Blue sky, green trees.

I had to stop reading this while eating because the stress was giving me stomach cramps. The author's writing is so vivid, so compelling, and the story is truly horrifying. In the Prologue the author explains that he wrote the book so soon after the disaster in part to help himself process everything that took place up there, and I could really feel that come through in his writing (this is not a criticism, it is a compliment). Grappling with the choices everyone made, how people's flaws or prejudices or bravery or tenacity played a role, would absolutely require some heavy-duty processing for a survivor, and it makes for fascinating reading. Highly, highly recommend.

The author gets repetitious at certain points, and sometimes over-explains ideas. However, this wasn't a deal breaker for me, I was entertained throughout the whole book. Also, I learned a lot of new things about nature and taxonomy, which was the whole point of my reading it. Like most good non-fiction that I have read, this book made me take stock of how I live my life and think about changes that I should make. Will I actually make them? Meh. But I will certainly think about them, and the author's arguments for them, and who knows what this percolation will brew.

As a direct result of reading this book, I have made my first gumbo (I even made a roux!) and find myself constantly lusting after po'boys and crawfish beignets. Eating a king cake is now on my unofficial to-do-someday list, and I'll be paying more attention to the flavor of my New Orleans iced coffee from Blue Bottle because they use actual chicory in it (hence the name).

It wasn't just the food porn that hooked me, though. The author's obvious love for her adopted city was just as wonderful to read about, and it makes me long to feel that way about a city of my own. Perhaps I should give New Orleans a try...

Read it the first time when I was just out of college, and it blew my mind. Twenty years later I grabbed it for my trip to Naples/Pompeii, and it absolutely came alive for me once again. It's a fascinating and absorbing story, and filled with thousands of historically accurate details that make my understanding of human history all the richer. I was completely enthralled. Highly, highly recommend.

I think this book is best for people who got married after a brief dating period, since so much of the stuff they talk about is pretty basic. That being said, I guess it doesn't hurt to refresh basics once in awhile. What I enjoyed most about this book was all their personal stories - they were basically just celebrity relationship gossip, and everyone knows celeb gossip is my weakness!

I liked the first two-thirds of this book, when it revolved around a son's attempt to find out more about his deceased father's inner thoughts. Abruptly it changed into a sci-fi book with a flashback (I think) to when the family went on a trip to the moon via the father's homemade spaceship. This incident wasn't mentioned again, and could easily be lifted out of the book without causing any plot disruptions.

Overall I think the book was mediocre, and putting in a random chapter that was pure sci-fi did nothing to make things better.

This book was just too much damn work! Never knowing what order in which things are happening, collecting the clues that he sprinkles like crumbs in order to follow the plot (is there actually a plot? I still can't tell), and not finding a single character to connect with - it is all just exhausting. I'm reading this for fun during my relaxation time, Mr. Wallace (RIP), and this book is neither the former nor the latter.

I made it to page 371, and now it's time for me and this book to part ways.

At first I enjoyed this book immensely, but as the chapters proceeded I grew less and less interested. It's not that the material stopped being interesting, it's that I just stopped caring about hallucinations. Also, the writing style wore on me a bit. At first the use of snippets of case studies was nice - a new person mentioned in each paragraph! - but eventually it felt very disjointed and choppy; he didn't flesh out any of the people he talked about, they were just supporting evidence for the fact he was stating.

Fun fact: my copy of this book jumped from page 268, doppelgängers, to page 301, the D section of the bibliography. I had to check out the ebook version from the library to finish, although at the time I seriously considered not bothering.

The author could have cut out about half of the description of the swamps during Ava's search; it's like filling in a really detailed background when all the audience wants is the portrait of Mona Lisa. Also, the ending left me unfulfilled. It seems like the author just ran out of steam and cut off the story without giving a good explanation for it all, or any sense of how the characters felt about their experiences.

Countering these negatives is the main positive: the characters. I really was interested in them, and related in my own ways with each of their personal dramas. Even the times when I was like, “Come on! Get your head out of your ass!” I still understood a little why they could not, in fact, get their heads out of their asses.

Full disclosure: I had to skim a good portion of the dialogue in each of these plays in order to not give up out of boredom. I think that a focus on monologues and having very little action was the style back in ancient Greece, but it does not translate well to modern America (my attention span is nil! entertain me!). The strongest feelings I had when reading these plays was when I stepped back and considered on my own what the characters were going through; I did not find the dialogue to be all that moving.

I went a little rogue on this book and read each family's history as a unit, jumping past the other families' chapters, instead of reading it straight through in page number order. My reason for this was that by the middle of the first chapter of the Spencer story, which followed the first chapter for each of the other families, I was already a little muddled with names and stories. Skipping around the book in order to read each family's history straight through, then moving to the next family, and finishing with them all together in the epilogue, worked out just fine in terms of enjoyment, and much better in terms of following and remembering the stories.

The Wall and Spencer family stories were fascinating, and everything that I had hoped for when I picked up this book - enough said. The Gibson family story, however, I found very disappointing. Things started off very strong with Gideon Gibson and his “journey from black to white”, as it is often called in this book. It was fascinating and thought-provoking, and I wish it had stopped there. Unfortunately it continued on to Gideon Gibson's descendants, focusing primarily on Randall Lee Gibson and Hart Gibson. By this generation (Civil War era) the Gibsons are white, in that they think of themselves as totally white and everyone around them does too. Their whiteness is only questioned once, and it is treated by the Gibsons and everyone else as an absurd notion, one that is so preposterous that they barely respond. This means that readers are reading many chapters of what are essentially mini biographies of white racist Southerners - not what I signed up for. And while it's true that readers are well aware of the irony of the situation, that this racist, anti-black family would have been considered black by its own rules of "purity", Randall Lee and Hart and their children and grandchildren did not know it. The irony is lost on them, so why oh why was the vast majority of the Gibson story about them? Better to have addressed their generations in just one chapter and then moved into the generations that discovered that their family had passed from black to white.

This book was fine. I preferred the parts that dealt with the concrete experiences - animals crossing the lawn, writing while nursing a baby - rather than the philosophical parts. The section that dealt with birthing a baby, especially those moments right after giving birth where there is now a new person in the room, those were interesting and powerful. I thought of the women I know who have birthed babies and who are soon to birth babies and I let the awe of it flow over me. I thought about her point that we have epics describing famous battles, difficult battles, but no stories describing epic and difficult births; and this lack seems as true a proof of society's hatred of women as any around.

This was the wrong book to read prior to my trip to India. All of the fantastic stories that the author relates seem to end with, “these wonderful sights/monuments/environments/people have all been completely destroyed, and nothing is left except worthless ruins”. He makes Delhi seem like a wasteland, all the more disgusting and pathetic in light of its former splendor. The only positive of this book is that the stories he relates are interesting. In short, this book was a major downer.

This book changed my life. I picked it up because fiction novels were all looking the same to me, and because it was thick enough to last the long train ride from Dusseldorf to Maastricht. School textbooks were the only non-fiction I'd ever read, and they had not prepared me for the vibrant and engaging writing found in Salt. Since reading this book I have become a devoted fan of non-fiction writing, which has exposed me to a whole new world of literature.

The writing style was a bit hard to understand at first - there are no indications of who is talking, you have to rely on context and content - but once I got used to it the style really helped bring immediacy to the story. Not sure that I understood the ending, but that doesn't take away from the book in any way.