Author: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Original Publication: 1974
Started: 2011 Jan 19
Finished: 2011 Feb 5
Format: Kindle
5862 locations / 18 days
326 locations/day
Once again writing these years after reading the book. Perhaps I’ll catch up someday. Ha!
Well, in any case, this is the classic Woodward and Bernstein narrative of their watergate investigations. More than two years later, my main memory of this is being disappointed that it ended before the resignation, so didn’t take the story the whole way. Yes, I know they did another book that covered the last days of the Nixon presidency, but I still wished this just continued.
I have a vague memory of thinking that while the events themselves were interesting and of course are historically important, than the actual tone of the writing was a bit dry and “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” for my taste. But it has been a long time since I read it, so who knows.
I’ve been toying with giving a star rating or some such when I do these things, but realize I actually have a better measure of how much I enjoy a book, and it is already listed above. When I am really into a book, I make time to read. I read in the spare moments during the day. A minute here or there whenever I catch a chance, and I end up choosing to read instead of watching TV or even instead of sleeping sometimes. I end up reading it faster. Not in terms of how fast I actually read while I’m sitting with the book, but in terms of how much I read per day. Meanwhile, for books I am NOT enjoying, I end up forcing myself to read a little every once in awhile, but don’t actually seek out time to read, so those go much more slowly.
Of course, this is also effected by how much free time I have. Although there are exceptions, in recent years this has been relatively steady, so I’ll just ignore it at the moment. :-)
And yes, this is also somewhat determined by the “difficulty” of the reading. A light fiction book is going to “flow” better than a dense textbook. But I think that also matches up with my enjoyment. The dense textbook may well provide me with valuable information, but I’m not sure “enjoy” would be the right word to describe my interaction with it.
With physical books, if you look at pages, that is of course a measure that depends on the size of the pages, the size of the print, if there are photos or illustrations, etc, etc, etc. But if I’m reading on a Kindle, most of that is abstracted out by the “location”. And look there above, I already have locations per day. With my patterns of reading (one book at a time, always finish any book I start), this is a good measure, at least for books I read on Kindle.
So, for All the President’s Men, I give an enjoyment score of:
326
As context, here is where this fits with the last 10 books I’ve reviewed (in order by score):
- 723 – Shadow of the Hegemon (F)
- 695 – Shadow Puppets (F)
- 656 – Fatal System Error (NF)
- 647 – War of Gifts (F)
- 614 – Shadow of the Giant (F)
- 446 – First Meetings (F)
- 326 – All the President’s Men (NF)
- NA – Nurtureshock (NF) [Physical 25.8 p/d]
- NA – 9 Ways to Bring Out the Best in You and Your Child [Physical 14.9 p/d]
- NA – Agile Project Management with Scrum (NF) [Physical 9.06 p/d]
So yeah, I guess I wasn’t all that excited by it compared to the last few things I’d read previously.
Finally, my usual two Kindle adoption graphs…
% of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I’ve said before that I’ll do these charts until the ratios get to 90% or so.)