A review by samphiresyl
The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Silvia Ferrara

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.