Alexei

TL;DR: Old man yells at cloud.

I really enjoyed all of Bryson's past travelogues, but the tone of this book is just super grumpy and unfunny. He spends most of his time complaining about how things were better in the good ol' days, and making pointless, negative hyperbolic statements about everything. Every time I tried to make progress in this book it felt like a chore, and was the first Bryson book that I've put down without finishing.

This book started out so strong with the setup of an interesting mystery on a generation ship floating through space–so much potential for a fun story.

Unfortunately, the author basically throws that setup away and just makes it a tangential part of what felt like a totally slapped together conspiracy story. It turned into a slog, and the plot became really unbelievable and borderline incoherent.

The author herself even says it in the afterword there were “seemingly infinite revisions it took to get the (hopefully entertainingly) Rube Goldbergian plot of this book to hang together correctly”. Unfortunately, I'd disagree with her–the plot of this book does not hang together at all, and “Rube Goldbergian” is not a desirable trait for a novel.