Beloved
Pulitzer Prize Winner

I used to think that the best person to read a book to me would be the author I mean, who would know better than the author how a book should be read out loud? Authors like Jon Krakauer and Sidney Poitier seemed to confirm my ***umption, but that was before I listened to Ray Bradbury as an old man reading Fahrenheit 451, and before I listened to Toni Morrison reading Beloved. First of all, I HATED the book. Once I got the gist of the story, the rest of it bored the hell out of me. And second, I HATED the way Morrison read it. Long, drawn-out, mystical ramblings, stream of consciousness, and really poor phrasing, where sometimes she'd take a breath before reading the next word and then read only that word, which was apparently the end of a sentence. Well, it drove me crazy. I've wanted to read this book for a very long time, but now that I've listened to it, I don't have to read it for myself, and I won't. I guess you have to like her writing, and I guess I don't. So if you're reading this review, thinking about listening to the book, take my advice---choose another book.

first five star of 2024. i would like to apologize to all of the dinners i ruined with friends, my boyfriend, family, and other loved ones because i could not stop talking about the brilliant, dark, vibe-ruining concept of this book. this was my first toni morrison, my first new favorite of the year,......more

Updated, August 2019: RIP, Toni Morrison Over the past 15 years, I’ve tried a couple of times to read Toni Morrison’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about murder, guilt, ghosts and the brutal, complex physical and psychological legacy of slavery. Something about the dense, poetic prose and the el......more

The brutal truth, brilliantly written. A mother hanging from a tree, the vile debasement of a nursing mother, scars so deep from whipping that they make a design of a tree on a woman’s back, a bloodied dead baby, the ultimate symbol of how truly horrific slavery was. These are some of the images tha......more

There are reasons why Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Beloved may be the biggest one. The structure is a ghost story about a woman who killed her own children rather than see them be dragged back from freedom to live a life of slavery, and how the guilt of that act comes ba......more

This is one of those rare and beautiful books that begins as if it's written in a code you have to crack. You have the sense early on that you've missed some vital shred of information and it's these perceived black holes that engage your attention on an ever deepening level. As is the case in the b......more