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A review by laneyofthenight
Super Sushi Ramen Express: One Family's Journey Through the Belly of Japan by Michael Booth
3.0
I finally finished! God, that felt like forever. It actually wasn’t that long a book, but it was very slow going, for reasons I’m happy to explain and certainly will because I’ve developed a lot of strong opinions about this one.
To begin, the actual content is fascinating. I don’t think there was ever any doubt that months traveling around Japan experiencing the culture and eating till your hearts content could possibly be boring, and it wasn’t. That said, interesting subject matter doesn’t solve every problem, and as others have said, this book was definitely lacking balance. I felt like I was jumping between huge chunks of memoir about a family vacation and huge chunks overloaded with information about Japanese cuisine.
That said, the writing itself may have been my bigger problem, and it sometimes left me with a bad taste in my mouth. For example, I found that location and timing were very hit or miss. There were times in this book when I got ridiculously detailed descriptions of where they were, when they were there, and how they got there, and other times all I got was a snippet two pages into the chapter of something like “just outside in Hiroshima”. It made it unnecessarily more difficult to keep track of the progress of his journey, especially on occasions when he would jump back in his story and give further explanation of something he’d done previously that always left me wondering if he knew what order he did things in, because I had to take notes to piece it together. That compounded with my biggest problem.
My biggest problem with his writing, and with the entire book, is the sheer number of times that the author would begin explaining something interesting and complex and mid-explanation would cut off with a “but we’ll come back to this later”. It made things incredibly difficult to follow, and I think I’m going to retain substantially less information from this book than I normally would be able to simply because of the poor outline of information flow. His writing would’ve been substantially more compelling if organized in a more coherent way.
Overall, the book had some flaws, substantial flaws in my opinion, but the content was interesting enough to make up for most of this, and it’s a good starting point to learn more about Japanese regional cuisine.
To begin, the actual content is fascinating. I don’t think there was ever any doubt that months traveling around Japan experiencing the culture and eating till your hearts content could possibly be boring, and it wasn’t. That said, interesting subject matter doesn’t solve every problem, and as others have said, this book was definitely lacking balance. I felt like I was jumping between huge chunks of memoir about a family vacation and huge chunks overloaded with information about Japanese cuisine.
That said, the writing itself may have been my bigger problem, and it sometimes left me with a bad taste in my mouth. For example, I found that location and timing were very hit or miss. There were times in this book when I got ridiculously detailed descriptions of where they were, when they were there, and how they got there, and other times all I got was a snippet two pages into the chapter of something like “just outside in Hiroshima”. It made it unnecessarily more difficult to keep track of the progress of his journey, especially on occasions when he would jump back in his story and give further explanation of something he’d done previously that always left me wondering if he knew what order he did things in, because I had to take notes to piece it together. That compounded with my biggest problem.
My biggest problem with his writing, and with the entire book, is the sheer number of times that the author would begin explaining something interesting and complex and mid-explanation would cut off with a “but we’ll come back to this later”. It made things incredibly difficult to follow, and I think I’m going to retain substantially less information from this book than I normally would be able to simply because of the poor outline of information flow. His writing would’ve been substantially more compelling if organized in a more coherent way.
Overall, the book had some flaws, substantial flaws in my opinion, but the content was interesting enough to make up for most of this, and it’s a good starting point to learn more about Japanese regional cuisine.