Just finished Matthew Parker’s “One Fine Day“. To be honest, I rushed through the last 100 or so pages.
“One Fine Day” is an ambitious book. Matthew Parker has a breadth of knowledge in terms of how the book touched upon a variety of British colonies and went into various characters from these colonies. I can’t imagine a single person having so much knowledge in their head, and then being able to put it all down in a book format along with a ton of quotes from the various characters and newspaper articles etc. It is indeed an achievement.
But at the same time, being able to read that too is an achievement. And I suppose I am just not up to it. đŸ˜€
I like that books that focus on one thing and got into a bit of depth. Maybe not too much depth, as I am not a historian or academic (although, mind you, I did like books such as “Persians: The Age of The Great Kings“, and “Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire“, and “Weavers, Scribes, and Kings“, “The Ottomans“, and so on… so I do like some depth) but I figured after reading this book that I am not a fan of breadth. Or maybe it’s down to a matter of presentation too – if perhaps “One Fine Day” were organized a bit differently, say events in chronological or with a proper finish to each colony that is talked about, I might have enjoyed it more.
I liked the initial chapters that were about the conference and the Ocean Islands. I also liked the chapters about Prince Edward’s tours. These were informative, and felt like they had a beginning and an end; but with most chapters on the colonies they had a beginning and a lot of interesting details, but no real end. And also because there are a lot of details and these need to be crammed into a few chapters, it feels like an information dump with no depth and by the end I barely cared.
Maybe this is the sort of book you tackle differently too. Rather than read it start to finish, you read it in sections so as not to get overwhelmed. That might have been a sensible approach here, but I know that won’t work for me as I like to finish a book and be done. Maybe I can revisit it at some point by dipping in, I don’t know…
Overall, a great book, an incredible achievement, just not something I enjoyed towards the end. This was one of those books where from about 3/4th of the book I started looking at how many pages remain and kept sighing internally, and towards the end rushed just so I can finish it and don’t have to start tomorrow (today, it’s way past midnight!) with this book again. And that’s not a nice feeling. I am glad I read this book though, as I enjoyed the first 3/4th of the book, just it would have been good if he gave the stories there a proper ending instead of leaving it dangling before moving on to the next colony.