Two Less Specific Reviews (My Airplane and Trip Reads)

I read Flannery's The Weather Makers for the BGSU Common Reading Experience Committee, and I think it's a great book selection for the Common Read--and one that I would recommend to readers interested in the environment.

Like Field Notes by Kolbert, this book tackles the issue of global warming by providing background info, but Weather Makers is much more personable. Flannery gives his own impressions on global warming and its history AND proposes possible solutions to global warming. Kolbert's Field Notes was a saturation of scientific support for global warming, whereas Weather Makers takes scientific facts and makes them very real on a human level.

I wouldn't say this book is a page turner, but it is a lot less overwhelming to those not all that scientifically-minded than Kolbert's Field Notes and it leaves one feeling less saturated too.

I vote for it as next year's common read, and I think it's an important book to read generally speaking.

Four out of five environmentally concerned Hello Kittys.


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Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You is good, but not as special as I thought it would be. I was expecting something like the works of Sara Pitchard or Aimee Bender. My expectations weren't met. The stories were readable, but after a while I kind of got bored with the first person point of view. And the quirky-ness. I felt like the stories were projecting hipster-indie writing, but they weren't really all that new or fresh. They were different...different, I feel, for the sake of being different.

Maybe I'll back to this book some point later in my life and like it a lot more. But for right now, I felt this collection didn't live up to its hype.

3 out of 5 mildly amused Hello Kittys.

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The best bookstore we visited in Utah: BYU's University Bookstore. They had the BEST selection of contemporary poetry I have EVER seen in one location.

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More deets on the trip coming soon!