These are books that got me on the hook throughout, but I can only say I somewhat enjoyed reading them. They certainly aren't a waste of time, but there's just better ones out there.
miguel cervantes
After seeing a bunch of fanart of Limbus Company's DQ, I really wanted to like this book. (I read this before knowing of the character I think.)
It's a fine book, but there's just way too many tangents. Certain segments were pretty amusing though! The humor holds up surprisngly well after a couple centuries. I can't say I laughed, but I certainly wasn't bored.
Actually, there was one part where I busted my gut laughing. I'll leave it to y'all to guess which one it was.
The way the book works is that it's kinda-sorta split into segments that are basically independent of each other besides a couple of callbacks. If all you knew was the premise and I flipped you to the random start of a segment, you'd have basically no problem reading on.
ryan north
This is the first book I've read in a while that has pictures, haha. I actually didn't read all of it- the last 50 pages or so were just more of the same, and I wasn't really interested in the contents of the last chapter. Surely that doesn't completely invalidate my opinion of this book. :clueless:
While the book purports to give feasible schemes for aspiring supervillains, plenty of the chapters fall short of what is promised. For example, instead of actually giving a plan to get dinosaurs back from the past, North proposes editing the gene expression of chickens to get something that from what I see is only kinda, sorta, like a dinosaur.
It's not the plans themselves that I'm mad at- I found them fascinating! He shows a lot of niche science stuff that were pretty cool, and the pictures definitely added on to the enjoyment. I just wish he didn't raise expectations so high in the preamble.
miriam gross
After Embracing Defeat, this book was a real nice change of pace. Only half as long, this book is remarkably well organized and provides a very thorough account of Mao and the CCP's fight against snail fever, a disease which had plagued rural China for a very long time.
In it, Gross argues that the official narrative by the CCP and the WHO gets the main reasons for the campaign's success wrong. She then puts forth her own reasons for the campaign's success. To non-historian me this highkey seems like a nothingburger argument with no actual impact, but I was certainly convinced of it by the end.
Each chapter starts out stating very clearly what topics Gross intends to examine or what points she wants to argue, and each of the succeeding sections aligns exactly with what the intro said it would cover. This makes it very easy to follow, and any times I got lost were most certainly a skill issue on my part.
I guess a major good thing about this book which Embracing Defeat didn't have was that it actually sets out to argue something, which requires a coherent narrative of events. Dower just explored post-defeat Japan from a bajillion angles without having to put them all together. Regardless, this book made for what I thought was pretty more informative and entertaining reading. If I graded these books on how much I learned, this would be at the top, but sadly(?) that's not the standard for this page.
sigrid schmalzer
Pretty short read, though it's very dense. But I mean this is nonfiction analysis, so standard stuff. This was more descriptive than God of Plague, but it executes it in a much better way than Embracing Defeat, probably because it limited it's scope to "just" the advent of the green revolution (or scientific farming? i'm not sure what i should call it) in post-'49 China.
It goes about its objective by exploring this revolution from the perspective of many different personnel- scientists, local cadres, sent-down urban youth, the like. Within each chapter, Schmalzer proposes a narrative, mentions "contradiction" in one way or another, and then supplements said narrative with a bunch of stories and lived experiences of well-known people and randoms she interviewed in China. While this made for interesting reading, there weren't many statistics that would've really driven her points home. Though that being said, I'm not really sure what numbers would need to be found in order to support her arguments.
Oh yeah, instead of using pinyin for the various Chinese terms that needed to be localized Schmalzer just uses the actual characters instead. While I found these easier to understand, I realize that those who don't know Chinese are just kinda cooked if they care.
So yeah. Pretty good read, though again probably only because I was already invested in the surrounding subjects.
daniel james brown
In this book, Brown chronicles the tale of Sarah Graves, a survivor of the Donner Party, starting all the way from her childhood in Illinois and ending in her heart failure in Corralitos. It was enjoyable enough, though at a certain point I did have to stop asking myself who each individual character was and just start going with wherever Brown decided to take me.
A quaint little thing the book does is occasionally give 21st-century perspectives on things related to whatever was happening to the party at that time. For example, when Christmas passed as they were slowly dying in the Sierra Nevada, Brown spends a page or two describing the history of Christmas and how it came to be the holidy that we know and love today. I found maybe one or two of these to be a little silly, but overall these tangents were one of the best parts of the book.