But let this be a reminder to myself and to you that expectations are poison for reality. The book was really good, as a whole, up until the chapter about computers, which disappointed me greatly. There is a chance it was a personal issue and not the book—I’ll admit that sometimes things just don’t stick—but even after reading and re-reading, the explanations and stories about computing felt tenuous and vague. Everything was extremely unlike the detailed and highly comprehensible chapters on, say, the typewriter, or the telegraph. If you’ve ever played a long video game and the final dungeon feels like the developers ran out of time and just plopped a bunch of enemies in a bland maze, well, this had the same vibe. It’s there because it is supposed to be there.

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