If you're looking for a history of salt; neatly packaged, easy to follow for an uninitated reader, and full of fun facts about salt to share at dinner parties; this is not the book for you. Kurlansky's writing is dense and dry. The only real difference between this book and a book intended for historians to read is the somewhat lacking bibliography and lack of footnotes. There is no overarching narrative line to link diverse chapters covering everything salt from cultures all over the world, making the book feel choppy and difficult to keep up with. But despite its organizational flaws, you can't deny Kurlansky did his research. This book is overflowing with fascinating information, if you have the endurance to get through the book. When the book ends, you get the sense that Kurlansky simply had to limit the length of his book and decide to end it there. It certainly wasn't because he ran out of stuff to talk about. I learned so much by reading this book and it certainly is exactly what the title says: A World History. I loved bouncing around different cultures, different time periods, and learning about how salt was used. I especially loved the recipes that were included, they were so interesting to read about. While I did thoroughly enjoy the content of the book, I would've loved to read more about the biological importance of salt to life and understand chemically how the different types of salt were best suited for their individual purposes. I have a Biochemistry background though, so I acknowledge this information might not have been as much of a glaring omission to others. Still a chapter on the subject would've been really interesting!

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a book about so many things - video games, partnership, trauma, creativity, family - but for me, it was really a story about growing up. We follow Sam and Sadie, unlikely friends bonded by a shared love of video games, from childhood into adulthood and all the ways their relationship bends, twists, and grows as they age. There is a beautiful simplicity to their friendship in their younger years. They both love video games and their time together revolves around them. As children, they play video games for hours together in the hospital as Sam recuperates. As college students, video games rekindle their friendship and they decide to get in the business of making them together. Making the first game, Ichigo, together is arduous, but they work together almost effortlessly. As Sam and Sadie age though, things become more complicated. Years ticking by means that irreversible choices are made (like Sam becoming the face of their game company), words are said that cannot be taken back, and things that should be said to each other are kept to oneself. Major life events like deaths, surgeries, breakups, moves, new relationships all pile up too. These choices add up over the years and despite their clear love for each other and the work that they do together, Sam and Sadie's easy connection starts to become strained from the weight of all their years together. This can be difficult to watch as the reader. We want to see things work out between Sadie and Sam, for them to remain close and connected, but it becomes increasingly hard. While the book doesn't have the ending for Sadie and Sam I wished for them, it is an undeniably real one. I think once certain events happen, whether its trauma from childhood or a major loss in adulthood, destructive patterns can be locked in for life. Sadie and Sam are a perfect example of that. Still despite their pain, there is so much beauty in the book. The trio of Sadie, Sam, and Marx is a beautiful, dysfunctional mess. It was lovely to watch these characters grow up together even if they weren't always able to make the best choices for themselves. My only issue with the book, as many have already said, is Dov and Sadie's relationship. I'm particularly sensitive to this type of content and just always find it deeply uncomfortable to read. I can see the utility of their relationship in driving the plot forward and sparking Sadie's personal growth, but much of what was included was just too unsettling for me to read. I agree with other readers' in that Dov's atrocious behavior was far too justified by other characters in the book. However, I do acknowledge that the book took place in the 90s and 00s where Dov's actions probably wouldn't have been view as so reprehensible. I still think more of a middle ground could've been established. Dov is not really condemned at all by any of the characters, even Sadie's closest friends, which troubled me.

When I think of memoirs, I typically think of them as intimate re-tellings of an author's life. They may not follow the author's story from childhood all the way into adulthood and instead choose to focus on a particular important period in their life, but they typically offer a clear narrative structure that goes from beginning to end. Avashia's Another Appalachia distinguishes itself from this typical structure. The book is more of a collection of short essays about her life than it is a complete memoir that flows chronologically and coherently from her youth to the present. Still, Another Appalachia is a beautiful memoir. Avashia's writing is incredible. She is clearly someone who cherishes the people and things in her life and thinks deeply about them. Her writing has an ability to convey the emotion of an experience so completely and enable the reader to begin to experience those emotions alongside her, whether it was an experience we were familiar with or not. There were elements of her story I personally related to (outgrowing your conservative hometown, trying to reconcile receiving love from someone who expressly hates a key part of your identity, leaving the countryside and trying to settle in Boston where people can feel so different than where we were raised) but even the elements new to me struck me deeply. The image I remember most from the book is a young Avashia admiring the women in her extended network of Indolachians dance as they celebrated Navratri. The clarity and reverence with which she described each woman as she danced was so beautiful, it made me emotional reading it. I really enjoyed this book and truly loved each essay Avashia wrote. However, because I enjoyed them so thoroughly, I couldn't help but wish the blanks between them had been filled. I left the book yearning for the more traditional memoir format I was used to, where I was granted a more deep view into the author's story. In particular, I wanted to read more about Avashia's experience growing up queer in Appalachia. Most of Avashia's "coming out" is brushed aside as a series of first dates that went nowhere until suddenly in her early thirties she was able to let go of this idea of who her life partner should be (a southern, Indian man) and open herself up to her current partner (a white Jewish woman) Perhaps this information was just too personal to share, but I really wanted to know more about what happened in those in between years before she met her current partner and realized she could let go of what sounds like compulsory heterosexuality.

