I woke up at five this morning, and couldn’t trick myself into sleeping again, so I grabbed my iPad and read Inspired! because if you can’t have beautiful dreams, you might as well stare at beautiful things instead.
Inspired! is a collection of better-written-than-wikipedia-although-containing-the-same-superficial-information entries about twenty different inspired people (actually, one of them is a dog and some chapters are about a partnership, so actually twenty-five people and one dog). I’m not sure how a dog is inspired. It’s a cute story though — Hachikō. My impression is that Inspired! is supposed to be a sort of glossy, flipping-through-it book you find in museum gift shops. Or maybe it’s for tweens/teens to learn about inspired people (and dogs). I could picture myself reading it at the dentist to pass the time. I doubt I’d purchase it though.
Ultimately, it’s an icing book — you aren’t going to feel very full after reading it. Plus, and I am assuming because of copyright issues, art that is referenced in the text isn’t always reproduced (it’s like the book didn’t even know that it was going to be my looking-at-beautiful-things-while-insomnia’d book 😉 ). It’s a bit like a listicle made into a book with a sort of random application of the word inspired (Alexandre Dumas père vs Hachikō vs Bonnie and Clyde vs Suzanne Valadon vs Picasso, etc.)
Inspired! by Maria Bukhonina went on sale December 1, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.