Energy: A Human History

Book was decent, audiobook narrator was distractingly bad.

I liked how Energy is a tale of how developments in energy and the consumption of natural resources were intertwined with the priorities and needs of society throughout the past few hundred years. Rhodes shows how different discoveries and inventions were responses to the time period they happened in, and to some extent, the subsequent influence. For example, it was interesting to learn that early developments in engines were related to mining for coal for heating, which was important because of the limited availability of wood.

The style of writing didn't really work well for me, though. It felt like the author was trying to cram as many citations into the text as possible, leading to a dense text of quotes and not-always-important facts and leaving very little room for any kind of commentary or context-setting. And I found the way technical things (like how the engines worked) to be a bit strange in the level of detail - some diagrams and descriptions are included but yet not enough to actually understand the systems without external reading. This added to the feeling of slogging through the text for me.