"You will love it," she assured me, her dark eyes gleaming. "You will just love it!" 
 I looked at the movie cover with doubt, since it depicted a priest leaning tenderly down toward a young woman. "I will, huh?" 
 "You will. It's about life, and love, and struggle, and human frailty, and ambition." 
 Though skeptical, I listened to her and watched "The Thorn Birds." It has since become an ongoing sort of obsession for me, a story talked about in great detail with various friends, most of them just as devout in their beliefs as myself. It has been a controversial conversation starter and is one of those tragic stories I return to time and again, to see what else emerges from it as I grow older. There is always something to ponder, some subtle symbolism winking at me from the rose bushes. 
 It has taken me years to getting around to reading the book, and it contains a similar power, though somewhat undermined in my opinion by a vast amount of needless words. The power of this story is in the story itself, not its trappings, and the information dumps, the tendency to "tell and not show," and the subplots and over-exploration of feelings kind of numb the effect for me somewhat. I found myself skim-reading, with greater desperation as the library notified me, "You have three days left." To my surprise, Ralph is more disagreeable in the book than in the series, while Meggie is more likable, but their brutal essences remain fixed in my mind, their struggles in my blood. 
 For the most part, it's engaging but a little too tawdry in its sexual descriptions for my taste, although I do appreciate how the author differentiated between meaningless sex and loving sex in how she approached the various scenes; the former is pure physical description and the latter is poetic emotional resonances. 
 All things considered, the book and the miniseries demand about the same amount of time invested in them to get through the story completely, and I suspect that the allure of a more likable Father Ralph (in great part thanks to Richard Chamberlain) will pull me more often to the miniseries.