Although I enjoyed reading the original content that inspired the TV show, Sex and the City is nothing without a strong bond between four female friends, sharing their life experiences. I missed the group dates with Cosmopolitans...

I have been an avid "Sex in the City" series fan. It is one of my favorite shows, and one reason why I bought dvd boxed sets of each season. The TV show is so well written, with great characters and story lines which are very funny that it made me want to read the original book. What a terrible disapointment reading this has been to me.

The book is very hard to follow. I don't know how these vignettes ever became newspaper columns--they don't even hold up as short stories. The characters are nothing like those on the show. While I do appreciate the candid discussion of singleness, relationships, and sex, I found the ideas put forth by Bushnell weren't as developed or comprehensive as they could have been.

I would advise those of you who like the show to forget about reading the book. It will not help you one bit to gain more insight to the show's characters, nor is it a very amusing book. Those who like to read Bushnell as an author, might find the book entertaining on a disjointed, superficial level. Full of snippets of neurotic relationships and desperate sex, the book is one tale of failure after another. Whether or not the tales are true, the book highlights a bizarre kind of pathos in human relationships.

But I absolutely think the majority of fans of the show will be disapointed. The show is ripe with raunch and wit, along with characters we truly care about. This book is grim and dark, poorly written, and ripe with people I would never want to meet. What we have here is a rare example of the show being far better than the book. I never thought I would advocate TV over the written word, but in this case, turn on HBO.


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Book Details:

Title Sex and the City
Author Candace Bushnell
Reviewed By Purplycookie

Reseña pronto. Al final se salvó. At finally this book saves Review soon.

Todo lo que puedo decir es que despreciaba este libro y prácticamente me apresure a leerlo solo para terminar con esto. Me refiero a la forma en que los hombres y las mujeres son retratados en este libro me enferman físicamente. Tuve que obligarme a terminarlo, todo el tiempo que leía esto seguía deseando poder leer algo que realmente quería leer. Qué pérdida de tiempo.

No logré superar esto. Todo lo que puedo decir es que los escritores de la serie de HBO realmente tuvieron cierta visión, porque el programa (y las películas) fueron aproximadamente 4000 veces mejores que el libro.

There are dozens and dozens of reviews on here in which it is stated that while the reader enjoyed the series immensely, the book comes up lacking. I always hated the series and just wrote it down to one of those things that makes men and women different. I am consistent, because I hate the book for the same reasons that I found the series to be repugnant at almost every turn.

When you get down to it, neither the show nor the series has much at all to do with sex—that was just a catchy title. What both are really about is lifestyle porn, as if people with money somehow experience sex in a different manner than people who work in a restaurant in Iowa. I think she is saying that rich people can just hire people to have sex for them.

Even when we visit a sex club there is no sex. And a sex club? Eww. I have way too much respect for my cock to go near a place like that.

This was the exact allure of the Shades of Grey phenomena. It appealed to women who don’t really even understand what sex is. You don’t need whips and chains to have an orgasm; all you need is someone you are attracted to and nothing else, and I mean nothing else. You don’t need a leather mask, or a torture chamber, and you definitely don’t need a sex club. All of those things are for sexless people who can’t get it up, or whatever the female equivalent is.

I got news, folks. Sex is the same for everyone, and what the women in the series were looking for wasn’t sex, it was status which is an entirely different thing, in case you didn’t already know. You don’t have to be rich to get your rocks off.

Sex takes a far back seat to status in SATC. If you disagree with this then why is every person referred to by their high-status profession?

An English journalist came to New York
Tim was forty-two, an investment banker
there's Parker, thirty-two, a novelist
Skipper Johnson, an entertainment lawyer
Barkley, twenty-five, was an artist
Robert, forty-two, an editor

Then we saw the manager, Bob, a burly, bearded man in a plaid shirt and jeans who looked like he should have been managing a Pets 'R' Us
Obviously, having a real job is really not OK with this woman because she uses a normal job as a hateful sort of insult. "Fuck you, you store clerk!"

He comes from a wealthy manufacturing family
Sarah, a filmmaker who used to be a model
Maeve, a poet who is half Irish.
Britta, a tall, rangy brunette who works as a photo rep
Jerry, thirty-nine, a corporate lawyer
George, thirty-seven, an investment banker

I think my point has been made and I stopped at page 37. In none of these cases is their profession germane to anything in the story. They did the same thing in the TV series. It was like they were out shooting big game. She could have just as easily put a price tag on each person: Tom, $750,000 a year, etc. Or told us the size of the dude’s cock: Walter, five inches and narrow.

