Undirected Reading

   I received an electronic copy of this book for free via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I have mixed feelings about this book. A three-star rating is not a bad one; based on the definitions Goodreads gives, it means "I liked it." And that's true; this book was an interesting introduction to the legislative history of public lands in Nevada, and I came away with a somewhat greater understanding of the sovereign citizens movement in the rural West than I had before reading it (while I've occasionally encountered sovereign citizen types here in Michigan, they are of a somewhat different variety). This book's greatest weakness is one that I hope is merely a function of this being a pre-publication review copy: the editing is distractingly bad. The same person's name might be spelled two different ways on the same page; the same sentence will appear, verbatim, in adjacent paragraphs. Years are frequently subject to typos, such that at se...

I really, really wanted to like this graphic novel more than I actually did. It touched on a number of themes I really enjoy in fiction: truth and lies, surveillance and (false) freedom, justice and mercy, idealism and disillusionment, identity and its loss. It featured a morally grey protagonist, and a setting that I tend to enjoy seeing in media. It drew subtle parallels between characters that could have been very poignant and thought-provoking. It had most of the elements that should have made me love it. And yet somehow, it read like a summary of itself. The pacing was too fast to evoke either the poignancy or the quiet horror of which it should have been capable; the art, while evocative and well suited to the story, never felt quite atmospheric enough to capture the suspense and sense of inevitable dread that never quite manifested. For a story that relies so much on the protagonist's sense of himself (or lack thereof) and his lies, I never felt that I knew Her...

This is a very interesting, readable book with a fairly extensive bibliography that seems to be part-way between biography and travel writing. Despite my near-complete lack of any background in music, I found it easy to understand and enjoy the descriptions of music--and the availability of the companion website made it that much more accessible. I went into reading this book with an understanding of Chopin as a symbol of Polish national identity far more than of his work as a pianist and composer--as a Polish American who has had some proximity to the cultural side of American Polonia, having some exposure to Chopin in this context is likely inevitable. The book’s narrative seems to approach Chopin almost from the opposite direction, predicting that the reader is familiar with Chopin first as a piano composer and second as a feature of Polish identity worldwide; I suspect that for such a reader, the way the author deals with Chopin-and-Poland would be just as readable an...