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gnatie's review
4.0
I liked this book. I agree with the other reviewers, it is structured like the author is talking to you and it's easy to get lost, but I like it. There's some really cool information in here and some cool graphs/images of these ancient scripts. The author also has a sense of humor that comes through in her writing, which is fun to encounter in a nonfiction book about writing. The only thing that really irked me about this book is that the author makes an argument that writing isn't an invention... but the title of the book is "The Greatest Invention"... so maybe she's being purposefully ironic, but it just doesn't make sense to me either way, I see no point in confusing the readership like that. She could have just made the title "A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts" and I still would have read it. But I digress...
samphiresyl's review against another edition
1.0
In my hater era, but I HATED THE WRITING STYLE/TONE OF THIS BOOK HOLY CRAP. It felt like I was reading a TikTok for you page - every third sentence had a new idea in it, and then a few paragraphs later it would circle back to the original idea that was the "focus" of that section -- SUPER confusing to read if you're not reading it all in one go. This is not a book you can pick up at your own leisure - it demands your attention in the worst way. I walked into this thinking I was going to learn about some cool languages/scripts and walked out of it having probably read 50-60 pages actually talking about that out of 350 PAGES!!! Maybe I got some false advertising somewhere along the way, but this book desperately lacked any sort of coherent train of thought. The only reason I did not DNF this book is because no one else wanted to loan it from the library - I wonder why. The amount of unnecessary metaphors/references made me want to do something DRASTIC. Fighting fire with fire, this book felt like I signed myself up for a lovely bingo game, but it turned out to be an episode of Survivor where I had to drag myself through the mud to the finish line - except there was no finish line. Thank god it's done now, never reading again, this singlehandedly got me in a reading slump for two months. XOXO
P.S. NEVER read a book that has emojis in it - immediately DNFing if I ever see this again.
P.S. NEVER read a book that has emojis in it - immediately DNFing if I ever see this again.
eserafina42's review
3.0
First book finished of 2023, and I've been reading it on and off since October. Sadly, I wanted to like it more than I should, even though there is a lot of information there that I found interesting. I think it would have been helpful if the author had been up front about the rationale (and there was one) behind what seemed like a somewhat rambling, unfocused presentation, but as far as I could tell it didn't come until the very end.
jamoeos's review
3.0
2.5 stars. This books has a LOT of organizational issues that make it kind of a slog to get through. After skimming the afterword it seems like this disorganization may have been intentional in an attempt at a more lecture-like reading experience, but it didn’t really work for me. The content is interesting, but it fails to clearly describe each of its 9 scripts, and furthermore, these scripts only take up half of the book. The most interesting part is the description of other scripts that take up the second half, but this addition takes away greatly from the main purpose of the book.