The Rivers Amazon -- Take 2

Yet another book and yet another country in my march across the southern hemisphere, which will end with Brazil.  I completed The Rivers Amazon in less overall time than I expected, but the last 50 or 60 pages were a bit of a struggle. Up to that point, though, I found it to be a quick read.

The author, a bit of an amateur botanist and explorer, set off in the late 1970s to see what he could learn about the medicinal Amazonian plants and the tribes who use them, while simultaneously hoping to recover from personal troubles which we hear no more about.  It is always the irony of those who want to see the unspoiled, though, that by their mere presence, they may have spoiled it. In fact, there is one passage near the end where the author reveals that his guide has tuberculosis and may have been the Patient Zero who killed hundreds of remote natives simply by his presence.  But what of the author himself? What illnesses may he have had, whether or not he knew about them, that he passed to the native peoples?

The adventure is reasonably interesting, but read with today's eyes, it comes off as a bit tone deaf.  I cannot dismiss, though, what fun it was to read about plants and animals we had seen while we were in the Amazon ourselves. That experience puts the whole book into context which I really enjoyed.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens -- Take 2

Ina Garden reads her own memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, and generally I like that.  In her case, I especially liked it.  She has an easy voice to listen to, and since it's familiar, it fits the story even better.  It would be strange to have an unfamiliar voice be talking so much about Ina's relationship with "my Jeffrey," wouldn't it? 

It was a quick listen, which is saying something considering it spans about 60 years, from Ina as a teenager to Ina today.  Her career is at once both astonishing and oh-so-obvious.  She describes herself as a person who will dive into a project or idea first and figure out how it's all going to work later.  With that disposition, she took a lot of risks that other more cautious folks probably would not have dared, and with skill, determination, and probably a bit of luck, things went well for her. 

If you're interested in food and cooking, possibly with a little bit of entrepreneurship thrown in, this is a good one.  And specifically I would recommend the audiobook version.

What I'm Reading Now -- Be Ready When The Luck Happens

Ina Garten's new book, Be Ready When The Luck Happens, came recommended by both Mom and K. 

I spent several weeks on the library wait-list, before the book dropped into my library app.  I had requested both the ebook and audiobook options, and the audio arrived first. Lucky for me, I had a couple of flights the following day, which was a great time to put on some headphones and get started.  I like what I've heard so far, and I am looking forward to the rest of it!

What I Read -- What You Are Looking For Is In The Library

E's latest selection for our Postal Book Club is the ever-so-charming What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama.

This slim title is a collection of five short stories that are loosely connected in the way that the stories in Love Actually are connected: there is some slight overlap in the lives of some of the characters and they occasionally even play a role that changes someone else's trajectory, but their interactions are typically neither deep nor frequent. The same is true here: a character from a previous story may pop up later in a different story, or maybe someone doesn't pop up where you expect them to, but it keeps you thinking.

The stories are perhaps a bit overly cute, but they're hopeful and forward-looking in a way that feels very necessary right now.  It was an excellent and timely selection on E's part, and one I very much enjoyed reading!

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking -- Take 2

As I said, I had been meaning to read Quiet for a very long time.  When it first came out, I took one look at the title and thought, "yep, that's me!"  But, maybe because it seemed like I probably had internalized most of the messages of the book already, on my own, I just didn't make it a priority to read it.

I'm glad that I finally got around to it.  Though I think my instinct was correct that there was nothing truly shocking in this book to me (a lifelong introvert), she did rather concisely summarize several concepts that had been much more amorphously dancing around in my head.  And she had research and data to provide support her assertions.  You, too, can probably guess the general points; regardless, its contents will help you either understand yourself or others better, so give it a go!

I marked several passages that seemed like they might be useful reminders either for me or someone I know.  And it truth, this book probably has as many annotations now as any book I've read in recent years.

In the end, a thoroughly worthwhile exercise, and a fairly quick and entertaining read, to boot. 

And it marks the second of my 2026 Reading Challenge books ticked off the list!  I'm killing it this year (so far)!

