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elexa 's review for:
Unfamiliar Fishes
by Sarah Vowell
Things I liked: Reading about the history of Hawaii is really fascinating. It's incredible that shortly after the development of written Hawaiian, the literacy rate of Hawaii was one of the highest in the world. It's also frustrating to read about how "Manifest Destiny" and pursuit of naval power robbed Hawaii of its right to self-govern. The material in here is constantly fascinating and it's clear that Hawaii is a really complex place. 4.5 stars
Things I didn't like: Sarah Vowell's writing makes me feel like I just learned how to read. To be clear, I know how to read. I read a lot. I read all kinds of stuff with different types of written dialogue and levels of difficulty. Something about Vowell's sentence structure has me reading and re-reading the same sentence over and over. She tries to cram so much information into each sentence that I felt like diagramming each sentence just to figure out what was going on. I get it - a lot of things relate to one another. But is making a super complicated sentence to express that really the best way to get that across? I thought that maybe if I got the audiobook, this would alleviate my sentiment, but it was really clear from the sample on Audible that this wouldn't be true. Sarah Vowell reads really really slowly and intensifies my feeling that I am not fluent in English. (English is my only native language.) 2 stars
Average: 3 stars
Things I didn't like: Sarah Vowell's writing makes me feel like I just learned how to read. To be clear, I know how to read. I read a lot. I read all kinds of stuff with different types of written dialogue and levels of difficulty. Something about Vowell's sentence structure has me reading and re-reading the same sentence over and over. She tries to cram so much information into each sentence that I felt like diagramming each sentence just to figure out what was going on. I get it - a lot of things relate to one another. But is making a super complicated sentence to express that really the best way to get that across? I thought that maybe if I got the audiobook, this would alleviate my sentiment, but it was really clear from the sample on Audible that this wouldn't be true. Sarah Vowell reads really really slowly and intensifies my feeling that I am not fluent in English. (English is my only native language.) 2 stars
Average: 3 stars