Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
295 pages
Published 2015
Read from August 8 to August 16
Rating: 3 out of 5
Did I really just go three months without finishing a book, again? Damn.
After making a bit of progress getting myself back into the reading habit this past winter, I find that my attention span and motivation have foundered once again. Time to gather myself up and make another go at it, from scratch.
Non-fiction often seems easier to read when I get into this book lapses. There isn't the requirement to invest emotional energy into characters and their intimate tragedies. On the other hand, the rewards from non-fiction -- especially this sort of journalistic pop natural history that provides a sweeping but shallow overview of a large topic -- are more meager than those found in a well-written novel.
I found Rain to be a straightforwardly enjoyable example of its type, though it left me unsatisfied, as such surface-level reportage tends to be. I want something more substantial than a few illustrative anecdotes; I don't feel like I really learned anything. But Rain was a nice way to break my recent reading drought, pun entirely intended.
