Rating: 
Summary: Not a compelling work
Review: This book, written by a morally confused author, reads like an assignment for a university course studying both turn of the century German intellectual history with contemporary German Holocaust hand-wringing. It's basic premises are unbelievable in the abstract and in the execution. The chief sin of this book is its desire to make Michael Berg's moral dilemmas serious ones. In fact, his relationship with Hanna is less interesting than his inability to confront his own emotions. The most sensible discussion about the Holocaust comes from the mouth of a man driving Berg, and is presented as intolerable. The man blames the holocaust on the ability of humans to become indifferent to the suffering of other humans. This is more compelling than the idea that an inability to read coaxed Hanna into the SS. (As if reading confers understanding and wisdom!) There are also far too many useless references to now classic literature - Emilia Galotti, Bachmann, etc... The reader interested in moral dilemmas would do better to read Solzhenitsyn, or someone similar, where such dilemmas are at least confronted honestly.
Rating: 
Summary: A stunning challenge about crimes of personal betrayal
Review: I read this remarkable book twice and made new discoveries the second time around. As a decade-long national leader in adult literacy in the U.S. I understand well the stigma and shame attached to the condition of adult illiteracy, but I don't find it believable as the primary motivating factor for the actions of Hannah. But there is much else to say about the work. The lucidity of the language creates a horrifying picture that is both stark and beautiful. Hannah's awful past acts against humanity are horrifying and inexplicable. Still, one wants to cry not just for her victims, but for Hannah herself. The author masterfully interweaves the horror of her criminal action (really, a lack of action) with other periods in her life, but most importantly with the underlying broader theme of betrayal that results from silence/inaction. The book delivers a powerful message that asks for a great deal from the reader, including an honest examination of one's own behavior. I admire the book immensely. Oddly, despite all that is terrible about Hannah, and about the lawyer who loves her as a young man, the truth is much more complicated than that. At the end, on a purely human level, I cared about Hannah and even felt in some measure responsible for her.
Rating: 
Summary: This makes it as the "best book I have ever read."
Review: It is much easier to write a scathing review than to be humbled in the face of what for me is, to date, the best book that I have ever read. THE READER By Bernard Schlink is only one of ten books that I have already read this year and though I have recommended it to others no one has had quite the irreversible effect from its reading that I did. I finished it awhile ago and yet there is not a detail that I don't still recall. I am not often up for a second reading of anything except WUTHERING HEIGHTS and yet I can hardly wait for the third copy I have purchased and loaned to be returned so that I can read it again. I am so afraid that I may have missed something in my first and second reading.
The reviews on this novel are honest and for me they spell out clearly why it meets so precisely my criteria for the near perfect story. Schlink never uses an extra word, never describes an event not absolutely essential to the story, never wastes or neglects a minute of your time. Truely, this is a story for the ages.
For weeks after reading about the middle-aged woman who would rather be exposed for an ex-Nazi guard than be found out to be uneducated in post-war Germany,I could only debate the decision of her former lover not to help her at her trial. I kept remembering how he had once loved her and how he had failed,in the course of his life, to find a relationship as important to him as the one he had had with her. I debated his choice with a vehemence I rarely feel, for any characters in a novel; afterall, it is once and for all only fiction, correct?
I was truely sorry to finish this book; it is unfortunately, a very quick read. Though it needed to be no longer in length, it was a genuine loss when it was finished and a story that I am still dizzy from.
This is a very small investment with a king sized reward!
Rating:
Summary: Sex, Scandals and Punishment
Review: A 15 year old kid and a 36 year old girl. What could they possibly have in common? From the beginning, this novel captures the attention of the reader with passionate sex between these two characters, 15 year old Micheal Berg and 36 year old Hanna Schmitz. The novel matures from there and tells the story of two lovers torn apart. Hanna takes in Micheal as her son (with a few more benefits not normally given by a mother) and protects him and forces him to succeed in his studies. Micheal lives for the love he gets from Hanna, with a glimmer in his eye, dedication in his heart and a book in his hands. They live through fights and growth; love and hate; and finally, betrayal. Micheal is betrayed by his one true love. How you might ask? Well, you will just have to read the novel to find out. This woman of beauty and love takes from Micheal the ability to find and experience love again. The same love that he had experienced with her. Hanna stole his innocence, and it would never be returned. This is a riveting novel that takes the reader through the course of Auchwitz (yeah, where did that come from?) and a young boys first, and last, love. Through trials and tribulations. Easy reading, but deep meaning. Simple, yet complex. A must read for any personal library.
