Sex and the City

I seriously find all the one star ratings interesting! Seriously interesting because I really enjoyed this book. I was definitely able to separate it from the TV series and it could be because I'm a writer myself and I can read it while understanding that the adaptation wasn't a literal one--and a good screenwriter takes as much as they can from the text but in the end successfully translates the story to appeal to the audience of the visual medium. So I'm able to read the book as it is and that is a peek into the love lives of some professional and wealthy yuppies living in Manhattan. Period. And I definitely liked the writing style. To me it was a mix of journals and interviews and notes and pieces of an actual article all put together to form one entertaining story. It's like the wild wild west of writing! I love it! The book was daring and yeah, I bought it...I mean, I get the tug of war between societal mores, values and beliefs and the innate sense of independence. It can drive you crazy! And I think Candace Bushnell did an excellent job of capturing that in this book. Bravo! 5 stars for sure in my book! And believe me... I'm NOT easy to please. But you can't read this book and THINK Sex and The CIty the TV show because this Carrie Bradshaw and that Carrie Bradshaw are a number of ticks different. There's no way a studio exec would take the chance the book's CB. They have to make $$$. They have to make her "LIKABLE" for all the women who are inflicted with the Cinderella Syndrome. I mean, this CB, sniffs lines, smokes marijuana and drinks until she pukes. She has a lot of friends and sometimes Samantha Jones gets on her nerves. This book is grittier and is not a story for those who ascribe to the "THE SCRIPT."

I watched "Sex and the City" for the first time two years ago and fell in love with it. I knew the book was going to be different -- and in most cases the book is better. I somehow missed the original "Sex and the City" column in the Observer, so I had nothing to go by. However, around the same time there was another sex/dating column that ran in the New York Press by a young lady named Judy McGuire. The column was called "Date Girl." McGuire's column was hilarious and a great read! When I worked in NYC I looked forward to Tuesday evenings when new The New York Press was published and I read "Date Girl" religiously. I think I was expecting "Sex and the City" -- the book -- to be cute, fun, cool and honest like McGuire's writing always was. So I got the "Sex and the City" book a few days ago. It was a turn-pager only because I was wondering if it was ever going to get better. I didn't "get" the characters as many were dull, egotistical and needy. It was like, "yeah, whatever." Not to mention, the book was poorly edited. Grammatical mistakes practically jumped off the pages. There were some funny parts, like the "nanny camera" story, but for the most part it was boring, depressing and definitely not empowering for a woman.

Have you ever sat in a coffee shop or your hometown's shopping mall, catching snippets of juicy conversations as they pass by you? $eXz In The City, the book, is just like that only better. In SITC, you get to listen to the snippets of the rich and famous, the ultimately wealthy, and the downright notorious; something you don't get at home. Though built upon shallow ideals, the characters are anything but shallow; they are witty, charming, self-centered, goal-orientated, and real. The storyline, though it is told in fragments not unlike a diary that many people have written in, manages to stay smooth and yet spontaneous in its wandering courses. Both the Cable Show and the book stem from a column Candace Bushnell started writing for The New York Observer back in 1994, where she decided to remove the sentimental value from relationships and mating rituals and replace it with a healthy, well needed injection of sardonic humor. Thanks to Ms. Bushnell, we have such wonderful glimpses into this taboo subject like "The M&M's", "The Modelizers", "Psycho Moms", "Bicycle Boys", "Dweebs, Nerds, and Losers", "Comparison Shopping", "The Nanny Camera", and many more. SITC is a wonderfully fun, kick-back-and-relax kind of book; a lively and fun story that reminds you not to take yourself so seriously all the time. I highly recommend it for a lazy afternoon or a sunny day at the beach. Enjoy!

Would have given it 5 stars but it was slightly hard to follow in the beginning. After reading about a third of the book, it was easier to figure out what the next paragraph was referring too. I have watched the Sex and the City series and the movies and was wondering what the original book was like. I'm glad I decided to read this book, it gives you a play by play into the lives of others, while keeping it real and interesting.

While the cover boasts that this book is the Age of Uninnocence, conjuring up the idea that it is comparable to Edith Wharton's novel of manners, the book doesn't deliver. It's a door mat on the floor of Edith Wharton's penthouse. There's no real plot to this novel and the characters are one-dimentional and vacuous. Edith Wharton, like her friend, Henry James, had a great ability to write scenes with witty dialogue, revealing character in subtle ways. Wharton used symbolism and multi-layered textuality in a way that Bushnell seems incapable or at least does not attempt. And if we are comparing Bushnell to a jouranlist writer like Hemingway or Tom Wolf, there again, she doesn't measure up. There's not multidimension to these characters, to the text. There's no interesting subplot within an over-arching story. It's all subplot and no major premise. It might be shocking to midwesterners, but it's not much more than that. Once you've heard about one oral sex encounter, the other ten are simply boring. The three-some sex chapter is an overkill and I left the chapter feeling a bit smarmy. If that's what Busnell wants us to feel, pity and sorrow for her characters misadventures, then she succeeds. I don't get that impression, however. I honestly don't know how anyone can "enjoy" the book. It's not funny. David Sadaris is funny. He can make you laugh at people you feel sorry for -- that's a talent. I felt sad for the characters in Bushnell's book, none of whom I actually cared about. I wanted to shake them and tell them that life isn't a series of three-somes, rails to snort, and cigarettes to smoke. I wanted to tell them to get a life. Move to Nambia and work for the UN. The only redeeming chapter was the Bicycle Boys, which was perhaps the best written chapter. It has some interesting and novel observations. On the whole, women lack direction and look for men to rescue them. There is no real self-reliance here. Even the women who are financially independent, like Sam, are so needy that it defies imagination. The stay-at-homes in suburbia are supposed to repel, but their desperate housewife syndrome is more attractive than the empty sex and drifting that Carrie and company must go through. In the classic sense, the women in Bushnell's novel are as trapped as the women in Edith Wharton's novels, but they are not as interesting. In the end, they all want to bag a man who will take care of them and settle for whomever they can get. This isn't about women's friendship or about relationships at all. It's about survival of the fittest. In the year 2006, it's really a very sad book and if this is life in Manhattan, I'm really glad that I decided not to live there. I'd take my life a million times over.

