I really enjoyed the distinctive voice of this book. Quoyle (via Proulx) conveys so much with such terse little sentences. With a different narrator this might have been too sweet, but as it was, it was a quietly effective story about small towns and families and love and all that without being annoying.

Oh, oh, so good and so heartbreaking and so courage-inspiring. Dave Eggers is so good at cutting right to the heart of a situation... one of the reviews on the back said something like, this book is humane in the best, least-boring sense of the word. And I think that is true.

This book was sooo interesting! I idly picked it up figuring, "Wow, I can't believe there's a whole book about salt... I don't know anything about salt." And now? Now I know SO MUCH about salt! And so do all my friends, because the entire time I was reading it I kept inserting new salt-related factoids into conversation. My favorite? The phrase "red herring" comes from the salted red herrings that the Pilgrims used to distract the wolves that otherwise would have stalked them through the woods. Awesome. This book also had a kind of awesome subtle sense of humor. It's pretty much a whole world history using salt as a lens, focusing on trade and food history. Totally awesome.

I really enjoyed reading this! Also it made me hungry and gave me the delusion that when I go back the US I'm going to start making my own cheese. SHE MAKES IT SOUND SO EASY AND FUN, YOU GUYS. Also I admire how non-smug she and her family come across. It is really hard to talk about organic local foods without sounding smug! Hoorays.

Thoroughly enjoyable! I loved all the twisty plot threads. I loved the not-too-veiled Narnia homage. I loved the characters. I loved the "grittiness" of the magic. Hooray!

**

I re-read this after reading [b:The Magician's Land|19103097|The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)|Lev Grossman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386012841s/19103097.jpg|24330801] and I still really liked it! Also it made me more impressed with how Magician's Land picked up things from this book that I'd kind of forgotten about.

Seriously stunning how relevant about 2/3 of this book still seems. The other 1/3 has some missteps, like where she compares suburbia to Nazi concentration camps, or all the zings at gay men. BUT seriously, the rest of it... good, good stuff.

WOW. This book was like a series of slaps to the face. In a good way. It took me a while to get through it--although it's very well-written, it's heavy subject matter. Some seriously scary & shady shit that I had no idea was going on in the world, oh my goodness. Please check it out.

As a fan of contemporary Native American fiction (is it pretentious to say that??), reading this for the first time now was interesting, since it definitely paved the way for writers like Louise Erdrich. Standing on its own, now, it's maybe not as "fresh" as it was 30 years ago--I feel like I've read these kinds of "rediscovering native culture/reclamation/rebirth" themes before. (Not that that's Silko's fault; she came first, I'm reading out of order.) But still, I enjoyed her prose, and especially the way the different stories flowed together so seamlessly. Also, I loved her descriptions of the Southwest landscape--gorgeous.

Hmm. I loved Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I didn't connect as strongly to this book and I wonder if it's just because I care more about grammar than I do about manners? I think I would have liked this better if it had just been some blog entries. But to commit to reading a hardback book and getting these rants about manners (even when she's self-aware and entertaining), well, eh.