Bookworm: The Blind Giant. Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway

I was recommended to read this book a good few months ago by a former work colleague. They said how interesting the book was.

Working in digital comms, living in the digital society that is ever developing and being someone using the many areas of digital in day to day life, I felt this book was going to really appeal.

As I've mentioned before I'm not the biggest fan of non fiction, but again I wanted to give this a go and see what I could learn.

One thing I did question was the fact that digital is constantly evolving so how could a book suitably cover such a topic.

Clearly I read this as an e-book on my Kindle and so you did have the option to learn more with the hyperlinks included at the end of each chapter by Harkaway.

I found there were some strong and useful points highlighted by the author. However my main experience with this book was finding myself easily distracted and how difficult I found the writing style.

Those of you who have read or will read this book will understand my conundrum though, as part of me feels the writer may well have adopted the style on purpose and to make the audience fully concentrate and take in all he has to say.

I did feel let down by this book - something I can see from reviews on GoodReads is going to be an unpopular opinion. More often than not I felt the points being raised were just simply repetitions of earlier arguments made with a slight change in angle.

Honestly, I also felt a tad stupid reading this non fictional piece and did question my intelligence at times. Did I not 'get' the book purely because I wasn't clever enough to understand what the author was trying to say?

It took me a very long time to reach the end of the book and in fact towards the end I started to find a lot more points I could relate to/understand/agree with. 

In the main I found the style made the reading experience one that reminded me of school days and those texts you have to read. More like homework than a book I'd chosen to read personally.

Good points

Interesting arguments made

Current/topical 

Personal and professional relevance to myself 

Not so great

Tiring writing style

Repetitive 

Did it ever really reach a solid conclusion/point? 

I'm glad I read this book since I did learn some interesting points and I could relate to some of the thoughts and topics covered. Some of the things in our modern life we take for granted the book brought to your attention and the potential problems they may cause. For now though it's back to fiction for me and a bit of escapism.