I found this book: Saturday by Ian McEwan.Then I read it.Things happened, some exciting and some less so, nothing of super consequence. I finished the book. I put it away and forgot about it.I then went on to another book.That's my reading experience and that's the arc of Saturday. It's a "day in the life of" short story dragged out into novel length. Granted there's plenty packed into that day and it's admirably juggled by McEwan.The main character is accosted. He happens to be a doctor and tha...

Hello everybody,I'm Henry Perowne and welcome to a day in my life... a Saturday to be precise. I'm a good natured sort of chap, if I were famous I'd probably be saddled with the tag of "thinking women's crumpet", but personally I take myself much to seriously to acknowledge that kind of thing. I'm a successful neurosurgeon who enjoys long, descriptive and adjective laden games of squash with my erudite and debonair colleagues. Today, for once in my incredibly lucky and wealthy life, I had a spot...

TWENTY YEARS ago today it all happened, folks...Some books just hit you with the full blunt anarchical force of a powerful nightmare.Or like 9/11 itself!This out-of-the-way novel by the incredible British writer Ian McEwan represented what was for me - in the years following upon the annihilation of all my delicate presuppositions on that cataclysmic but classically Indian-Summer day in 2001 - a savage indictment of my standard middle-class mores.For 9/11 was exactly the same thing for Dr. Henry...

Godawful."Saturday" was ponderous, labored, rhetorically thick and therefore perhaps to my mind pretentious, or do I mean pompous? It was like a big bloated beer gut, but a beer gut bloated - indeed, rendered distended, turgid, and tumescent - by the finest chardonnays, Gewurztraminers, and Sauvignon Blancs, sipped (quaffed?) while listening to Bach Partitas. It was bereft of conciseness, brevity, midgetude, terseness, laconism, abbreviation, and pith, its rather meaningless, hollow sentences cu...

Ok. I usually force myself to finish each novel I start. (with the two exceptions so far being Catch 22 and Atlas Shrugged).. I do this (1) to at least get my moneys worth, and (2) because I know somewhere in there, there must be a part worth waiting for. This book fell into the (2) catagory. It was an impossible bore throughout most of the novel, with one interesting fight in an alley due to a fender bender.... until you hit the last 50 pages. For me, hitting those last chapters was like breaki...

Jonathan sits before his reliable laptop, gathering his thoughts on how to begin a review of Ian McEwan's Saturday. He has already made up his mind as to how he shall write this review, a mediocre attempt at emulating Mr McEwan's third-person, present-tense style, will suffice. Yet he struggles with the concept of how best to begin the review. Shall he mention the plot, the themes or the beautiful writing? He knows at this point that he will refer to why he talks as an omniscient narrator for th...

*******Note : SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE!! This review is for people who have read Saturday or people who will never read Saturday!********Reading Saturday is like running a weird obstacle race. At first it’s all manicured lawns and rhododendrons, and then it’s hideous piles of donkey droppings, and that’s how it goes – daffodils, donkey droppings, vistas of beauty, donkey droppings. And I’m not sure that was the intended effect. What a weird novel – here we have one of the stupidest plot devic...

Henry Perowne is a busy 48-year-old London neurosurgeon. Saturday, in 2003, two years after the 9/11 attacks and as the invasion of Iraq ears, is a single day in his life. We peek in at every thought that crosses this fellow’s mind over the course and react with him to the events that occur, such as seeing a flaming plane cross the London sky, getting mugged by a trio of toughs, losing a squash match to his buddy.Ian McEwan - from his site - Photo Credit: Annalena McAfee Saturday is no one’s not...

For me, one-star ratings are extremely rare. & this is, without a doubt, one of the worst books... Ever! The titular day is a bland array of stupid events that fill up a stupid life. The neurosurgeon atop his manse contemplates the plague of humanity living right below him (commoners, proletarians, drug addicts) all the while believing that his own existence is worthwhile as he parades around all the perks of being rich in a modern-day luxurious London. I detested this neo-bourgeoisie panorama t...

Short version: GOD IT WAS BORING.Long version: You know the anecdote that a succesful novelist could publish his shopping list and people would buy it? That's the case with Saturday. A chronicle of 24 hours from the life of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, the novel is full of his ruminations, reminiscences, all described in painful, tedious detail. McEwan fails to build an actual plot; instead you'll be sure to hear every single event, no matter how irrelevant and drawn out (there's an 18 page descr...

My star rating of "Saturday" is a reminder of the days when I still liked his writing style enough to give him the benefit of my suppressed doubt. I will let those stars remain shining here to remember what kind of strange magnetic power this author has to make me try, again and again, to discover the evasive genius that seems to be hiding just around the next sentence...I do hold a personal grudge against one of the last scenes in "Saturday" though. I have never been able to fully forget the te...

This wasn’t my favorite Ian McEwan. Admittedly there were very valid points in some of the negative reviews. But I’m partial regarding to McEwan--his mesmerizing prose, particularly his superb interpretation of music (e.g. jazz/blues in this book and modern classical in Amsterdam) woke up all my senses.

I loved this book! This is not a book for you if you’re looking for entertainment only, or light reading. This is a book full of layers, metaphors, parallels, & issues to think about. The thing that most reached out & grabbed me was the idea of a man going about his daily life (whether you find his daily life mundane or overly privileged or whatever), when unexpected events occur & change everything. That’s always sort of a scary theme for me! On the surface it’s the story of Henry, a successful...

This eighth book in my current Ian McEwan binge is the one I have now purchased just after reading a digital copy. (All the others have been library copies.) The reason being that not only is this story of one day in the life of a neurosurgeon so brilliant and moving that it reduced me to a sweaty puddle, but reading a single line of McEwan's narrative lights a fire in my writer brain. He reminds me about full-sensory life and how to express it—color, heat/cold, smell, etc.—evoking the words of

To state that I read this is not exactly true. This was my second attempt to read this book. I want to preface my statements to say that I have enjoyed many of McEwan's books very much. Although I am a medically educated person and understand the relevant language, I found the narrative tedious, tremendously rambling and slow to reach any point of interest for me. Apparently I am in a minority, but fortunately, there are many more books of interest for me to read.