Rating: 
Summary: Starts out good, but becomes tiresome
Review: A chronicle of a female writer's descent into madness and subsequent self-discovery, it interweaves the various parts of her life - her early years in Africa, her Communist activities, a novel related to her experiences, and a personal journal, through a series of journals that she eventually interweaves into one. It's a bold and ambitious book, but after 500 pages or so, I was eager for it to end.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: Despite the reputation of the book and of Lessing, I found this book extremely overrated. I found it hard to care about any of the characters, and the plot isn't that interesting, either. The supposedly profound psychology I found rather pedestrian and not especially insightful. Also, and Lessing isn't the only women writer with this weakness, but she doesn't construct very believable or interesting male characters. The female ones are better, though.(A little scientific aside here--since cognitive psychologists and neurobiologists have established that women have superior social intelligence compared to males--I don't understand why this should be the case). I understand the book is more than what the feminists have made out of it, as Lessing certainly has more intellectual breadth and depth than most of the writers working there, but it unfortunately doesn't come across in this book. The author's gloomy world outlook, partly fostered by the failure of the Russian experiment which affected an entire generation of socially minded British intellectuals, is evident. But I didn't really mind that. The world is a depressing place--which is why many authors get neurotic enough to write about it so as to exorcise their demons. :-) So overall, a big disappointment, given my expectations. But I give Lessing some credit for her willingness to experiment with her craft and the medium although ultimately the book is more successful from that standpoint than as a story or novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Read this book. Let it change you.
Review: Future generations will call this the most important novel of the 20th century, or at least they should, for this is the book that expresses the major themes of the world in that century. What we now call gender issues (now there's a broad label!) occupy a major portion of the novel, but it is just as much a picture of the Fear of humanity during the Cold War times, when every day we were 30 minutes from doomsday. It is about racism and colonialism and the fading of empire; it is about the breakdown of society in the technological age; it is about single mothers; it is about mental states and breakdowns. It is about Communism, and have we not heard the 20th century called the Age of Communism? All this is not what makes this a great novel. Each time I've reread it, the more it seemed I could almost put my finger on something-a question of identity, or what it means to be human. "Breakdown" is a word appearing throughout the novel-by the end, it almost seems to mean "break through": break through the rhetoric, break through the categories. The Golden Notebook speaks to deep emotions-something there is that needs to shine through, to grow, to love and to be loved. This novel reached down to that. It is sometimes painful, sometimes provoking a fear/hate reaction, or a feeling of dislocation. This is the kind of book that you often have to slap down on the table, pace the room, and work off the tension that has built. Doris Lessing wrote once that she considered this novel something of a failure, for it only names the issues, exploring briefly, but not solving. I can see what she means-this is a novel that forces the reader to wrestle with themselves as much as the characters. This is why some people read the novel and yawn, and why some read the novel and are profoundly changed. One must be at a crossroads, unsettled. Read this book. Let it change you.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book. Let it change you.
Review: Future generations will call this the most important novel of the 20th century, or at least they should, for this is the book that expresses the major themes of the world in that century. What we now call gender issues (now there's a broad label!) occupy a major portion of the novel, but it is just as much a picture of the Fear of humanity during the Cold War times, when every day we were 30 minutes from doomsday. It is about racism and colonialism and the fading of empire; it is about the breakdown of society in the technological age; it is about single mothers; it is about mental states and breakdowns. It is about Communism, and have we not heard the 20th century called the Age of Communism? All this is not what makes this a great novel. Each time I've reread it, the more it seemed I could almost put my finger on something-a question of identity, or what it means to be human. "Breakdown" is a word appearing throughout the novel-by the end, it almost seems to mean "break through": break through the rhetoric, break through the categories. The Golden Notebook speaks to deep emotions-something there is that needs to shine through, to grow, to love and to be loved. This novel reached down to that. It is sometimes painful, sometimes provoking a fear/hate reaction, or a feeling of dislocation. This is the kind of book that you often have to slap down on the table, pace the room, and work off the tension that has built. Doris Lessing wrote once that she considered this novel something of a failure, for it only names the issues, exploring briefly, but not solving. I can see what she means-this is a novel that forces the reader to wrestle with themselves as much as the characters. This is why some people read the novel and yawn, and why some read the novel and are profoundly changed. One must be at a crossroads, unsettled. Read this book. Let it change you.
