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A review by mo3rgan
Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa
3.0
Musashi is not a bad book; in fact, it’s kind of good. I enjoyed it enough to finish it. I wanted to read a samurai adventure by a Japanese author, and this book provided that. The title character has some reasonable depth and development. The ending is fairly strong.
The problem is that this book is a lot longer than it needs to be. If it were about 400 pages long, I would enthusiastically recommend it. At over 1,000 pages, it can feel tedious.
For the first few hundred pages, I enjoyed the book, and I thought it was building up to something exciting. As it progressed, I had difficulty keeping track of the diverging plotlines and growing cast of characters. Many of the plotlines just seemed to run in circles, and could have been significantly shortened. Most of the characters are 1-dimensional. The book never got bad, but it started meandering much more than I would have liked.
By the time I realized that this book wasn’t for me, I was over halfway through it. I didn’t want to give up after 25 hours of reading, especially when the book was kind of good.
I cautiously recommend Musashi to anyone who likes samurai stories and is a very fast reader. If you can finish this in 12 hours, it’s worth your time. If it will take you 50 hours like it took me, then there are better things you could do with your time.
The problem is that this book is a lot longer than it needs to be. If it were about 400 pages long, I would enthusiastically recommend it. At over 1,000 pages, it can feel tedious.
For the first few hundred pages, I enjoyed the book, and I thought it was building up to something exciting. As it progressed, I had difficulty keeping track of the diverging plotlines and growing cast of characters. Many of the plotlines just seemed to run in circles, and could have been significantly shortened. Most of the characters are 1-dimensional. The book never got bad, but it started meandering much more than I would have liked.
By the time I realized that this book wasn’t for me, I was over halfway through it. I didn’t want to give up after 25 hours of reading, especially when the book was kind of good.
I cautiously recommend Musashi to anyone who likes samurai stories and is a very fast reader. If you can finish this in 12 hours, it’s worth your time. If it will take you 50 hours like it took me, then there are better things you could do with your time.