Sunday, June 15, 2008

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (1989)

I have been fascinated by the construction of cathedrals for some time now - maybe since I visited our National Cathedral in Washington and was blown away by its story - how it took 83 years to complete in our age of modern twentieth century technology. How in the world did people build these majestic structures 800 years ago? Where did people get the architectural and engineering skills, when everything else was so primitive? How could they afford this? Follett seems to have had similar questions. I liked that he was raised in a simple unadorned church, but started visiting cathedrals, when he needed settings for his novels and was intrigued.

[Will write more about the book itself, hopefully soon.] Listening to this 32 CD book was quite an undertaking, but well worth it. I'm glad I had a couple of long trips out East in May.

I still want to get McCaulay's illustrated book for kids on how cathedrals are built, as I still need some visuals, though I did go to the Wikipedia for illustrations for some of the terms, like clerestory.

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