Rating: 
Summary: Evocative style; author hints at larger "secret"
Review: Americans have grown so accustomed to turgid, overwritten prose that Schlink's unadorned style at first seems cold and a little unsettling. The result, however, is that the reader is called upon to use his or her own imagination and memories to "fill in the blanks", and I found Hanna's home; the streets that Michael walks; the bike journey; the courtroom; the camps, etc.; formed extremely vivid pictures in my mind as I read this book and for days thereafter.While I loved the style and enjoyed the interaction between Hanna and Michael--who among us has not lived through illogical, confusing relationships?--I found the story so odd that it was somewhat frustrating. The "secret" upon which the whole plot revolved--Hanna's illiteracy--was so obvious to the reader that it was incredible to think neither Michael nor anyone else in Hanna's life had caught on. Nor did illiteracy seem sufficient explanation for the intense alienation of Hanna's character. (An aside here--see Ruth Rendell's "Judgement in Stone" for a similar motif). In his imagery and descriptions, Schlink hints strongly at a darker, more compelling secret--that Hanna is actually blind. This would explain why she did not acknowledge Michael in the streetcar; why she was unaware that he left her a note in the hotel room; why everything about her is associated with tactile senses. Of course, a blind woman simply could not have carried out the things Hanna did, and illiteracy seems to be Schlink's own metaphor for Hanna's "blindness". All of the characters are "blind" in their own fashion: to the sufferings of the WWII prisoners; to the needs of their friends and lovers; to their own inadequacies. The implications of Hanna's "secret" are intriguing, but ultimately awkward--the reader should not have to reach this far to make sense of the story. Despite the flaws, I found "The Reader" compelling, and certainly worth reading, although I understand why the reviews have been so mixed: this is not the kind of book one encounters often!
Rating: 
Summary: Blechh
Review: Didn't like this one bit. Slow, dull and predictable, with uninteresting prose and characters. The "surprise twist" toward the end of the book was neither surprising nor much of a twist. Avoid.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing & boring...
Review: I never found myself fully engaged in this book, I did finish it hoping that something more would develop. This book is divided into three parts, the first is when Michael is a teenager, the second covers the trial of Hannah, the third section has Michael as an adult & Hannah in jail. The book started out ok, although I found myself annoyed with Hannah & her childlike attitude & tantrums. The first section ends abruptly with Hannah disappearing and not returning until her trial 10 years later. The trial drags on, it never pulls you into what's happening. By the time the third section came around I was completely uninterested with Hannah in jail. By the time the "big" revelation comes about in the third section, it's too late for you to feel compassion or sympathy for Hannah. I have to say I was very disappointed in what was an attempt to tie the entire story together & make you understand Hannah & her behavior. Don't waste your time with this book, there are certainly better choices out there.
Rating:
Summary: Love in Troubled Times
Review: This is a good book about a boy who falls in love with an older women only to find out she has a very troubled past that is coming back to haunt her. He never forgets her and can't understand what is going on until he grows up and finds out exactly what is going on. Tried to avoid spoiling anything in my review. Try it out I think many will enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Surprising and different
Review: I really enjoyed this book. It was unlike any other I've read. It was an easy read and kept my attention. I recommend it to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: A gift to the postwar generations
Review: "The Reader" explores Germany's guilt-ridden relationship with its own past by objectifying it in the sexual and emotional coupling of a 15-year-old boy and a 36-year-old woman. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like the premise for one of the best pieces of Holocaust fiction available (certainly the best I've read), but it is. Far from eroticizing Nazism or trivializing the Holocaust, using the metaphor of a human relationship makes them both more accessible. Schlink provides a way into the unique postwar experience of the German people by relating it to things we have all experienced: guilt and romantic love. Issues and events which usually repel or dismay us with their enormity are taken out of the zones of History and Philosophy and reconfigured on to a human scale - the scale on which they happened, and on which they must be confronted if we are ever to understand them fully. I was surprised and moved to find a novel which treats the Holocaust in this way; a novel which risks being horribly misunderstood in order to foster understanding. The erotic aspect of the novel is, in the end, a minor one and hardly the point: it's about so much more than that. Through careful characterisation and plot development, Schlink manages not only to make plain the ease with which German civilians were drawn into unspeakable roles, but also to explore the difference between a legal conviction and real justice, between retribution and recompense, and, most importantly, the almost insoluble situation in which Germans born postwar find themselves - laden with guilt for things they did not do and for which they cannot possibly atone. Interestingly, Schlink's book also becomes a sustained yet subtle commentary on the function of literature and literacy as ways of recording and recovering the past. (Those interested in this subtext might like to read next W. G. Sebald's "On The Natural History of Destruction" which explores the historical unwillingness, and therefore the contemporary inability, of German literature to deal with the terrorist victimization of German civilians at the hands of the Allies.) For all its high intent, and equally high achievement, "The Reader" is almost an easy read. Schlink's language (or Carol Brown Janeway's translation, at least) is smooth, straightforward, concise and precise. His subject is dignified by such simplicity.
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