Category: Challenges

Review: Pod by Laline Paull

If you loved Paull’s The Bees, you’ll probably love this one too. It’s not an easy read, for a couple of reasons.  One is that, like The Bees, you have to really get into the mindset of the ocean creatures in this book. There’s a fair amount of unfamiliar terminology, sometimes related to the biological functioning…

Review: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I’m so glad that Moreno-Garcia’s publisher is going back and reissuing her earliest books, because both this and Certain Dark Things were fantastic. I wasn’t sure I’d like this one – the backdrop of 80’s music didn’t appeal to me much. I wasn’t expecting this book to bring me right back to what it felt like…

Review: Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert

I read this book for the Gaia Nature Reading challenge, and it was both fascinating and timely. Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sixth Extinction, writes about how science is being used to address some of our biggest environmental concerns, such as invasive species, carbon emissions, and global warming (at the same time, recognizing…

Review: Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

I picked up this book on the recommendation of Modern Mrs. Darcy, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a moving story of a young black nurse in the 1970s, about a real-life class action suit to address the coerced or forced sterilizations of young women of color in hospitals and institutions across the United States. Civil…

How to Give Up Plastic by Will McCallum: a review and my own efforts to reduce plastic waste

Plastic may not be the worst issue impacting the environment, but it does feel like one that an individual can more easily do something about. And if you’ve seen the photos and videos of marine life with bellies full of plastic trash, it’s pretty hard to look away.  I picked up McCallum’s book as part…

Review: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited was written during World War II by Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh. Brideshead reflects many aspects of his life, from experiences at Oxford, his friendships with the British aristocratic set, and his military service. He published his first novel in 1928 at the age of 25.  Also around that time he was married, then…

Reading about the Environment: The Book of Hope and Diary of a Young Naturalist

This year I signed up for a challenge to read more books about the environment (hosted by Gum Trees and Galaxies).  I haven’t read too many yet this year, but I read these two in June and July and it made sense to write about them together. Both books are pretty impossible to “review” in…