REVIEW: The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks (nonfiction book) by Daniel Konstanski

The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

After finishing Brian Barrett's LEGO: The Art of the Minifigure, I came across this book and thought it would be a nice way to expand upon what I learned. However, I hesitated on Konstanski's book for a long while, primarily due to reviews that indicated that font size was too small.

Unfortunately, I agree with those reviewers. It's the worst thing about this book. For the most part, I could still manage to read the text, but there were a few captions that I had to just accept I wasn't going to be able to read, even with my glasses properly on my face.

Despite my issues with the font size, overall I thought this was a worthwhile read. When I was a kid, my family could only afford a basic LEGO brick set, and even as an adult I've only bought a few small, cheap sets. For some reason, however, I seem to really enjoy learning about the LEGO design process and how and why different sets were developed. 

You get that in spades here. The first chapter looks at the design of the classic 2x4 brick. Chapter 2 gets into the creation of the LEGO wheel and LEGO trains. Chapter 3 is focused on brick-built LEGO people, minifigures, and the mini dolls for LEGO Friends. Chapter 4 looks at the decision to focus on three distinct time-period settings (past, present, and future) and looks at sets developed for the "past" part of the time-period themes. Chapter 5 looks at LEGO monorails and rollercoasters. Chapter 6 looks at LEGO Town and LEGO City. Chapter 7 gets into more advanced and detailed LEGO building, with the creation of LEGO Technic. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 deal with licensed worlds like Star Wars and Hogwarts, as well as experiments with creating LEGO-born worlds and IP, like Bionicle, Ninjago, and Legends of Chima. The last chapter looks at experiments with larger (and therefore more expensive) sets and LEGO Creator 3-in-1.

Everything was accompanied by gorgeous full-color (when possible) photos. It's unlikely that I'll ever see most of these sets in person, but it was still enjoyable reading about them and the work and planning that went into them as designers tried to extend the boundaries of what was possible. There were (and are) restrictions on how many new and/or unique elements could be present in sets, and it was fascinating reading about how designers tried to solve various problems resulting from these and other limitations. 

I have to admit that I was much less interested in Chapters 8 through 10, except when they discussed creative efforts to repurpose elements from past sets. Also, if you're looking for information about disagreements within the company about various decisions that were made and directions taken, you won't find much here. I think Brian Barrett's minifigure book hinted at more disagreements than this book. Not surprising, really, considering how closely Konstantski worked with LEGO Group and how much input it sounded like the company had on the final product. No one wants their company to look anything other than perfect.

All in all, this was interesting reading, and I got through it much more quickly than I expected.