Finished “Devil in the White City”
Well, I actually finished it Sunday. Started Saturday night, finished Sunday night. I’d forgotten how good it feels to just sit down and get sucked into the world of a book, letting it pull you along.
I need to read more.
As for the book itself, it was a great read, in the vein of In Cold Blood if a little more expansive (necessarily, due to the subject matter). As a work of popular history, it’s decent, but as a piece of narrative, Erik Larson hits the ball out of the park. My only complaint was that I already knew the history of the Fair, so when Larson would try to create suspense by withholding someone’s name, I would just think, “Come on, man!” (case in point: referring to Ferris for three chapters as an unnamed engineer from Pittsburgh so as to not give away the kicker that the first Ferris wheel was build for the Columbian Exposition).
On a related note, I’d forgotten how malleable my writing style is, and how susceptible I am to influence by whatever I’m currently reading. Today, I very distinctly felt my prose pick up the pace and become more lively, and it’s got to be at least in part due to the fact that I’m reading a lot of non-academic writing lately. Lesson: it’s good to keep reading stuff that doesn’t directly bear on one’s dissertation, because it’s in the cross-pollination of ideas and styles that really interesting work is done.