From amazon:

Apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. This sounds, perhaps, like a Dutch shopping list, but it's really a quick index to the subjects of Pollan's new book. One day, while working in his garden, the author began to wonder how his role as a sower of seeds differed from that of the bumblebee that was pollinating a nearby apple tree; his ( Read more... )

From amazon:

'Carrie Bell is the worst person in the world. Or so she would have you think. In the gripping, carefully paced debut novel of personal epiphany, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, by O. Henry Award winner Ann Packer, Carrie's very survival is dependent upon her leaving her fiancé, even after he dives into shallow water at a Memorial Day ( Read more... )

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Everyone in the world (well, everyone on Amazon, that is) seemed to love this book except for me.  Maybe I would have enjoyed the plot more if it hadn't been such a bloated, mind-numbingly slow-moving monster of a novel.  MrBish and I listened to this in the car over several road trips, and it just made me want to stab myself in the eye ( Read more... )

I couldn’t put this book down! It was a fascinating and horrifying account of a wealthy Chinese family. Adeline, whose mother died giving birth to her, was bullied, abused, or ignored by her siblings, her father, and, most of all, her stepmother. I just can’t imagine a family where children are treated so badly.

So many times, Adeline struggled to ( Read more... )

I adore travel books, and I am not sure I would have really discovered my appreciation for the genre had it not been for bookcrossing. I'm so thankful for that ( Read more... )

1.    A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck

2.    A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck

3.    Saint Joan of Arc by Jeremy Roberts

4.    Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde

5.    The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman

6.    The Call of the Wild by Jack London

7.    The Last Cato by Mildred Asensi

8.    Book Lust by Nancy Pearl

9.    I'm Just Here for the Food ( Read more... )

From Amazon:

First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.

Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of ( Read more... )

From amazon:

Twelve-year-old Artemis Fowl is the most ingenious criminal mastermind in history. With two trusty sidekicks in tow, he hatches a cunning plot to divest the fairyfolk of their pot of gold. Of course, he isn't foolish enough to believe in all that "gold at the end of the rainbow" nonsense. Rather, he knows that the only way to separate ( Read more... )

For such a little book, this one took a very long time to work through.

I'm afraid it left me with kind of a bad first impression. It seemed a little too harshly critical of all of the other branches of Christianity in the first chapter. And I can appreciate that someone going to the trouble of writing a whole book about Celtic Christianity would ( Read more... )

From Amazon:

Is the Kensington Rune Stone an authentic relic of European travel in the New World over a century before Columbus sailed on his voyages of discovery? Evidence of pre-Columbian European travel in North America has been unearthed in Vinland, Northeastern Minnesota.

I didn't read this whole book, but I did skim a lot of it. I hit all the ( Read more... )