⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ four stars -

This was a must read chick lit book during the time of its original publication (1997), and especially during the time when the SATC was a weekly HBO ritual. Now that there’s buzz of a new movie coming out, I felt that it was time to revisit this one…

I read this originally back around 1999 when the HBO show was in full swing. I really enjoyed the TV/HBO version so much, and I wanted to delve into the characters more. Well, as I’m sure most everyone knows already, the book is not at all like the show. While you do get a better glimpse of the characters from the book, you’re not really getting a positive view of their innermost thoughts here…

Candice Bushnell is known more as a satirical writer who loves to poke the edges of high-brow NYC society. She excels at this, and is a skilled commentator on the social norms of the high flyer Manhattanite types. This novel is no exception, but readers will find that as a story, it’s choppy and reads more like excerpts from a column imo.

Lovers of the show will be disappointed, but taken as a novel alone, while it’s entertaining, it’s views are overall harsh and have undertones that will leave you sadly shaking your head.

I would still classify this as a 20th century must read, though. It’s a glimpse of what first class society was like when Manhattan was in the throes of its second roaring twenties time period, as the backdrop depicted here will immerse you into NYC at one of its most decadent times of excess.

Don’t expect to find the TV characters here, but instead a true well written satire. I would recommend this read for those enjoy who this genre (social satire), and who would enjoy a step back in time to the 1990s.

Four solid stars for a modern classic.

Let me start off by saying that I am a huge fan of the HBO series. So I was always curious about the original book, which was, I'm sorry to say, very disappointing. Sure there are similarities, ranging from characters, lines, and situations that were mirror images of the TV series, but the charm was almost totally lost. The story follows Carrie and some of her acquaintances, but focuses more so on a countless number of other characters. Each chapter starts off like an essay about another couple or person, but then goes to Carrie, and back and forth and on and on. This format made it really hard to focus on any specific person or portion of the book, and things just became jumbled and uninteresting. The ending also just kind of fell flat, and you just got some a bunch of quick synopses of the more prominent characters. Beyond the content, the writing is sharp, witty and funny, and kept my interest enough to keep reading. I really did want to enjoy this book, but it is probably one of the few times that I'll say the live action version was far superior than the original story.

I know that I’m a little late, but just realized that I forgot to add this into the original review. The biggest shock moment in this book was that Stanford had hair?!?!

this book made me laugh out loud more times than i’m willing to admit

"Сексът и градът" е от книгите, които много исках да прочета.

Като изявен фен на телевизионният сериал имах огромното желание да се потопя в книжната история, да погледна по друг начин на героите. Направих го и съжалявам!
За мен това е най-слабата книга, която съм чел до този момент!

В книгата са нахвърляни истории на различни хора и нашите любими герои от сериала почти не присъстват в текста.

Yesterday I finished my 44th book in English this year. It is "Sex and the City". It's popular because it has been made a TV show. I hadn't read the book even in Japanese yet, but I used to watch the drama with Japanese dubs. The drama was very interesting to know a life in New York, and I enjoyed it very much.

The book was different from the drama, but some descriptions reminded me of the scenes in the drama. I enjoyed reading the book while imaging the main characters faces and voices in the drama.

I think I can't live like the women in the book. It's far way from my life, and that's why it's fascinating. I definitely prefer choosing one man with whom I can live for a long time rather to be popular among a log of attractive guys. I am not interested in doing it at all. I can't enjoy each moment, and I tend to think my future. I can't pay it by ear.

This book is nothing like the show (which I adore!). I couldn't make it past 50 pages of this book: I was so bored. Candace Bushnell is so impressed with herself and that's pretty much what her books are about. There was no plot or substance to hold my interest.

I had fun

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As a fan of the ubiquitous, outrageous and beloved show, I had a desire to read the sourc material as I have always always enjoyed the book over the show/movie/puppet re-enaction. This is the very first time (that I can remember) where that is not the case: I'll take the show and even those two atrocious movies over this crapfest. What was a fun, frothy, sexy show with independent and strong women was a soul-crushing excursion into the minds of characters so flat I could apply makeup while standing on them. Candace Bushnell might have had the right idea but she had no idea about how to execute it. Without Darren Star and the writing team at Showtime, the Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda and even Carrie we all love or love-to-hate would never even have come close to existing. There are no tangible storylines here - just a series of disjointed vignettes.

It is a bleak, and entirely off-putting book. There are no real characters, just darkly humorous facsimiles of modern people in a big city. No one is likable; no one even really has a tangible storyline! I have no idea where the writers of the eponymous show found their inspiration for Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha and Carrie: it certainly wasn't in the pages of this book. This was an incredibly depressing and unfulfulling read for me. I'd rather I'd never even started it, but I can't figure out how to unread this tripe. While it may seem I have a complete total hate-on for Bushnell, this is not true: her expansion into the YA market with the novel The Carrie Diaries had three-dimensional characters and a valid (if weak) plotline that I had fun reading. I just HATED both of these novels to a rather large and voluminous degree, and the characters so so much as well that I'll be needing a nice looooooooong break before I try another of her work.

I've seen quite a few of the Sex and the City episodes and enjoyed them a lot, so I thought it would be cool to see where it all started from. I have to be honest - I think the television show is so much better - more fleshed out characters, better dialogue, more likeable characters and just a lot more depth period.
It's hard for me to get too interested in a book that is so very on the surface, where you never really get to know much about the characters or even the setting they are inhabiting.
There were some interesting sections, but all in all I wasn't that impressed. For anyone who is reading this book in the hopes of it being much like the tv series, beware - it's not even close. Perhaps people who never saw the series would like it better than I did.

It's amazing book and very sexy sence in book ommg

nearly unreadable— the structure makes not a lick of sense and if you think the sex and the city tv show is misogynistic and homophobic.......you got another thing coming when you read the source text

If I ever got elected I’d get sworn in on this