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I enjoyed this book, but it comes dangerously close to overstaying its welcome.

I have to give credit to Clavell for putting together such a far-reaching epic story in a stand alone work. He does such a good job giving you well-researched details about feudal Japan and how their society hung together in contrast to feudal Europe, highlighting the many ways in which feudal Japan reads as more modern to the 20th / 21st century standard while also acknowledging their sort of collective, efficient brutality. The plot that emerges is twisty in a delightful way that court intrigue seems uniquely capable of delivering regardless of which culture it takes place in. Clavell does an especially great job making each of the many characters feel unique, with their own agendas, secrets, and desires. Not one of them felt like a caricature, or a mindless antagonist.

The one flaw with Shogun is the pacing. You spend the first half of the story getting a very thorough introduction to feudal Japan, then the plot gets moving and it becomes more character driven, but once you're closing in on the end you realize there's no way Clavell is going to give a fully satisfying ending in the remaining pages. The story ends too quickly from a plot perspective, and it makes some of the 1200 pages of exhaustive details seem needless in retrospect. Ultimately, I would have traded a couple hundred pages of early world-building and administrative minutiae (as edifying as I found that at the time) for a couple hundred pages on the end to full settle the plot and explore the short term consequences.

Ending a little abruptly keeps this book from being a true masterpiece, but it's still a damn good read, an interesting glimpse into feudal Japan and its complicated politics, and a very entertaining story of adventure, romance, loyalty and betrayal. I'd recommend it for anyone that isn't scared off by the page count.

Like the musket regiment details when we never get to see them used, or the Blackthorne/Rodrigues dynamic when he never assaults the Black Ship. A lot of discussion and maneuvering went in to setting up a battles that just never happen "on screen".

I enjoyed reading this. I was about 6 when Doom came out, but in the subsequent years I played the shareware versions of it as well as Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D regularly. The first half of this book was a bit of a nostalgia trip but it filled in a lot of the backstory of Carmack (who is a personal hero of mine as a C programmer) and Romero (who was more of a famous name).

I was most interested in the early, hacker days of basically turning pizza and Diet Coke into seminal videogames. The book did a good job chronicling the creation of Commander Keen and Wolf3D as a prelude to Doom and setting the scene of BBS era shareware gaming. It also colored in some of the other notables whose roles were never as clear to me. The contributions of fellow Softdisk guys/id founders Tom Hall, Adrian Carmack, and to a lesser extent designers like American McGee and Sandy Petersen are all made clear. There's a lot of fun in reading about just what a huge splash Doom made and getting some light shed on other players like Scott Miller's Apogee, or Bill Gates trying hard to sell Windows 95 as an upgrade over DOS, Burger Bill, Nintendo trying to keep the SNES a family system, or even Joe Lieberman calling for the creation of the ESRB.

As a programmer I was generally pleased with how technical the book got in some places. Nothing too insane for the non-technical reader, but it did go into details about how each iteration of Carmack's engine was different and better than the last. The rise of the GPU is also a minor tangent here. It didn't get everything right (at one point it referred to OpenGL as a programming language which... is a simplification at best) but it grounds the software work well and even gives some details about the rigs they were using to do their work.

I was less interested in the second half, mostly because I was actually old enough to remember some of the broad strokes but there are still plenty of bits of trivia and readings from .plan files that were new to me. The book does a pretty great job overall of painting Carmack and Romero as the yin and yang of early id, and the later history of Ion Storm (Romero's game developer utopia that failed to do much - classic status of Deus Ex aside) versus id's more diminished role of being an engine publisher (which is harsh but mostly true up until Doom 2016 well after this book) underscores that they both really needed each other to bring balance to their early work. Even with 16 more years of retrospect that analysis holds up.

Anyway, very interesting book and I'd highly recommend it to anyone that enjoyed the 90s PC gaming scene, even if you were just a kid.

Unexpectedly intense and fascinating read.

I read this without knowing anything about the plot, but of course it's reputation as a "sad book" preceded it. I was unprepared for how much of an understatement that is.

The first part of this book, before it becomes a hospital log, is amazing. I feel like it perfectly portrays the morbid cynicism of the suicidally depressed, but also the caged feeling of being a woman in this time period. Esther is straining against the parameters of her society and actually demanding agency of any sort she can get. It is a feminist book and is definitely judgmental of men, but I would say deservedly so... It's radical points of view are based only in equality and resisting the sort of angel-whore dichotomy and double standards facing women in the '50s. As she becomes more fixated on suicide, I wanted to shout to her (and Plath by extension) that things would get better even if her current status seemed hopeless.

It's in the last fifth that the book loses this intense thread. After the main suicide attempt, Esther is treated successfully. I didn't anticipate that, expecting more of a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest style derision for EST and asylum psychiatry... But Esther pulls out of it. In a way that's a relief, but Plath makes it clear that the solution is temporary, that the bell jar that causes Esther to rot in "her own foul air" and become suicidal can surround her again. Especially since this work is obviously biographical, and Plath did indeed kill herself later, the work feels incomplete and the temporary solution unsatisfying. It feels ghoulish to say Esther should have died, but alternatively she could have learned to see something beautiful or hopeful in the world instead of being scrambled by EST.

I have to give this book credit for making me feel raw and sad the way it did, and for being a really powerful account of suicidal ideation that rings true. It's only the rather incomplete end that keeps it from being a perfect score.