It's so weird how the TV show portrays these characters. Truly, if you're going into this expecting the story in the TV, you may as well not read this. It's a great book, truly, written in a unique, fluid style that gets at the truth with no apologies. By comparison, the show sugar coats the pure cynicism of the characters and their experiences. It's always cool to read about the way things happen to people, unfettered. There are so many topics related to sex and being single in NYC that it makes me wish I could go back and read ALL the columns. Now I'm going back and watching the series to compare. IMO, the first season is most true to the book, but after that, it takes on a life of its own. I'm a believer that the book is almost always better than the film adaptation. True in this case, but it's a close race.

If you thought the TV show was shallow, materialistic, white-washed and privileged -- just know, the source material is far worse. I can see why Bushnell's column only ran for 2 years. I assume she thought she was writing a slice of glitzy, galmourous New York life. Maybe if I'd read it when I was 25, I'd think so, but it's hard to believe. It's just one shallow, materialistic, narcissistic vignette after another. With everyone saying how bored and disappointed and unfulfilled they are. Ok, maybe try doing something besides working and drinking and f***ing (or trying to) all the time? What a bleak, postmodern hellscape this book was. With bad writing besides...maybe these read better as columns, but when you alternate hyphenating and not hyphenating "threesome" repatedly throughout an a single column, it's kind of lazy and embarrassing. There were some funny elements. The first being how dated it sounds in 2024, which is hilarious because knowing what was "in" and doing and wearing and saying all the right things was so important to the people in this book. I lost track of how many times "oriental" is used to describe Asian people, and don't even get me started on the treatment of the gay and trans communities. Or how maybe 3 persons of color make an appearance in a book set in one of the most diverse places in the world. The other funny thing is how the whole book reads like a red pill manual in today's culture. So much stuff about women being depressed over never getting married because they waited too long and focused on their careers too much, and had too much "baggage" and too high a body count. And how men desire young, fertile women they can dominate and who will serve them. Finally, I just didn't buy the reality of any of it. I know a writer in this genre has to take liberties, filling in dialogue and obscuring identities, etc. What I can't buy is that multiple groups of 4-7 men or women had hours to spend in the middle of the day, at someone's house, drinking and smoking and talking about whatever Bushnell's obscure topic de jour was. Really, she knew multiple investment bankers and TV producers who could (and would) all take off on the same random weekday to let her watch and record their conversations? She really knew mutiple "modelizers" and "bike boys" willing to discuss these subjects at length, for publication? In a city full of narcs, maybe. The least believable were the depictions of conversations between men. Not only do men not talk to each other this way, but if they did, they sure as hell wouldn't report it back verbatim to a female sex columnist. It's a total fabrication.

Having been a fan of the show for years I began reading with that bias in mind. It's interesting to discover how much the show drew from this book - there were parts that happened verbatim on the show, just sometimes spoken out of the mouth of a different character. There is nothing amazing about the writing/topics, I really only enjoyed it for the parts that had the same feel as the show. It is a little awkward reading these individual columns in series, as there is no particular flow between chapters and so many different characters presented that there is no real attachment to any characters. The one thing that really bothered me was that the narration flip-flopped between first-, second-, and third-person and I just couldn't get used to that.

Came as expected, NEW. Have not read yet so unable to comment on how the read is

When you read this book there are many things to consider. 1. The book is written in the style of a scientific work of a doctor student. Every chapter has an own topic. There is no coherent plot with the exception of the relationship between Carrie and Mr.Big. In this way the book is often very hard to digest, but once you have put up with this way of writing and swallowed the idea you can enjoy its wit and humour the more. 2. The book is quite different from the HBO serial. This serial deals with the life and sex relationships of four women, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. In the book only Carrie has a distinguished part, the other women are three out of hundreds. At the beginning it is quite fastidious to have to read so many names of women and men, but at the end you get the idea why Candace Bushnell is doing this: all people consist of names and sex, nothing else. 3. Is this book a moral book? In my opinion it is very much, indeed. The relationship between Carrie and Mr.Big can be described with the following key dialogue. Carrie: "How come you never say 'I love you'?" Mr.Big: "Because I'm afraid if I say 'I love you' you're going to think that we're going to get married." The biggest compliment Mr.Big gives Carrie is: "We're close now, aren't we?" Sex without love. At the end Mr.Big uses all his influence and power to destroy Carrie. 4. When you have finished the book I advise you to read the first chapter again. It has the genious quality of both introducing the book and summing it up. Afterwards you understand what Candace Bushnell wants to tell us.

Witty. This book shocked me, it's witty, dirty. It describes the women as obnoxious, money obsessed sociaites. I always felt Carrie was the worst of the characters in the series and in the book she truly shows her insecurities and faults. I enjoyed it.

英語の勉強の為に購入しました。 DVDも映画もすべて見ましたので、内容はわかっているので なんとなく読みやすかったです。

I found this literary work to be a good read but just once. The characters of Magda, or Samantha Jones or even the other 2 girls are portrayed totally opposite when it comes to the movies based on this book. Correlating both takes a bit of time in the real world