Pillars of the Earth

Jan read this last month and gave it to me when she was done. She had warned me ahead of time that the writing "isn't literature," in her words, and she was right. Ugh. The first 1/5th of the book is a struggle to read. The prose is sooooo pedestrian and 5th grade and while the characters are vaguely interesting, they are also so two-dimensional that it's hard to stir up enough energy to keep reading. I finally got over the hump and got engaged in the main character, Prior Philip, enough to want to see how he manages to get his cathedral built. I'm now halfway through and the writing hasn't improved much (I just read about how one character hopes another gets his "just deserts" - WTF? Edit much?) but I've gotten this far, so I want to see how everything ends up. So far, it's a 2 1/2 out of 5 stars, and I don't expect it to get any more.