Marathon Man by William Goldman is definitely not what you would call my “normal” read. It was originally published in 1974 and re-released in 2013. I was offered the chance to review it via Netgalley in 2013 and because I loved the authors previous work The Princess Bride I agreed to do so. Ultimately, I did not wind up reading it but now in 2021 I have read it and all I can really say is “this book is weird”.

Marathon Man is a thriller. It has spies, trained assassins, and Nazi’s. It has secrets and misunderstands. And it is really all over the place. There were multiple times when I had to put it down and say to myself “what did I just read?” before re-reading it and trying to understand it. Yet believe it or not, this captured my attention and kept me wanting to read it so that I could try and figure out what was going on.

I think one of my main issues with Marathon Man may have been the way it was written. I understand that it was originally published in the 1970’s but, some of the language is now very outdated and a bit troublesome. Some things just really don’t translate well into modern times. And as much as I tried to keep my mind in the frame of which this book was originally written, it still bothered me.

The way Marathon Man was written felt very overly dramatized from beginning to end and to me that just screams “bring it to the silver screen”! And apparently, it is also movie staring Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider. I do enjoy older movies so I might have to check that out at some point. I’m actually curious as to how they would do some of the scenes from the book. It was just so….very weird.