A review by owensf
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville

4.0

Writing a relatively concise, narrative-driven, ~300 page history of the Russian revolution is a daunting task, and I think Mieville did about as well as he could’ve at the task. Does a relatively good job tracking all the threads, and trying to get the big picture, but as things progress, the literary characterizations go away, and the number of names/committees increases, which sometimes makes it difficult to follow. Again, I think that’s kind of just what you’re going to end up with a book like this. Also was a bit annoyed that Mieville loves using arcane vocabulary, there’s quite a lot of words he uses which have extremely obscure definitions, and oftentimes, there’s an extremely 1:1 alternative. Maybe it’s just a British:American English thing