The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. aka The Mind of Ellias is broken; his Soul fucking fullfilled!!!!!!!!!!!! The way I cannot begin to express or even put into mere words on how this book made me feel....literally immeasureable and inconsolable!!!!It honestly felt like a missing part of a dream, sequenced away to savor and find for later. This missing piece? A callback to that wonderful and comforting nostalgia- our childhood's wildest untamed dreams and imagin...

Umm, is that it?Ok, let me start by first apologizing to everyone who loves this book. Obviously, I'm an outlier and my thoughts here are decidedly in the minority. So if you feel differently, please don't throw rotten vegetables at me. Going into Piranesi, I had heard nothing but great things about it. How it's riveting and unputdownable. How no one had ever seen a story like this before. How the twist is going to blow my mind. Unfortunately, none of those turned out to be true for me.For one t...

**UPDATE: WOAH WHAT!? This is not only getting a film adaptation but it is going to be STOP MOTION I AM SO EXCITED!**Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.‘I was in a house with many rooms. The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.’An infinite labyrinth with an ocean inside, academic murder mysteries, many-worlds theories--Piranesi by Susanna Clarke has it all. This tightly written novel is endlessly engaging and so cinematic it feels more like ...

Well, I guess it is time to say that Susanna Clarke's slender little PIRANESI is my favorite novel of possibly the last five years. I could write spoilery essays upon essays about its use of metaphor for ambition, identity, religion. I'm so delighted.If my novella "Opal" drove you batty, it might also drive you batty for similar reasons, but personally, it gave me everything I wanted.I don't want to say too much more because the beauty of this puzzle box is in the opening, but highly recommended...

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” First of all, for those who - like me - read the blurb for this book, noted the mention of “the house with the ocean imprisoned in it” and automatically assumed that “Piranesi” has something to do with piranhas (because ocean = fish, right?) — yeah, that’s certainly not what the story is about. Regrettably, there’s not a single piranha in sight.——————This is like a dream, slow, strange and intensely atmospheric, unbelievably i...

A second fantasy novel from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — finally!! It's excellent, and VERY different from Jonathan Strange (for one thing, it's less than 250 pages). Review first posted on Fantasy Literature (along with my co-reviewer Bill's excellent review, which I reference a couple of times below): I have to say I was a smidgen disappointed to get to the end of Piranesi and not have seen a single footnote (I’m quite fond of all of the quasi-scholarly, tongue-in-cheek fo...

I almost DNFed this one, and maybe I should have, but in the end I wanted to be able to fully review this book and I don’t think it’s fair to do that only having read half of it.This is a book that falls into a category I’ve come to describe as for A Certain Kind of Reader®. Maybe that’s a phrase you’ve heard before, but for me it namely means that most readers will not like it, but a segment of them will LOVE it. If you’re a Bestsellers reader, you probably won’t like this. If you’re a Book Clu...

Delightful. An antidote to the trend of self-serious writing that there's so much of recently. It's a fun and easy read that's compelling, but gets to a depth many less entertaining books wish they could arrive at. Anything involving impossible architecture has me hooked. This was a gift from a friend, and I think I'd recommend it too.

Three years ago, this book rescued me from the obliterating fog of a pandemic-induced depression. This year, it carried me through the interminable months of writing my master's dissertation. Always, reading it is like dropping anchor: I know that when I reach for its pages and read the words “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite,” I can, at long last, stop wondering what I am for.

I rarely write bad reviews but this was one of the most boring and repetitive books I've ever read.

Halls..
Vestibules..
Statues..
Albatross..
Halls...
Vestibules...
Statues...
Albatross..

And blah blah blah...

So goddamn boring, tedious and overhyped.

This is the kind of book that puts me in a slump!

I understand I'm in the minority here, most people have given this five stars - God knows why.