I've been joking that I read this as a part of studying for my Maine citizenship exam. I've become friends with a lot of Mainers since moving to New England and nearly all of them have mentioned being required to read this book in school growing up. After hearing about it so many times (and being lent a copy by my friend), I was curious enough to give it a shot myself. I'm an avid hiker myself who hopes to summit Katahdin myself in the coming years so the story naturally appealed to me. Just under 100 pages long, I can totally see how this book would make a great pick for kids who might be tackling their first few cover-to-cover chapter book reads! The story, told from Fendler's POV as his younger self, is easy-to-follow and very compelling. The details of his survival story are appropriately scary for a book intended for children 8-12. There's nothing too gruesome, but there's still an element of real direness to his story. We struggle along with Fendler as he deals with incessantly biting insects, sleeping on the ground with limited shelter, and having to walk miles barefoot day after day. I remember reading survival stories like this in elementary and middle school (Hatchet, The Call of the Wild) and being riveted by them. I think it's so cool that kids in Maine had an opportunity to read such a gripping story about a place that was local to them. I've heard that Fendler spent countless hours visiting schools and answering students' questions, which is really amazing too. I think it's great to kids to read about other, real-life kids going through difficult times and overcoming them. There's also a lot of lessons to be learned from Fendler's story about wilderness safety and survival, although I think he did a pretty amazing job for a 12-year-old. As for the book itself, my only critique is that I wish it had had a more detailed map that was drawn to scale! I kept flipping back to the map over and over. I think that the illustrations are really great, but I wish they were overlaid on an actual map. The distance that Fendler covers is truly incredible and I wish the map more clearly captured the enormity of his feat. I think that level of additional detail wouldn't be too inaccessible to young readers.

This book was given to me by a friend a few years back and has been sitting on my to-read shelf ever since! Although I feel like I'm several years behind the hype train with this book, I'm happy I finally read it. There was a lot about book I really enjoyed - namely, seeing nature through Kya's eyes. I loved reading about all the different creatures that inhabited the North Carolina marsh and taking the time to appreciate their beauty alongside Kya. This book made me long for hot, humid summers and lazy days lounging on the beach, watching the world go by. Owens writes beautifully about the natural world and has clearly developed a deep love and respect for it. Some readers might find the minutiae of her writing boring and repetitive, but I appreciated the detailed and poetic observations Owens offered. I also found Kya's coming-of-age story to be quite compelling. Coming-of-age stories always have universal elements of uncertainty and strife, but the wild and isolated environment in which Kya grew up made her story feel gripping in a very unique and heartbreaking way. Her experience of loneliness was especially striking. In reading more about the author, she mentioned the Where the Crawdads Sing was inspired by her experiences as a wildlife biologist living in some of the most remote parts of Africa for long periods of time. She wanted to write a book that encapsulated that feeling of isolation and capture how devastating and difficult to cope with it can be. I think Where the Crawdads Sing definitely achieves this. Where the novel starts to fall apart for me, though, is with the murder mystery / legal drama plotline. I'll admit I'm not a huge thriller / mystery fan to begin with, but I really did not enjoy this part of the book. I found it to make for a very jarring narrative. Whether with the abrupt jump cuts between Kya's adolescence to the Sheriff's bumbling investigation decades later or the chapters upon chapters of cross examinations in the courtroom that completely remove us from the marsh, where Owens' writing truly shines, I couldn't wait for that part of the book to over. I found it to be a very discordant inclusion to the novel. I was especially disturbed by it after learning about Owens' involvement with the alleged murder of a poacher in Tanzania. The parallels between the plot of the novel and Owens' real life are pretty spot-on and it makes me question why Owens included the murder mystery plot line at all.

A friend of mine, who I share of love of paddling and all things water with, lent me this book to read. It took me a while to get around to it, but I'm so glad I did. Memoirs are always one of my favorite genres to read. Loewen's memoir is incredibly intimate and personal. Written after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, "Up a Creek, with a Paddle" feels like Loewen's parting gift to his children, grandchildren, and all those who were moved by his work as a sociologist throughout his career. In its pages, Loewen is alive even though he's since passed. It seems like the best parts of him are entombed in this novel - his love of paddling, his well-researched insights parts of U.S. history we try to forget or stubbornly choose to misremember, and his wisdom, collected over nearly eight decades of life. I knew nothing about Loewen going into this novel other than that we shared a love of paddling, but after finishing the memoir, I feel saddened at his passing. His perspective on many of the challenges facing our country was so well-reasoned but also so hopeful. I wish I could read his thoughts on what's going on in the U.S. in 2025. I look forward to reading some of his other works, such as Sundown Towns and Lies My Teacher Told Me, to hopefully learn more from his writings. My only critique, as others have noted, is the abrupt shifting of focus from paddling stories to essays on antiracism or Reconstruction. I enjoyed both types of chapters, especially since they seem to encapsulate Loewen so well, but for the uninitiated reader who knew neither Loewen or his career as sociologist the juxtaposition can often seem quite harsh.

