The Cider House Rules by John Irving
The Cider House Rules is another John Irving book and I don’t mean that in a good way. All his books are the same – long and rambly and full of unlikely behaviors. Some are better than others and all have their interesting characters and faster-paced parts but overall they’re just too tedious for me. If you can’t tell your plot in less than 30 years, maybe you need to rethink it.
And why does every character and every incident have to be so fully fleshed out? They’re not all that important. None of that detail is setting anything up. His books just drizzle to an end. He could quit at any point or continue on for the next 30 years and it wouldn’t make much difference. The big bang ending to this one is: Homer decides to do abortions. Ooh. Didn’t see that one coming from 500 pages back. And then the world rambles on, just the same.