WHEWWWWWW I had to let this one sit for a while. I finished the defense draft of my dissertation and in the two week break between submission and my defense I immediately chewed through a 750 page book in three days lol. I cannot live without some kind of punishment.

AND PUNISHMENT IT WAS. I honestly have no idea how to rate this. I'm very glad I read it and it will stay with me a long time but on the other hand I would never recommend this book to another human who I respected or cared about. The People In The Trees was a similarly painful reading experience but there the protagonist is designed to be unlikable so it was easier to handle, unlike Jude who you want to succeed but instead everything is just consistently getting worse. It's hard reading a novel where a stretch of good things happening only leads to a growing sense of dismay and horror knowing something awful is coming up shortly. It was to the point where approaching the end of a chapter I was able to accurately predict the horrible tragedy that I KNEW WAS COMING!!! Because too many pages had been not even good things happening, but just the absence of terrible things happening! On twitter I posted "The moral is 'all of life is suffering and all good things are just temporary light posts in between the endless stretches of darkness'" and like...that probably isn't what you should take away from this book but that's sure what it felt like while in the middle of the reading experience!!

Anyway my final review on twitter was "4 stars but also f*ck this book lol" which, basically accurate. It's a beautiful novel! The writing, as usual, is near flawless! It could easily have been 200 pages shorter! It made me very upset constantly while reading it! I don't know if I could emotionally handle reading it again!

I think it's like a haunted house where you know you shouldn't go in because people are going to jump out screaming and scare the hell out of you but some part of you yearns for punishment because it reminds you that you are alive and breathing so you're going to go in anyway? That's basically the experience of A Little Life.

An incredible work, notable for its lyricism as well as its ability to wring emotion out of the reader. While some might label this a punishing read, the journey is worth the pain.

I loved Yanagihara's first novel and expected something incredible from this release, but I was not treated to the same writing, plotting, or complex characters. This novel was a form of torture porn with very little sense of humanity to be found.