I'd be lying if I said I didn't like any of these books. All of these are certainly enjoyable, but I just can't put any of them in peak.
susan orlean
I read the synopsis thinking it was gonna be about the actual court case, but no, like 80% of it is just the author dicking around Florida and yapping with others about orchids. It's fun yapping, no doubt, but I can't lie- I felt a bit cheated after seeing the conflict the cover flaps advertised resolved in such a simpler manner.
There's not even a proper ending. Maybe there's a reason for that which English teachers could make their kids write a whole essay on, but it kinda left a bad taste in my mouth.
So yeah, not the best book, but it's still fine. I don't really regret reading it.
jules verne
Real quick, props to the title for being such a concise description of what goes on. Like yeah, I sure as hell did read a journey to the center of the earth.
I actually had to read an abridged Chinese version of this book in my middle school's Chinese immersion program. In my mind I believed they gutted like 90% of the book, but turns out the original thing is just as short, clocking in at around 250 pages.
It's an ok, self-contained little read. I'd read 20k Leagues next, but I already finished it in middle school and there's nothing I hate more than rereading books (besides being drawn and quartered or whatever).
bob woodward & carl bernstein
The writing style of this book is very unique. It's about Watergate and is written by the people who broke the whole thing. They talk about themselves in the third person, and they only directly quote others- never themselves. So yeah, the journalistic writing is pretty cool and I'd read another one with a similar style.
I'm putting this in OK, though, since despite the book's best efforts at the start to remind me who each of the bajillion names are in the White House, I still forgot and had to look crap up on Wikipedia. The plot also got a bit scattered towards the end, and it lowk kinda lost me. Most likely a skill issue, but this is my book review, not others'.
ben macintyre
Who doesn't love a good spy story? This book follows the life of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB spy who worked as a double agent for MI6. Though told more like nonfiction than fiction, I still found all the various spy splots intriguing enough to keep my attention.
For some reason, despite the book telling us his real name and giving us a photo of him and his house, the epilogue says that he lives under an assumed name. My brother in Christ, what is the point of the anonymity if some schmuck with a tape recorder is going to come and dox you anyways?
also ben macintyre
Before I started reading this I actually didn't know that this was written by the same guy. I just saw this in the Amazon recs under the spy book and placed a request for it on a whim.
It's a decent book, though. One thing about this is that MacIntyre often goes on winding tangents about people that are only vaguely related to the central plot. I think there was a couple pages spent on a driver that drove the protagonists and their corpse to their destination. These tangents are pretty hit or miss, so overall I guess I would call them a net zero addition. Or, maybe an \(\epsilon\) addition, where \(\epsilon\) is an arbitrarily small positive number.
Overall, a nice short read. It's around 300(?) pages, and the print on my copy was pretty big too. Unfortunately, like the previous book of his I read, I can't call it peak.
maria smilios
Funnily enough, I read this book about tuberculosis while coming down with a cold myself. Obviously my illness was much milder, but a funny coincidence regardless.
This book started out pretty good. The prose is nice! Smilios does a great job at drawing the reader back into the early 20th century and the havoc TB was wrecking on the US. She also provides vivid accounts of the injustices black nurses faced during both the hiring process and their employment.
My main issue with this book is its pacing. Near the middle and the end it started reading more like a linear account of events than an actual narrative, if you get what I mean. The actual cure for TB is only brought up in the last couple of chapters, and disproportionate time was spent on some other drug that didn't even wind up working. I get that it's how things happened IRL, but it doesn't really make for good writing.
Smilios also spends some time on events that ultimately turned out to mostly be for sob/shock value and don't really contribute much to the actual story. Like once, she spends a chapter talking about how a doctor's wife died from a brain aneurysm and then never mentions it ever again. I know this sounds really heartless of me, and I might be trying to get something from this book that it wasn't meant to provide. However, this book was catalogued under narrative nonfiction, so I feel like me judging it as a story is at least a little justified.
jessica bruder
I'm...honestly not sure if this book belongs in the yellow section. Maybe in an alternate universe, if my experience reading this was just a tiny bit different, it would've been in green. I treat This American Life as the standard for nonfiction stories, and this book was closer in tone and storytelling style to that podcast than any other narrative nonfiction I've read. And yet, something about it just doesn't cross that threshold for peak.
The book goes hard! That much is undeniable. It's a bittersweet mix of hope and despair, as Bruder follows the cohort of older (and sometimes younger) Americans that have taken to living on the road to save on rent and other expenses. There's special focus on one Linda May, whose dream is to settle down in a self-sustaining house in the desert made out of tires and compacted dirt. Even though this book was published nearly a decade ago, its economical commentary seems more relevant than ever. You could tell me this book was written last month and I wouldn't have bat an eye.
Bruder also really throws herself into the entire topic- like one chapter she describes her own experience living out of a van. She even tried taking on some of the same gigs that the people she was reporting on were doing. Vaguely reminds me of that thing where the CCP sent all the city kids down into the rural areas to take 'em down a notch, only voluntary.
So yeah. Pretty good book, would definitely recommend, just like maybe 1% short of being peak.
robert macfarlane
This book was way more hippie than I expected it to be. While I still take some issue with its central argument that a river is a living being and should be granted the same rights as one, I found it a great read nonetheless. MacFarlane tries to argue that the answer to the title of this book is a resounding "yes" by chronicling his journey along three mid-tier rivers with some people he knows. (By mid-tier I just mean not the ones that everyone blurts out, like the Mississippi or the Yangtze.) I expected a lot of doom and gloom in regard to how humanity's wrecking every part of Mother Nature, but there were way more positive news than I thought there would be.
I personally would've liked a more analytical argument on why rivers should be treated as living beings, but MacFarlane mostly does his arguing in terms of pathos rather than logos. A lot of words are spent on how humans should see themselves as just one node in a massive network of life, mainly in the form of moving depictions of the scenery and all the wildlife around the rivers. It makes for nice reading, but in terms of actual convincing not so much.
At the end of the day, a river doesn't reproduce or evolve, nor is it made up of cells. Unless you can someone convince me that the very definition of life is wrong...