A review by howard
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution by China Miéville
3.0
This was kind of a nightmare to get through. Besides my general lack of knowledge on the topic/names of the dozens of key players, this was just horribly written. The first thing that jumped out at me was the immense vocabulary used by Miéville. I am pretty well read and there were just so many words I have NEVER seen before or have maybe seen once in an academic paper. I mostly used context clues to figure these out but there was so many to the point that it was disruptive. I don't know how this is meant to be a beginner friendly text (which it claims in the intro) with the sheer amount of extraneous vocabulary that the average person has no chance of knowing. Second, the sentence structure is just horrible. This is obviously a joke, but it felt like there wasn't a single sentence without at least 3 commas. THERE WERE SO MANY COMMAS. Miéville could not get through a single sentence without interrupting the flow to point out something minute that could have been added at the end. I imagine the audiobook would be very confusing to follow. His transitional sentences also were worded in the most confusing way possible. I often found myself pausing, saying "what?" out loud, and eventually figuring out what he meant after a second or two. Definitely not a good reading experience.
I also feel like he never explained things? He would just throw out a concept in one sentence and completely move on without explaining what it meant or why it was important. For example, I have no idea what right-wing or left-wing mean in the context of Russia in 1917, or what the Bolshevik party stands for (or any of the other parties for that matter). He would say something like "they voted to pass x measure" but not say what the measure entailed or what it would effect. Maybe that wasn't the point of the book as Miéville imagined it, but the information still felt incomplete. All in all I have a vague idea of the timeline but no concrete knowledge about the politics.
I also feel like he never explained things? He would just throw out a concept in one sentence and completely move on without explaining what it meant or why it was important. For example, I have no idea what right-wing or left-wing mean in the context of Russia in 1917, or what the Bolshevik party stands for (or any of the other parties for that matter). He would say something like "they voted to pass x measure" but not say what the measure entailed or what it would effect. Maybe that wasn't the point of the book as Miéville imagined it, but the information still felt incomplete. All in all I have a vague idea of the timeline but no concrete knowledge about the politics.