Rating: 
Summary: Pleasure reading shouldn't be this painful :-0
Review: I bought this book 2 years ago - almost to the day...I have the receipt stuck in the book...I can only seem to force myself to get to page 50 and then I just can't stomach anymore and I put it down for 2 more years. Maybe this is a piece of art. Something to be treasured and something that should change your life. But pleasure reading shouldn't be this painful. I wish the store would take it back - but I think I've probably had it for too long.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely overrated
Review: I had tried so hard to plow my way through this book. I read and reread and printed reviews and pep talked myself...but in the end, around page 299, I found myself putting it back on my shelf. In her introduction, Lessing states that readers shouldn't force themselves to read books they aren't ready for, and if they feel no desire to finish a book, they shouldn't. I'm following her advice and putting the book away. I have to give Lessing credit for the style of writing. The various notebooks offer a compelling way to learn about a character. My problem is that the character is boring, self centered, and unemotional. The plot is unremarkable.
Rating:
Summary: I just can't do it.
Review: I have tried to wade through this book. Really I have. I even referred back to the other glowing reviews, printed them out, and carried them around with the book, hoping their enthusiasm would infuse the pages and make me want to read them. Didn't happen. I am overwhelmed by the thought that if I turn the page, and all the characters suddenly die, I simply would not care. I've only gotten to page 300, though, so maybe the magic begins later. My only solace is that over half of the women in my book club feel the same dull torment. I'll try to tackle the book again in six months. If I change my mind, I'll post another review.
Rating:
Summary: A book to be revisited again and again.
Review: Just as it's main character, Anna Wulf, divides her life among various notebooks, this book may be savored on different levels. On the surface, the plot is strong and the characters well developed. We find ourselves wishing we had a flamboyant friend like Molly and descend into the hell of mental breakdown with Anna. The themes of feminism, politics (communism and disillusion), psychoanalysis, and personal morals are all explored. Through the device of Anna's notebooks, and the inclusion of her novel, Lessing has created a totally unique, perfectly realized character in Anna. I have loved this book since I first read it as an impressionable 20 year old. Now, 16 years later, I am reading it for the fifth time and discovering new delights. I heard someone say recently that you don't read a book, the book reads you; that your experience of a book changes as your life changes. The Golden Notebook has both read me and changed my life. A must read for any intelligent woman, and the men who want to understand us
Rating:
Summary: Anna Wulf is my anti-heroine!
Review: The Golden Notebook is brilliant. Lessing does an amazing job of holding many strands together. Apparently she wrote it exactly as is published--page after page rather than completing the "notebooks" and short novel separately and spliting them into final form later. I must admit that one notebook did give me a bit of grief until I caught on to Lessing's plan, but it was well worth it--especially for the last 80 pages or so. The author decries the labelling of her book as being about the "sexual war" between men and women. I agree. Far more is contained here. Lessing addresses everything: the political, the social, the personal, sanity, insanity, truth, the sexual, the notion of accepting any experience for the sake of just that--experience. And of trying to keep oneself "whole" when fragmenting is the only protection against the pain of living. But how can one justify avoiding the pain of life when she subscribes to "experience of all" as self-education? Maybe the answer is the meaning of life.
Rating:
Summary: All the Amazing Notes
Review: The Golden Notebook is Lessing's most well known of her works and with good reason. It is an incredibly complex and layered work that addresses such ideas as authorship of one's life, the political climate of the 60s and the power relation between the sexes. It would be naïve to consider this novel as just a feminist polemic. I know many people have read it only this way or not read it because they assume it is only this. Lessing articulates this point well in her introduction. The novel inhabits many worlds of thought. It just so happens that at the time of its publication it was a very poignant work for feminism. More than any book I know it has the deepest and longest meditation on what it means to split your identity into categories because you can not conceive of yourself as whole in the present climate of society and in viewing your own interactions with people. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalisation of the protagonist's life. Consider the following passage "I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: 'Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a 'young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." She can't attach her own vision of herself to the reality of her life. The two are separated by the ideologies of society which influence her own vision of who she should be. This novel also captures the political climate of the era, a state of post-war disillusionment with the available models political ideology. They recognise the need for some kind of change, but are unable to envision a model that will work. Opinion is split into infinite personal categories of what government should become. Unfortunately, for all these good things which this novel intelligently discusses, it also has its own shortcomings that the reader should be aware of. Its representation of homosexuality is very limited. It has the unfortunate tendency to envision homosexuality as an idea of being rather than an actual state of being. No doubt, this was influenced at the time it was written by the meaning of being 'a gay' as being strongly attached to one's political position. The state of being a homosexual is inextricably attached to the misogynist vision of what femininity should be when it is actually something a bit more complex than that. Though Lessing is able to see through many misconceptions of her era such as the hypocritical actions of people who claimed to be fighting against racism while reinforcing racial divisions, the novel falls a bit short in other areas. Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent it from being a very powerful and enjoyable novel to read.
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