I only read seven books in September, and one of them was a dogdamn book for class. I expected grad school to take a toll on my leisure reading, but was still disappointed that it did.
I made a million notes in GMT because I read it for school, but tbh I found it dull. Apparently the maps chapter is widely acknowledged the weakest, which I give a fervent +1.
If you're interested in the concept of distant reading, through a Marxist lens, and visualized in...maps, graphs, and trees, you might or might not like this book. Apparently a lot of lit scholars are lit about it, and not in a good way.
To me the most engaging part was the last, trees, where Moretti evaluates the literary market in Darwinian terms, "And if language evolves by diverging, why not literature, too?" which of course got me thinking about the Veronica Roth Divergent series because I'm a scholar like that, always making connections.
For a Marxist, it seems to me that Moretti gives the marketplace a lot of uncritical attention and ascribes capitalist intent to centuries of authors.
But seriously, what do I know? This book did nothing for me. Give me fiction (or lowbrow memoir) to read, or give me nothing.