Absolutely fascinating. This book was extremely comprehensive, delving deeper into the lives of the emperors than I thought possible. The main thing that made this an enjoyable read was probably the format--concise paragraphs of information with subtle sidebars of unrelated but interesting information. I also enjoyed the breaks for pictures when describing the architecture; it didn't take away from the flow of an emperor's biography, but if I was particularly interested, I could skip the pages and easily go back due to the different colors.

Really, the only complaint I have about this book is that sometimes the timeline got confusing. I did appreciate the visual, especially if there was something I wanted to go back to later in more detail, but at times it was overly convoluted.