The Thorn Birds
Colleen McCullough
number of voters: 7
percentage of voters who finished the book: 85.7%
highest rating: 8
lowest rating: 7
average rating: 7.5
percentage of voters who thought Ralph should have made a choice between Meggie and the Church: 100
percentage of voters who thought that choice should have been Meggie: 100
percentage of voters who are Catholic: 0
February in the Willamette Valley can be cold and gray, buried under the oppression of gathering rain clouds. The river bulges with icy snowmelt from the thawing eastern mountains. The buttes, enshrined in twin halos of evergreens and wrapped in a chill blanket of fog, are far from inviting; they instead remind you how warm and pleasant it is to remain inside, to build a fire in the woodstove, and to curl up on the sofa with an engrossing book.
It’s a good thing because this month’s book was longer than the river herself. (Sometimes the author’s descriptions of the scenery were about that long as well.) But we liked The Thorn Birds. It is the most universally liked book that we’ve read thus far—not the highest rated, mind you, but it is the book with the highest “lowest rating.” We liked the characters—except when we didn’t like them, but that’s okay because we weren’t always supposed to like them. And we enjoyed the story—other than that it was in turns tragic and morose, but that just made the bright moments shine more brilliantly.
And there were indeed bright moments… enough to pull you optimistically through droughts and fires and floods, pain and death and sorrow, heartlessness and heartache and heartbreak. Bright moments, indeed. But they were there, and they were such that when you arrive at the end of the book, 700 pages and 60 years later, you are able to say, “I liked this book.”
