Dull. Good basic plotline. Convoluted. Atmospheric. Drags out. Too wordy. Beautiful phrases placed like pearls in the middle of long, boring paragraphs. I can't say that I found any of the characters all that likeable either. Last third or quarter of the book was good, but I am so glad to be done with this book.

I went into this book expecting to love it. Shostakovich is wonderful and he and Pasternak were living in the same time and place, and Shosty wrote the music to the 1971 version of King Lear, and Pasternak translated the Shakespeare to Russian, but Shosty's music is beautiful, and full of meaning, where as Pasternak's writing is full of meaning, but the beauty comes from far and few between as beautiful diamonds of quotes that get your hopes up that the writing will get better, only to have the next twenty or forty pages be as dull as the last twenty or forty that came before.

And on another note, I am very frustrated by the Wikipedia description of Lara and Komarovsky's relationship as 'an affair.' That they were relieved that Lara's mother hadn't learned of their 'affair.' Komarovsky was Lara's mother's boyfriend. If such a relationship happened in todays society it would be called sexual abuse, and I feel that in descriptions and analysis of the book it should be called that as well.

Boris Pasternak essentially won the Nobel prize for this book.  The book was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and it is quite critical of the Revolution and is an anti-Marxist book.  I admire and in certain respects share Pasternak's ideology (apart from the Christianity).  He is in many ways a hero, but this book is just not that great.  I rate books based on the work of art and not the person.

Doctor Zhivago is heavily influenced by Tolstoy and it is in many ways trying to be the War and Peace of the Russian Revolution, but it is just not that well done.  It is quite amorphous in structure and tails out to an end, then tails out to a second end, then tails out to a third end, and then actually ends with poetry supposedly written by the main character.  The rest of the book is not that compelling the characters are all OK.  The writing is fine, but not compelling.  It's all a little boring really.

I admire what the book represents, but not really the book.

Both of these books are set in Russia and it's often very cold in them so that you definitely need a fire when reading them.

Doctor Zhivago always reminds me of my mum. This is her favourite book and she has read it I don't know how many times. I really liked it too and it is one of the few book I one day want to read again.