I’ve heard of Jon Krakauer before, due to Into the Wild, which he wrote about Christopher Johnson McCandless’s death in the wilds of Alaska. I knew Krakauer had a reputation for excellent writing, but I’ve never read anything of his before. After finishing Into Thin Air, I plan to find more of his work — this book was fantastic. “It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of […]
There’s gold in that there swamp!
Picked this one up on a whim from Half Price Books, and it turned out to be a pretty good read. The Outcasts is set in Texas in the 1800s, and I really enjoyed the aspects involving across the state (I live in Dallas, so it was fun recognizing some of the landscape). “Dr. Tom had said that Texas was the only place he had ever found that, when it killed you, it didn’t forget about you.” The Outcasts focuses on two sets of characters. Lucinda works […]
Apparently, there are four of these books now?
I remember reading Da Vinci Code when it first came out, and of course I’ve seen the movie a few times. I liked it, and I’m pretty sure I liked Angels & Demons, though I couldn’t tell you what it was about…I didn’t know a third and fourth Robert Langdon book had even come out until I stumbled across Inferno while looking for a e-audiobook to download from the library. It’s pretty formulaic, but interesting enough for the treadmill at least. “Dante’s poem, Langdon was now reminded, was not […]
This John Snow knows a thing or two
So I rented this ebook from our library last night, and read the whole thing in one sitting. I didn’t exactly realize that it was aimed at young adult readers — I just saw that it referenced the cholera outbreak on Broad Street in 1854, which I had just read a great book about called The Ghost Map, which focused on Dr. John Snow and his investigation of the Broad Street water pump (the author of The Great Trouble actually mentions at the end of her book […]