The Wager by David Grann

Not my favorite narrative nonfiction, The Wager is centered on the story of the HMS Wager, a Royal Navy ship, and the 1741 mutiny for which it is now famous.

It's hard to parse my feelings on this one as my experience is directly tied to the audiobook and the performance of the chosen narrator. Aside from that, Grann may have fallen prey to the task of having performed his research too thoroughly. He might have been too close to the topic to maintain objectivity, or perhaps felt obligated to throw everything in, along with that proverbial kitchen sink.

Though I rarely prefer the split narrative with dual timelines, The Wager might have benefited from posing more of a back-and-forth...perhaps the aftermath against the tamer opening before the two collide with the mutiny itself. As it stands, the opening chapters felt extraordinarily long and because I came in with no knowledge of this particular event, I wasn't even sure where we were going, apart from that teaser at the beginning that takes more than it gives.

Regardless, this was an interesting point in history, and clearly Grann knew his stuff. I still have yet to read Killers of the Flower Moon, but now that some of that hype has died down, perhaps I can tackle that one...in print.

Audiobook, as narrated by Dion Graham: Despite the fact that Graham has a beautiful reading voice, his performance increasingly veered into overwrought and angsty. Though to be fair, I am not sure how much of that was him and how much was simply because of the words he was reading. I'd absolutely listen to him perform the narration for another book, but I would be a little hesitant depending on the book itself.