There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of women like this in the city. We all know lots of them, and we all agree they're great. They travel, they pay taxes, they'll spend four hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals

I have no fucking idea what a “Manolo Blahnik” is, but over-priced footwear does not make a person interesting, or great, it just makes you a fucking consumer. There is nothing, nothing at all interesting about being a consumer.

I recall one especially repulsive episode in the show where protagonist loses a pair of shoes which cost her $500. This was, what, 15 years ago, at least, and $500 was (still is) a hell of a lot of money. She could have flown to Buenos Aires and done something truly interesting, but instead she bought shoes. What a fucking idjit!

Mejor la serie, la verdad.

a better bret easton ellis

New Yorker, seid ihr in Ordnung?

Vor kurzem habe ich die Serie geschaut und da schon an manchen Stellen gedacht: "Puh, die reden den ganzen Tag nur über Männer und wirken so abhängig von Liebe und Sex, das ist doch nicht normal". Und trotz ihrer Schwachstellen kommt die Serie ganz charmant daher. (Ich sag's, wie es ist, weil es Miranda gibt). Jedenfalls dachte ich, dass es eine gute Idee sei, das Buch mal zu lesen.
Ja, und dann kam das Buch.
Soll das jetzt Satire sein? Wenn, ist sie bei mir mal so gar nicht angekommen. Ich finde es mehr als bedenklich, dass erwachsene Frauen ständig besoffen sind und sich gegenseitig ausstechen wollen. Dazu noch diese Übersexualisierung und das ständige Gerede der männlichen Figuren, mit 16-Jährigen Models schlafen zu wollen. (Dabei entspricht das traurigerweise in manchen Männer-Hirnen sicher noch der Realität.)
Das einzige Kapitel, über das ich ein bisschen schmunzeln musste, war das über Eltern.

War für mich ne ziemliche Zeitverschwendung.

This is certainly different from the series - and it's not just the mounds of cocaine and pounds of marijuana consumed by the main characters.

The selling point of the series has always been the friendships between the four characters. In this book, on the other hand, it's every girl for herself. The women are never supportive, and are usually backstabbing. Carrie is even more of a mess than she ever was in the TV show. Everyone seems utterly miserable.

Also? Allegedly this is uproariously funny, but I didn't laugh once while reading it.

Not sure how they got the TV series out of this book. The two seem very tangentially related.

de makers van de serie hebben wel heel erg door hun vingers moeten kijken om van dit afgrijselijke boek zo'n geweldige serie te maken, ik vrees dat candace busnhell echt een vrouwenhater is

I decided to try some fluff. I really didn't like this book. I've come to like the TV series because although it can be a bit raunchy or risque, it has the redeeming qualities of humor, introspection, and the value of friendship. This book was all over the place. I guess I thought it would be a series of columns, but it didn't seem that way to me. It also didn't seem to have any introspection at all. I realize it isn't a novel so I didn't expect it to be a book with linear form. The problem is that it had some linear form and some non-linear form...like I said, it was all over the place. I'll stick to the TV series.

Creo entender porqué a los televidentes de Sex & The City no les gusta este libro. A diferencia de la serie, que se enfoca en las cuatro protagonistas con énfasis en Carrie y a través de ellas y sus experiencias nos pasean por Nueva York, el libro es un compilado de eventos azarosos que son suministrados por personajes incidentales - salvo Carrie, Samantha y Stanford, que son recurrentes. En ese sentido, imagínense este libro como el compilado de las columnas que Bradshaw escribía durante las primeras temporadas.
Pese a esta sorpresa, me entretuve, especialmente al principio de la lectura. La mayor parte de los temas en la primera temporada están calcados del texto, sin enfocarse directamente en quien más adelante se convierte en la protagonista: Carrie, que por lo demás no es quien narra el relato, sino que una personaje más en el Nueva York de Bushnell. Quiero agregar que todos los personajes que son posteriormente referenciados en la adaptación son muy, muy distintos en el libro.
El texto va perdiendo estructura mientras avanza, eso sí. Al principio un compilado de crónicas panorámicas sobre la ciudad, eventualmente se enfoca en Carrie y su relación con Mr. Big. Creo que Bushnell no supo desarrollar esa transición de foco, ni tampoco construir esa trama. Por lo mismo, creo que es difícil enganchar con el texto, ya que nunca te acostumbras al mundo que te está contando sino que este cambia la mayor parte del tiempo. La verdad, lo consideré más bien un libro sin mucho asunto pero decentemente escrito y entretenido a veces.