Although I am about to finish this book, I don’t feel that I like it as much as I like the author’s other books like “Liar’s Poker”, “Boomerang”, “The Undoing Project”–I only read fifty pages of “The Big Shot”, and I like it very much. Somehow I feel that the author’s usual style–a bit ironical plus a bit dramatic–doesn’t show up in this book, probably because it is based on the interviews of several heroic personalities. The writing is not so much as Michael Lewis’, but rather it is a collection of interview scripts. I know this book gets a lot of good reviews, but I am not into it. His “The New New Thing” is also based on interviews of successful businessmen of Silicone Valley, and I don’t like that book either, and couldn’t finish more than one third of it.
I got this book because I want to know more about the current pandemic and the possibility of future pandemic. However the current pandemic comes in very late in the book. More than half of the book is about people handling previous public health issues in California and the preparation for future pandemics during Bush and Obama administration. At one point, I almost feel that people were quite prepared for the next health outbreak since so much preparation had been made.
Probably the narrator also contributes to the monotony. After half of the book, I just started to skip ahead. Incidentally, I am also reading a book about the last two years of the Pacific Theater of WWII, and the book is really not very readable. A big portion of the book is a direct copy and paste from the interview scripts of soldiers or a direct quote from their diaries.
Anyway, Michael Lewis is my favorite author and I wish I can finish his “The Big Shot” and move on to more interesting books of his.
Haoyan Do 
I generally find books like that difficult to read too- they can be quite depressing. Unfortunately, I read a lot of these kinds of books for university but I always feel kind of sad after reading them.
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Yes, I had to skip 20% of it to make it to the end. That’s true. I have to say schools always manage to select the most boring material. I don’t understand why. More than 90% of my reading at schools–any schools–are boring as hell. LOL. Hope I am not too cynical about this.
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Sometimes that happens. One of my favorite writers is Ha Jin, yet I have been having a hard time getting through his novel, The Nanjing Requiem. It doesn’t help that it is a very depressing book.
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Yes, some books are so hopelessly dark and sad that I can’t read through. Some people can do it, but I can’t.
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