Blah, Blah, Blahhhg: Crochet Blocks

To break up the monotony of 3 very boring knitting projects, I checked out this book from the library, 200 Crochet Blocks. It's not a great book, but it's the only recent one in its genre, so it'll do. On the bright side, all of the blocks are designed to be the same size, so you can mix and match them as you please. This is a considerable help. I browsed a number of crochet-block books from the 70s and 80s, and surprisingly, none of the blocks in them are the same size. It would take some tweaking to standardize them to make an afghan.

On the downside,

the title is misleading as there are only 138 blocks, with colour variations making up the rest. There are even fewer if you omit the single-crochet ones with colour changes (e.g. thick stripes, thin stripes).
There are no charts, which would've helped immensely when the instructions get confusing.
There are many, many errors. Some of the mistakes are obvious and can be fixed if you look at the photo carefully, but for the others, you just have to wing it and hope that it turns out okay.
There are no stitch counts for each round or row. Without charts or stitch counts, it's hard to tell if you've made an error. The lack of stitch counts becomes downright annoying when it's time to join the blocks. You can't assume that every finished block has the same number of stitches on each side, so when sewing up, you have to rely on counting, re-counting, and averaging.
There are no photos of actual finished afghans, so you have to experiment to see which of the 3 joining methods looks best.