I finished Reading...

This in the middle of last week. It took me a couple of days, it's quite thick.

It's a really good story, made me ponder quite a lot. Without spoiling the story, the whole theme of the book is about the Environment, and particularly Global Warming and the burning of fossil fuels, and the effect this will/will not have on our planet.

The cool thing about this book, is that although it's a ficticous novel, all the references and quotes by the characters are based on environmental/scientific research and academic journals, which are footnoted on each page for easy reference.

Michael also gives his own views on the issues raised in the book, at an index at the back, which is also very interesting reading.

It was a bit more meatier than your usual fiction novel, because of the issues it tried to cover, namely: how research is funded affecting the end results, however "neutral" the carriers out of the research are; how you deal with conflicting environmental information; hwo many people who talk about "conservation" are actually destroying many sites that have previously been under managed; how according to some people, you can't actually "leave nature to itself", because the environment around us has always been manipulated by one species or other...

These and many other issues are raised, which point out that the world is actually a far more complex place than we like to admit, and while scientists have made some discoveries, they're only reaching the tip of the iceberg. There are more things in climatology that scientists don't understand, than there are that they do.

I found this a really interesting read, and it gave me a lot of things to chew over. :-)