All Unrecommended Books

Really superb journalism. Does a good job capturing the allure of the open road, as well as the drawbacks. But, as a read? It's... hard to follow and sort of boring. Too many people and places mentioned. Only a very thin narritive throughline. I'm super curious to see how they turned this into a movie.

Found the writing style dense and hard to follow. Bits of dialogue felt very witty, but most of the narrative felt disjoint and scattered. There wasn't a satisfying narrative conclusion. At least it was short.

I liked it less than I thought I would. It was bleak and matter of fact, but didn't quite sell me on the descent into the mob. It was an interesting enough take on the social structures that emerge in the lack of anything else, but one clearly written by an old white guy. I don't think he earned the brutality that played out. I did like the absurdity of some of it, but overall it didn't land for me.

Honestly, I liked a lot of the writing but I felt like it switched to too many gears and ran way long. The horror elements weren't quite my cup of tea, but that was a nice change of pace. There were some very funny passages.

There's some beautiful imagery in this book. There’s unsurprisingly a lot of Buddhist philosophy. Nothing in this book really grabbed me. I liked some of the notions around the passage of time, but wasn’t super fulfilled.

This book was interesting. Larson did a good job integrating 1st party sources into the narrative and really, building a narrative in the first place. He clearly wanted to write a book about the world fair and the architecture therein, but needed the murder angle to appeal to a wider audience. Ultimately the historical context is interesting, especially if you love Chicago. Overall, it’s slow and dull. The whole murder angle feels like an afterthought and the first half of the book can be summarized as “it was expensive and stuff went wrong”.

Ultimately, I’m disappointed. He took all this time to build a world and we don’t really definitely find out what happens I what anything means. There’s a lot of colorful descriptors and dream/hallucination sequences, but not much in the way of explanation. I think it’ll make a better movie than book, which is HIGHLY unusual.

The language is very British and fairly antiquated. Also, all of the mystique is ruined by the common knowledge that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person.

I really wanted to like this. It seemed like Cloud Atlas, which I was into. This had a worse frame and less likable characters, so I never made it through it. Just couldn't bring myself to.

Ended up being kinda heady. Lots of philosophical discussion, but with a lot of (fairly time appropriate) racist language that detracts from the experience.

Great premise, lackluster execution. Very similar to movie Megamind, but without the satisfactory payoff. So close to enjoyable.

He describes the augmented reality systems well, but definitely drags at points. There's also a big side plot about library factions that wanders a bit.

A fiction book that reads like boring nonfiction. It describes the woes of an IT manager working on a project that's behind schedule. Dialogue was forced, characters like stereotypes from an office manual. I didn't even finish it.