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After two weeks, or somewhere thereabouts, I finally finished The Great Chicago Fire. Can you guess what it was about? Actually, your guess would have been only marginally accurate. I was expecting a rundown of all the various causes of the fire and how Chicago ended up in the situation it ultimately faced. Instead I got a refresher course in turn of the century architecture in Chicago.

Not that I don’t find that thoroughly interesting on the whole…Devil In The White City is one of my favorite recent reads (from last fall), so I had a pretty good primer on the subject, especially as it pertained to Sullivan, Burnham, Root, Olmsted, The Rookery, and of course the World’s Columbian Expedition. This book seemed to cover that part of culture in grave detail. It also formed a bit of literary criticism on popular fiction coming out of Chicago at the time and told the story of those fictional characters. The book itself was non-fiction, and I would have prefered to hear the story of some of the people that actually went through it, not a sensationalized piece about non-existent people.

In the end I’m glad to have read the book, but it was a long and difficult read that I just was not able to get in to at all, and never got emotionally invested in it. It wasn’t one of those books that I was inspired to find time to read. Now I’m on to my third John Scalzi book on the year, The Androids Dream. That one definitely starts out…differently than one might expect a novel to begin. But I’ll get there a couple of days hopefully.

Until then, 20 down, 32 to go.