The Making of Home

Could not finish:36% (Note: This is not counting the appendix, which Goodreads counts as part of the text. I am only going to count the portion that I will actually read, which means it is not included in my percentage.)

I just can't do it.

When I bought this book, I was excited to see what it had to say on the development of the home. I have always thought that this idea was interesting, since homes have changed over the years with the advent of new technology, and new ways to entertain guests, plus different ideas as to what makes a house a home. The author, Flanders, attempts to explore this concept, and, when I first began reading it, I was excited to see what she would do. But the more I read, the more the book just didn't agree with me. Desperately, I went to goodreads to see if other people felt the same, and I was stunned and confused that a majority of people were rating it anywhere from a 3-4 stars, which was considerably more than I would rate it. After a time, I began to read less and less of it a week, until I have decided that I simply cannot do it, and have resolved to put it down, and will most likely never pick it up again.

And I think that is because of the writing style, which is so irritating in its construction. There are commas where there shouldn't be, and word choices that just sound off to me, especially when read aloud. Often times, I missed the historical or sociological fact she was trying to explain to me because I had to read the sentence over and over in order to understand it. In the end, each paragraph jumps around from topic to topic so much that it just devolves into a series of trivia facts, and little more.

This is compounded by what her argument is in the first place. She tries to explore the history of home (including the technological, economic, social, psychological and geographic influences on the home) in the countries of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and America, over a time span of 500 years all in just under 300 pages of written words. This is almost impossible to do effectively within that page count. The result is that in certain places she does not properly explain how one thing links to another with regards to the home, making her leaps in logic seem skeptical at best, baffling at worst. She does not take her time with her concepts, which irked me to no end.

It is this symbiotic relationship between the topic and the writing style that made me put this book down. I might have kept on reading it if the writing was any good, but as it stands, I find it mystifying as to how people could rate this book at even three stars. Therefore I'll have to leave it here. If I were to rate this book, I'd give it a two out of five. Don't waste your time on it.