What I'm Reading Now -- The Rivers Amazon

S and I were shopping for vintage books recently and he picked up one I didn't really expect.  It's called The Rivers Amazon.  It's an autobiographical retelling of the author's -- you guessed it -- journey through the Amazon in the 1970s, which of necessity incorporates information about the flora, fauna, geography, and peoples of the region.  I don't know much about the story beyond that. 

What the bookseller noted about the book was just that it was a small-run publication so near-mint hardcover copies of it are quite hard to find.  But now we have one, and it's up next in my march of books across the southern hemisphere.

Unfinished Books -- Overwhelmed and Stuck

There are a lot of books in the world.  I always try to remind myself of that when I'm reading a book that just isn't doing it for me.  It's hard, because not finishing something I've started feels like quitting.  I'll watch even a terrible show all the way to its final, lamentable episode.  But I am trying to be better, which is to say to be willing to give up on unimportant things, because life is short.

Two books I've decided I'm not going to finish are Overwhelmed and Stuck.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time turned out to be far too focused on motherhood to be useful to me.  There were a few good points about mental pollution (all that to-do-list stuff that takes up space in your brain), time confetti (those little bits of time, a few minutes here or there, which get wasted), and how much is lost because we are, these days, only able to dedicate about five minutes at a time to any given task.  

The author's disdain for the cultural shift where somehow speed and busyness became virtues also spoke to me.  The section on work had at least some non-kid-related thoughts, mostly about the myth of multitasking and how much of a typical worker's day is spent either being interrupted or trying to get back on track after an interruption.  But once I got to the sections on love and play, I was out. 

Remember how Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity mysteriously ended up in my library ebook app?  I started reading it, and it wasn't terrible.  I'm just stopping because it wasn't one I had picked for myself.  I have loads of other stuff to read. 

And, as I said, life is short. 

Happy Birthday, E!

The Emperor's Last Island and Skeleton Coast - Take 2

I had a love-hate relationship with The Emperor's Last Island. The "hate" portion began early in the book when the author tells us that, despite writing a whole book about Saint Helena, she's never been there.  That seems like a pretty basic part of the research - introductory, even - and I couldn't figure out why someone would so proudly put their shortcomings front and center.

There was enough "love," though, to get me to overlook that and keep going. And I'm glad I did, because the bits about Napoleon's life on Saint Helena were worth the read. I learned a lot of detail that would later come back to me during the audio tours we took at The Briars or Longwood House, but frankly it was more entertaining to discover them in the book.

Eventually, the author did come back around to her personal experience visiting Saint Helena. Again, first I started on the "hate" side of the spectrum, not wanting it to tum into an autobiography. But I have to give credit where it's due, and it's due here. Ms. Blackbum does a nice job of beginning the chapters with a vignette from her own travels, but working rather quickly back to Napoleon's story and sticking there for the remainder of the chapter.

This one gets good marks for being informative and educational, even if not thrilling.  It gets bonus points because it also fits the bill to be my March 2026 Reading Challenge book: a book with a possessive noun in the title.  So, yay!  Even further ahead of schedule than I was last week!

Skeleton Coast was brought the thrills.  It's the story of the wreck of the Dunedin Star off the coast of what was then South West Africa (now Namibia) during World War II. More than that, though, it's the story of all the people who braved the environment and elements on what might still be the world's most deserted stretch of unforgiving coastline to come to the aid of the stranded strip and its passengers.

The suspense, the will-they-or-won't-they of the rescue attempts, keeps the plot moving steadily forward, even if the travails of the overland convoy which gets stuck in the sand every 20 feet or so is somewhat repetitive. 

It's a quick, entertaining, and somewhat astonishing story of the willingness of so many people to risk their own lives to save complete strangers.

What I'm Reading Now -- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

My February 2026 Reading Challenge selection, and a book I've been meaning to read for years, is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. 

I am at least 95% introvert, according to every Myers-Briggs test I have ever taken.  I acutely feel the pressure, especially professionally, to behave like an outgoing, boisterous extrovert for far more hours in a day or week than I would care to. (And, lest there be any confusion, the number of hours in any given day or week that I would care to act that way is precisely zero.)

So, I'm interested to hear what Ms. Cain has to say to or about folks like me.  Hopefully I can learn some good tricks.