Petra is a mountain. An island. And many other grand things. However, it keeps getting pointed out to her that she is just a rock. However, because of the things she can imagine (and finally the very unique way a young artist imagines Petra) she can be almost anything that she can dream of. At first, I was not sure I would enjoy this picture book. Very basic, simple, text (in fact I have almost already written more words about it then there are words […]
White Dudes Walking
When I picked up this book as the April selection for my local library book club, I was puzzled. “Why are we reading a book about white dudes walking the Appalachian Trail, written in the 90s?” I still don’t have an answer to that question. I mostly find it entertaining because, as has been common in my experience, my local library book club is entirely populated with women, and white women at that, so we are an interesting audience for Bryson’s exercising in navel gazing […]
The Nature of the Unknown
This book felt a lot like Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane. Very quietly brooding, the horrors sneak up on your when you’re not looking. There is little dialog and the characters have no names, but that takes nothing away from the simplistic beauty of this story. A female biologist and a group of four other women are sent on an expedition to the strange and uncanny Area X, where their mission is to record data on the un-peopled area and figure out […]
Not just for bird nerds
Just a few days after I finished reading The Genius of Birds I observed four adorable white-crowned sparrows in my yard. Every fall I look forward to their arrival, when their journey from parts north ends in my Southern California backyard. Each year they arrive in mid to late September–seemingly bringing more friends each time–and spend the winter and early spring enjoying the Los Angeles weather, until a day comes in late spring when I realize I haven’t seen them in awhile. Next season, the pattern […]
“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
Jon Krakauer has a way of covering his subjects where he extends such dignity to the topic and the people involved, that it makes for such compelling, empathetic reading. Like with Into Thin Air, I was a bit young to grasp the gravity of these accounts of people succumbing to the perils of nature. The most that I had heard about either case was noises like “Of course it’s a tragedy, but what do people expect when they are underprepared/he was some kind of idiot […]
“Stop the logging, stop the lies. Save the monarch butterflies.”
For years (and years) my favorite Barbara Kingsolver book was The Poisonwood Bible, followed by Prodigal Summer. And then I read Flight Behavior and I believe that I have a new favorite. I have enjoyed everything I’ve ever read by Kingsolver, but there is a timeliness to Flight Behavior that makes it extra special. The story features Dellarobia Turnbow, a slight-statured, red-haired farmwife in rural, western Tennessee. Dellarobia has no family outside the family she’s made with her gentle giant of a husband, Cub, and […]