And so, my book challenge continues, though I’m rather a little later than I would have thought with the fifth book. When ChatGPT prepared my book list, I was supposed to finish my ‘British Foundations’ books by the end of March. A Room with a View has completely blown that out.

When I added the book to my Kobo, I thought, ‘oh, a nice short book, I’ll have this read in a week’. Famous last words. I dragged it on for weeks and weeks. I’d pick it up, read a couple of pages, and lose interest. Then, when I came back, I couldn’t keep the characters straight in my head and found it really frustrating so would drop it. I really should have written down the characters names as I read through it, as there were quite a lot of characters during the Italian section of the book.

The book is very heavy on dialogue – which is probably why the movie is actually really good (with a set of amazing actors). I don’t recall seeing any descriptions of the characters. I certainly couldn’t even tell you what Lucy (the main character) looked like. She’s young, we know that, as she needs a chaperone in Italy (her cousin Charlotte).

Not much ever seems to happen and when something dramatic does happen not much is made out of it (though one dramatic event precipitates one of the stolen kisses that are so very scandalous). There are several stolen kisses, the thief is George Emerson – a young man travelling with his father and becomes very taken with Lucy.

There’s a lot of gossip and judgement about the other guests staying at the Pensione Bertolini, which no doubt has the purpose of educating the reader about the social structures from this time period.

The book picks up towards the end when Lucy begins to have doubts about her engagement to a rather pompous man called Cecil. And now that I’ve seen the movie, it has made me want to go back and re-read the book. If I do that, I’ll update this blog, as I’ll have a better understanding of what I read, and some distance between the book and the movie.