I have decided to do these together because I feel the same way about them both. I also don’t want to make two posts about these cause I don’t think y’all will like these very much lol (sorry if you loves these)

What if I said that I don’t remember too much about either of these books? I am sure you would believe me.

Funny enough, I did really enjoy them (one more than the other but its is still true) and would totally recommend people read them. There was a lot in these that made me think and gave me a new understanding about the world we live in.

Basically though, this is me telling you, this may be short. Although I will still try and give you my best summary and thoughts I have.

(To my defense, I read this at the beginning of November so a lot has happened since then and I have had a lot of thoughts that have pushed this out of my head)

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The World in A Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

I didn’t realize how much sand we used and how we utilized it. I really only knew that we used it for glass but I didn’t think about the fact we use it for concrete.

It also made me think about how everything around us is made out of concrete.

This book explains where the drive to use concrete in all our infrastructure comes from (the catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco) and big cements lobbying to get contractors and architects to make the switch.

There is also a lot of discussion about the business of mining sand and the illegal ways people go about it as we are starting to run out. There are people killed when they speak out about it in other countries and we are loosing beaches and land to it.

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A History of the World in 6 Glasses

In this book you are brought through all of mankind as they drink different beverages. We start at the beginning with beer, then wine, spirites, coffee and tea, and last coca-cola.

He goes into detail about how these came into relevance and the history surrounding it. Things I remember specifically is that coffee was at first only for men. The coffee houses were only open to men and there would be a lot of political discussions that would happen during those times. By the time tea came into popularity, coffee houses were less common and more open to allowing women in but tea shops were always free to everyone (that was white at least because of racism) could come in and enjoy a cup of tea.

I also was interested to learn that, yeah we had the Boston Tea Party at the beginning of the Revolutionary war. But what we didn’t learn is school is that a big part of the taxes that people were pissed that there were specifically getting taxed on what we used to make liquor.

Then the talking about the history of Coca-Cola, obviously he talked about the well known fact that it originally was a medicine before becoming one of the worlds most popular drink. He also went into detail about the fight they had to keep relevant when Pepsi started to become popular.

I kinda struggled through this book. I did learn a lot but I had to force myself to sit down and listen to it. It might be because I had read a ton of non-fiction books at a time and had information overload at this point.

I took a short break from non-fiction to read a few horrendous romance books that I will talk about (or have already talked about lol because I am posting these out of order based on which ones were easier to talk about/I enjoyed more)

Buy (sorry this was so boring)