I understand why this book is important to literature but I really did not enjoy it. This was one of a very small handful of books that made me look for excuses not to read. I forced myself to finish it because I was curious but it was not long drawn out process that I don't usually associate with reading. ( )

I've been reading some of Stein's essays, which are pretty interesting. And I read a William Gass essay about 3 Lives, which was also pretty interesting, and I thought, well, why not?

Why not? Because this book is not particularly interesting. Gass reports reading it in one fevered sitting, then re-reading it obsessively, so deep was his ardor and fascination for the language. I can imagine that, I guess, if it were about one sixth as long (i.e., the length of an average Stein essay). Instead, it's Flaubert with more repetition and an intentionally restricted vocabulary. That's fine. It's important historically. But after I finished (skimming) the last life, I re-read the Gass essay. I would much, much rather read the Gass essay, because his writing (in that essay) is better than Stein's (in this text).

That said, Gass is a pretty high bar, and I can imagine returning to 3 Lives later in my life. Perhaps. Perhaps I'd rather just read other bits of Stein, like her essays. ( )

Please note that I DNF this book at 40 percent. I should have called it at 10 percent actually because this book was a struggle for me to even get into from the start.

I managed the Good Anna's story in this book and started to read Melanchta and had to quit.

The Good Anna storyline was about a German housekeeper. I found it to be repetitive and the constant reusing of the word "good" everywhere almost killed me. Reading about what made Anna the "Good Anna" just felt like I was reading a how to manual. There was no color to anything. It was the Good Anna did X and the Good Anna did Y. Stein tries to talk about Anna's background a bit to explain her, but I just felt bored throughout it.

Melanchta dealt with a young woman who had a black father and a mixed race mother. I have no idea where Stein was going in this story since I quit after I started to notice a lot of what I considered racist commentary about "Negroes" in the book. I have no idea if Stein was trying to talk about what she saw as an issue that white Americans had towards blacks or mixed race people at time, or if this is what she really felt, either way I was not in the mood for it and just DNFed after I got to this point. ( )

It takes a bit to re adjust to the old fashioned, passive 3rd person omniscient author writing style, but when I got used to that I began to enjoy the stories. She uses a kind of strange repetition in her writing that at times left me thinking I was reading the same sentence over and over again, still it was an interesting convention. I guess my biggest hurdle with this book is the racial elements. It's not negative for the most part, but the constant labeling is a hard for the modern reader. At lest this modern reader. ( )

Repetitious and disappointing. ( )