I think this may be one of my favorite books of all time! I am still working my way through all the books I've collected to read from little libraries around my neighborhood. I grabbed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I saw it because I remember some of my friends reading it as part of their English classes in school. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book (I could not put it down!), but also wish I could've read it when I was younger. I think it would've been very impactful to my younger self. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is so much more than a coming-of-age novel about a young girl, Francie Nolan, growing up in 1900s Brooklyn. It is truly a time capsule of early 1900s New York. The level of detail is incredibly immersive and absolutely enthralling. This is a novel you disappear into. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is unique as a coming-of-age story in that it doesn't focus exclusively on Francie. As readers, we get deep insights into not only her immediate family members, but also her extended relatives and even more distant relations like her neighbors and other folks in her community. This is probably my favorite aspect of the book. Francie's aunt, Sissy, might be one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. She's so earnest and kind, but also incredibly theatrical and larger-than-life in a way that is almost unthinkable for the era she lived in. I loved how the book plays with society vs. Francie's perception of complicated characters like her father or Sissy. By the estimation of many (at the time of the book's writing or even now), these characters are good-for-nothings, but through Francie's eyes, they become complicated, beautiful people who you can't help but love despite their shortcomings. I think this book has one of the best beginnings and endings of anything I have read in recent years. The ending has such beautiful parallels to the start of the story that I couldn't help but feel nostalgic and a little weepy alongside Francie as she reflected on how far she came. I also LOVED the pacing and the decision to not tell the story in a perfectly chronological order. Truly an amazing American novel. And to think it's pretty nearly autobiographical to the author's own life! I think this is definitely a book I'll come back to again and again.

I feel a bit guilty rating this book so low. It's not that the content itself was particularly unforgiveable - it was charming in its own way. It's simply that this feels like a more of a cash-grab than a full-fledged book. Wiking's book feels like a blog post come to life, complete with affiliate links to all the trendy things I'll need to hygge-ify my life this winter: wool socks, candles, and trendy Danish lamps. It all felt a bit consumerist, like I was reading a targeted advertisement. I think this type of work is much more suited to short form content like a blog, podcast, or Instagram post. There is a lot of cool stuff in this book; fun Danish recipes, ideas for a perfect cozy night-in, and neat data collected about how to be happy; but reading it cover-to-cover is like reading a series of Buzzfeed list articles in quick succession. This is a book I would suggest someone flip through at a bookstore or waiting room for some fun cozy inspo rather than actually reading cover-to-cover. I skimmed through much of this book, but the sections I actually really enjoyed were those that were enlightening to aspects of Danish culture I was unfamiliar with. I loved learning about the Danes' obsession with sweets and their different Christmas traditions. I thought the advent TV shows and the woven paper heart garlands were particularly charming.

I have a fondness for listening to Mary Roach's books on audiobooks. The chapters are the perfect length to listen to while cooking, cleaning, or running a quick errand and I always leave learning something new. While sometimes her penchant for jokes feels like a bit much, overall, I tend to enjoy the levity Roach adds to her writing. Science writing can notoriously be a bit dry, so I'm very supportive of any efforts to try and keep things interesting, especially for works intended for a general audience. I think Roach does a great job at maintaining interest without sacrificing the quality of the information she presents. This, like her other books I've read, is a well-researched work. I think my favorite chapters were the ones where she visited different research institutes across the country and met with scientists studying things like which pet food coatings are most attractive to pets and how to measure the contents of someone's farts. As someone who works in science and spends her days trying to come up with ways to answer very different questions, it was really interesting to get a behind-the-scenes look about how these experiments are actually conducted in the lab. It's logistically way more complicated (and funny) that you might think initially!

I think there is a lot of beauty in this book. Norwegian Wood is a novel where not very much happens plot-wise but it's somehow still very emotionally complex in a way that lingers with you. It's a coming of age story about Toru, a young Japanese man, trying to cope with loss, loneliness, and immense aimlessness in a society that seems to try and forcibly propel us all forward whether we know where we want to go or not. To me, Norwegian Wood is a very intimate portrait of a young man with depression. I think a lot of readers will find solace in the meaningless suffering that takes place in this book. It's awful, but it's life and this book embraces the nihilism of that with open arms and shows us that life goes on regardless. This book would've appealed to me much more when I was younger, coming-of-age myself, and going through a lot of the same things as Toru. But as an adult woman, I struggled to follow the protagonist on his journey. In particular, I couldn't get pass the way Murakami represents the sexuality of his female characters. They have a very potent sexuality, but in a way that is almost exclusively focused on pleasing the male protagonist and earning his affection. There is something dehumanizing about this that unsettles me and I left every sex scene feeling deeply uncomfortable. I struggled as well with the non-consensual / dubiously consensual acts that took place between many characters. I think readers without a sensitivity to these subjects might have an easier time immersing themselves in this story.