A sweet and sad short story in the world of Salt and Storm.

Just set one of the illustrations as my desktop, so pretty

Damn intense, but you should never expect less from Applegate. There's a lot of stories going on here so it takes a while to get a handle on who matters and who doesn't and why, but at the end of the book everything is in place for the next. Full of Saturday-night-sci-fi-movie science logic and "futuristic" (the book is set in 2011) peril, it's a fun read.

Bryson does an excellent job of describing the Appalachian Trail with enough wonder and awe that I want to hike it, but enough facts and no-nonsense attitude to the whole thing that I feel comfortable sweeping those wistful thoughts under my brain-rug and forgetting all about the whole thing. His sense of humor sees him through large swathes of the trail, and I enjoyed reading about his experiences because I have a friend who is almost done hiking the whole thing as I type this. It was especially interesting because he was hiking in 1996, before cell phones and other modern conveniences (though Centralia, the town he visits in Pennsylvania, is still burning). I would recommend to hiking activists, nature enthusiasts, and avid couch potatoes.

This was a little dry, though I think that's because the audiobook narrator would read the informational charts and his pronunciation of some words was bizarre.

I love Neil deGrasse Tyson's enthusiasm for science, and this collection of essays was definitely informative.

This book felt like the first draft of a master's thesis. And not a very good one at that. Aldhouse-Green weakly tries to tie together archaeological evidence and Celtic myths, without doing a very good job of describing either. The book is touted as a great introduction for those unfamiliar with Celtic myths, and yet every increasingly aggravating section begins with a quote that makes absolutely zero sense until you have read the entire following section. It is possible this is full of good information, but I can't think of anyone I could conscientiously recommend it to.