Reviews and Comments

This was delightful

I am over 160 pages into this book which is ostensibly a biography of typhus, and so far it has covered at length:

• the nature of art,
• whether or not he should write this book,
• the origins and fundamentally parasitic nature of life,
• the role of epidemic disease in various periods of history, each section of which he concludes that there's no reason to think typhus was present at that time.

It's the perfect book; it's like he wrote this book just for me.

beyond stoked about this

I'm number one on the library waitlist for this 💪

I liked a lot about this book, even though I felt like it lacked some polish, particularly in wrapping the plot up. It is told through slice-of-life-ish vignettes about various characters and how they ended up working at the hotel, with the story revealed incidentally in the background the character's stories. I found this book endearing but ultimately... it's not really a hotel is it? isn't it a cruise ship? this bothered me a lot.

it's hard to pull off a sardonic robot protagonist, and I think this did it

This ended up not really being my thing; the supernatural stuff didn't work for me and it was offering a kind of catharsis that I'm not looking for. But I liked the historical fiction stuff a lot and I'm glad I read it nonetheless

it's been a while since I felt totally engrossed in a book and this is hitting the spot

I know this was meant to be arch but the tone was unbearably smug and the misogyny and racism seemed excessive even for 1941. It also, insult to injury, dispenses with talking about bachelorhood about a chapter in and digresses into fully just this guy complaining about things (mainly how rich he is)

I'm actually enjoying this way less ironically than I expected considering it's a book about bachelor pad decorating published in the 1980

This appeals both to my desire to read some fluff, and to my interest in hypothetical pre-industrial supply chain logistics for salt

This was a frustrating read because I liked so much about it, but I thought it floundered a bit in the second half and also it was just so much. I wish it had done way less and spent more time with the story. I felt like the impact of revelations was diminished by the sheer volume and frequency they came at. The world was really interesting, but important parts didn't feel fleshed out (like the entire government and how it operated, logistically)

I'm really liking this but you'll be shocked to hear that this book about a soldier and a nurse in WWI is pretty bleak so far

What an absolute delight. I haven't read this in a decade and didn't realize how thematically in line with Jeeves and Wooster it is

I didn’t think this book was as strong as the start of the series; it got a little… whimsical? and some of the character dynamics didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I still was very happy to revisit this