it out.  It really upset me that I wasted a lot of time reading about a sad old dude who ends up sadder than when he started.  I had really been rooting for the main character to come up big in the second half of the main story, but he fell amazingly short.  Anthony’s life seemed so polarized that I feel he maybe was bi-polar.  He kept telling himself that he was just an average dude, and he convinced himself that he was a bad guy who had failed at a lot of things in his life.  If you live life constantly comparing yourself to others, you will be miserable.  I felt that he needed to go to church and learn something positive for a few days.  If you don’t believe in yourself, or love yourself, you can’t believe and love others as well.  He hyper focused on his wrongdoings, and I felt that this made the story all the worse.  I felt he was just going on and on about his past, with very little regard for a positive future.  Maybe the British are into books about sad, lonely, old dudes, but not me.  Hopefully this guy gets a grip and stops judging himself.