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For something I picked off a library shelf at random, this was a really interesting read for me. I like to research and come up with potential future vacation itineraries a lot, so travel is something I often think about (more than I actually do it...), but never really considered my impact on the places I've visited.

There are tons of references to specific organizations and companies engaged in sustainable practices in this book that I'd never heard of. So many, that I found myself stopping damn near every other page to whip out my phone and save a link to look at later. Thankfully they're all saved in one place at dummies.com/go/sustainabletravelfd

Some sections were a bit repetitive and there was one paragraph that appeared in two separate chapters almost verbatim, but that makes sense when remembering the disclaimer at the front that the author was expecting a reader to just flip around and read the parts that seemed interesting to them. I guess a reader going through the whole thing sequentially (like I did) wasn't how the author expected most people to engage with this book, but I didn't find anything detrimental about this.

Definitely a surprisingly influential book that is going to have an affect on my future bucket list logistical planning!

This book felt twice as long as it actually was.

A lot of different themes are being attempted here. We got: anti-consumerism, exploitation of oversea labor, first- and second-generation immigrant experiences, complicated mother-daughter relationships, religious fervor, and the collapse of society just to name a few. And while they were set up, somehow each one felt abandoned? I feel like I was watching a juggler constantly throwing balls up in the air with no intent to attempt to catch them.

Our protagonist come across as extremely passive, like a buoy just gently bobbing about as the mildest of ripples (in the form of external events) roll past her. I struggle to point to any development she exhibited by the end of the book (which may have been the intent, but I wish her resistance to change would've been more explicitly pointed out if that were the case).

This was a book club read, and one of those "we all hated this, right?!" kind of discussions, and somehow I enjoyed it the most and I'm still only giving it two stars.

Books like this are why I'm always apprehensive to quit reading one if I'm not enjoying it. After a middle that sagged a little too much for my liking, the final act and climax 100% reeled me back in and made up for it, and I'm glad I powered through.

It's odd to think that a "Western" doesn't have to be set in the United States, but this really does check all the other boxes aside from the geographic location. Latter half of the 19th century, people eking out a tough living on a homestead in an unforgiving landscape, conflicts between white settlers and the native populations; scrub away the details and the premise could easily pass for a Wild West story, but this is a uniquely Australian tale at its core.

Two teenage brothers witness something they shouldn't have, get coerced into a lie, and their lives are functionally destroyed as a result of that moment of weakness but it takes so long for both them and you as the reader to understand exactly how. A reluctant revenge story becomes a genuine one, but even after it's over it doesn't feel like it was worth it. Not because of any failing on the author's part, but because the wrong that these two boys experienced could never truly be righted.

This is a violent book that pulls no punches, and there's a particularly disturbing massacre that happens in the middle that is plot relevant and not just thrown in for shock value. We also have what amount to two separate antagonists, each with their own agendas and not always aligned with each other, one of whom was an intense yet fascinating guy that had me on edge every time he showed up. And while I'm not usually a fan of coming-of-age novels, but this was not a gentle and gradual ascension into adulthood; this was a shotgun blast to the chest of trauma and these boys were forced to grow up overnight.

If you want yet another example of how toxic masculinity is such a fucking prison to yourself and everyone around you but also want the occasional kangaroo in the background, give this one a try.

We've seen this story before. Ex-criminal gets out of the life and manages to go legit, but they eventually find themselves in a financial pinch. They hear the siren call of their old ways pulling them back for ~one more job~, but then things spiral out of control. It's a good story, so that's why it's been done before and why we'll see it again.

What sets this one apart for me personally is a satisfyingly interesting protagonist. Beauregard ("Bug" to his friends) is known for being a competent getaway driver, but he's a lot more than that. He is a meticulous planner who layers contingencies upon contingencies and has borderline eidetic memory which helps him come up with airtight schemes, so long as everyone sticks to the plan. Unfortunately, not everyone else can.

This is a tense and violent book, reminiscent of Pulp Fiction with regional crime lords sending hitmen and whatnot after each other. There are some characters that (I felt) were very clearly going to have bad things happen to them and that there was no way they were going to make it to the end of a story like this unscathed, but I still managed to be surprised by the inevitable.

Pick this one up if you're in the mood for a darker crime thriller where the cops are barely present and it's more criminal vs. criminal.

When you think about it, "the scientific community" is a really nebulous concept, and it is odd that it exists at all considering it ignores national boundaries, doesn't share a common language or faith, and doesn't have an overall "ruler" for lack of a better term. There's no "Pope" of science, and everyone who engages in that community are simultaneously in cooperation with each other peer-reviewing work and replicating others' experiments, but also in competition with each other over scarce grants and research contracts.

This short book did a good job giving an overview of the history of how scientists deal with each other. It felt a touch euro-centric, but when your starting point is in the 18th century when colonial powers were kinda at their height and already disproportionately important on the world stage maybe that's unavoidable. Also wish it had attempted to peek into the near future a bit, and the possible outcomes of the replication crisis, but maybe it wanted to stay in a narrower lane than I did.