Ten Days in the Hills

Boring. Endless and boring. Couldn't even finish, it just went on and on and on and seemed to go nowhere. If you like stories with lots of detail with no goal, this is the book for you.

I have liked Smiley's other novels but this was so detailed and boring I actually couldn't finish it.

I keep thinking I like Jane Smiley's books, then I pick one up and remember that I liked A Thousand Days, and quit reading part way through the rest. I guess hope springs eternal, but Ten Days was as vapid and self-absorbed as Moo and Horse Heaven.

I have wondered how boring a book could be. After listening to 2 discs of this book, I know I have found the ultimate.

There is an early renaissance work called The Decameron, by one Italian bloke named Boccaccio. The book is a thinly veiled excuse to collect a bunch of smutty stories under a thinly veiled excuse for a framing plot (ten young men and women escape to the hills outside plague-ridden Florence, and beha......more

My typical response to a Smiley novel: she cites ten or twelve other books that look even more interesting than whatever I'm reading of hers at the moment. This book (a modern-day Decamaron (sp)) has the reader eavesdropping on several Hollywood residents in a palatial house over the space of a week......more

I just started this, I'm hoping for some Laurel Canyon-like Hollywood shenanigans combined with Smiley's usual sharp and devastating observations. I just finished this. It was so much better than I thought it would be. I thought it would be good, but not great, and maybe a little boring or contrived......more