The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder

Not the actual cover
on the copy I had, but
I couldn't find the
cover for the one I had!

Well, what can I say about this? Some books are very difficult to love, or even get through. It helped that this one was short. Which sounds as if I thought this book was terrible, but it really wasn't. It was well-written, it was just not something I could really get into.

I knew before starting out that it was told in a format of a series of letters and that it had some serious historical inaccuracy. The historical inaccuracy didn't so much bother me; the letter format though made it hard for me to really get into the flow of the story. Though it did lend it a certain "historical" feel in a sense.

Certain things were very odd, like at one point there's a series of chain letters being distributed around Rome, which would be very difficult to do in a age without a printing press or copy machine. And there's an "Aemillian Droughts and Swimming Club" which just took me right out of the time period of the novel every time it was mentioned, because it just didn't fit.

A lot of really antiquated ideas about women in here, and I can't honestly tell if it's because Thornton Wilder was writing this in the late 1940s or if he was writing what he thought Roman men thought about women (which they well might have).

I didn't really buy that Caesar would be so fascinated by Catullus. I don't know, I just didn't.

Overall, I kind of felt like I wasn't really smart enough to enjoy a book like this.