MWT > Recent Status Updates

The narrator is overall good, but I think they should've found someone who speaks Mandarin... the butchering of all the Mandarin names is killing me. :p

It sounds like the start of a good story so far, but I'm not in the right mood for desert survival at the moment. Going to pause this for a bit.

Enjoying it so far. Hearing it read by Neil Gaiman definitely makes the story better.

Knocked out a bunch of this on a 10-hour roundtrip road trip today. I don't mind all the lengthy digressions into historical context of every single thing, though I can see how it might be annoying to people who only want the whales part of the whale story. Unrelated: the narrator is killing me.

Passed the part about how they got rid of the anti-Chinese law in the 1960s, followed by chain migration via Chinese university students. That's how my parents got here and I can totally see my father's entire family having followed my father in that way.

The other reviewers were right about Hawaii. This book doesn't talk about the people who were there originally at all. But does go into detail on the whys and wherefores of Japanese and Filipino settlement. Currently at 14.5 hrs in, discussing Japanese internment camps during WWII. Unrelated: I should also look up some History of Mexico next...

Just passed the part where he talks about how Custer was actually sympathetic to the plains Indians and wished he could live like them. And made it sound like maybe his Last Stand was him letting them win. It seems out of place in a history about everyone who *isn't* a WASP, that is supposed to be from the multiculturals' perspectives. I mean, I'm sure Hitler had humanity somewhere in him too but...

The Euro-centric perspective continues for how black slavery came about (how it transitioned from white indentured servants). Also, the narrator is kind of annoying - the cadence of his voice means that everything emphasized is too loud, and everything quiet is barely audible (in a car while driving). I prefer narrators that make their volume more even and consistent.

I assumed this book was going to focus on non-white-European perspectives. So far this hasn't been the case; while the first couple chapters are fairly critical of English attitudes at the time that Virginia was being colonized, it's still almost all about their attitudes, not what the natives thought of them at the time. This might be due to a lack of written records from the natives however, so I'll keep listening.

I'm listening to it all the way through for a second time at the moment. The very first part, about subatomic particles and the separation of the four forces, went by much too fast both times.

This is definitely a book that is best listened to rather than read. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, though I wish that my commutes didn't keep ending on cliffhangers in the stories (some of them literally).

Oh interesting. I *can* just say stuff about books in general around here! Well, for everyone who's been "enjoying" my feed spam: it's because I'm making a list of every book I currently own, in advance of donating/selling most of them to reduce the weight of stuff I have to move in the future. I have lots, it's taking a while...