The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Oh my God, Benjamin Franklin is such a pompous blowhard. This book read like a 200+ page humblebrag, and the takeaway message was that Franklin was perfect and if we were all exactly like him the whole world would be perfect, too. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration. But only slight. And maybe part of my problem with this book was the style in which is was written, with Franklin holding himself up as a shining example of virtue and prosperity and Capitalizing every other Word for Emphasis or Something. I mean, as soon as he listed Daniel Defoe as one of his favorite authors I knew this book would be a struggle to get through. Thankfully it was short. And there was a lot of military stuff at the end that I basically just skipped. But for all that this book was a struggle, there were a few interesting things. Though Franklin fought to make even the interesting bits extremely dry and a tad repetitive. He was influential in even more ways than I remember learning about...