Book Reports: one fiction, one fact

Isn't it amazing that you can read totally different kinds of books and love so many of them?  And yet at other times you feel you are in a book drought, you try many and none of them work for you, none of them grab you, none nourish you like rain does?  OK, that was a stupid sentence but I was trying out the drought metaphor. It didn't work but I am leaving it as a reminder how over-thinking about writing can get so easily out of hand. I will probably come back tomorrow and change it. 

Back to books: "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World" by Andrea Wulf.  What an extraordinary story about Humboldt, an explorer and a scientist and an amazing observer of nature. Yes, it is a biography of Humboldt but it takes you into more than just his life. If you pay attention you can see that Humboldt is one of the first environmental champions of the natural world. He travels all over the world, collects plants, studies them, brings them back to France and Germany and even shares his findings with President Thomas Jefferson. Wulf is an engaging writer and makes this story of a life lived in exploration come alive. Sometimes these kinds of books bore me after the first hundred pages but because of the way she excitedly tells about Humboldt's journeys and encounters, you just want to keep reading.  I seriously recommend this book if you like biography or nature or cool explorers or just a fine recounting of a life. It is a very good book.

A fiction story: "Perfect Little World" by Kevin Wilson. The premise is one that would normally turn me against even putting the book on my library list, but I read a few reviews and so I gave it a shot.  Glad I did. A young, single, pregnant woman gets recruited to be in a study of a new kind of "communal" group raising ten kids. Too much new age stuff could have been rife here but the story focuses on the young woman and her interaction with the other participants in the 7 year group dynamic and it's really all about learning to live in some kind of society, learning to share, learning to love, coming to terms with what family actually is.  Some of it is trite and contrived, but hey, it's fiction after all.  The first 70 pages were slow but once the "family" gets together and their small group connects, the book takes off.  I understand a lot of the criticisms of the book but I also liked the matter of fact tone of how this strange clan was really pretty normal.  Bottom line, it's just a good story that I enjoyed.  That's what it's all about, isn't it?

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