Celia has decided to get her own bespoke scent created for her (seemingly for the purpose of writing a book about it, rather than actually wanting this just for herself?). She visits someone that helps her pick out the top, middle, and base notes of her scent, including a colour consultation as colour and scent play roles together. After this, Celia sets out to find the origins of each of ingredient.
While staring this book, I wonder how Celia can keep me interested in her travels to learn about 11 different ingredients. It was interesting to learn about how these items are turned in to scents, and in some instances the massive volume of ingredient that is required to make a small volume of oil for scent. It makes you wonder how the finances work. While perfumes are not cheap, they aren't super expensive either compared to how much volume some of the ingredients require.
It's also hard to read a book on scent when you can't smell everything she's talking about. I don't recognize some of those ingredients and it would have been great to know what they smell like and what her final scent smells like. Celia tried describing what those smells were like, but many of them were unique to her like the smell of her childhood in some specific place. How can I associate with that? In general, that was my problem with this book. I couldn't connect with anything because I didn't know what the smells were and couldn't connect with her or her descriptions.
First Line: "There are only a handful of bespoke perfumers in London, and Anastasia Brozler, the founder of Creative Perfumers, is one of them."
Rating:
(3/5)
When Franz is dumped by his fiancee a few days before the wedding, he is shocked. The entire thing has been paid for, including the honeymoon. Franz surrounds himself with friends and family on the wedding day and then convinces his brother to take his honeymoon with him. The two travel to Central America and enjoy their time. Why not extend it? All Franz can think about is his ex-fiancee. He needs to break free and what better way than to travel the world.
Since he was a kid, John Pollack has been fascinated with boats and has been saving up corks to build his own cork boat. As an adult, working as a speech writer on capitol hill, John still can't shake the dream. He sends out some emails to friends asking for calculations on how many corks would be needed and to see if anyone would be available to help. A team comes together and eventually they determine they need over 150,000 corks. Collecting from businesses and friends, they find a place to store everything and then start determining how to build the thing.
Maarten Troost doesn't feel like he fits in his normal American job, so when his fiancee is asked to work at a non-profit at the end of the world, Troost follows. The country is Kiribati, located in the central Pacific Ocean, requiring many flights to get there. The island has history, as Japanese and American fought on the island during WWII. Tarawa is also an incredibly populated city, despite being in such a small area. Troost describes with humour his two year adventure on Kiribati, including run-ins with people pooping in the sea water he was swimming in, a dry spell with no beer, and how the locals only seem to listen to the Macarena.
Joyce Brooks is a well-travelled tour guide/travel leader from Texas. She worked for a bank, coming up with national and international trips for bank customers to go on with her. Usually she would take her husband though sometimes she travelled by herself, with a group of at least more than 20 other people, typically senior citizens. 
This is the story of a father and son who travel over 12,000 miles by canoe. They leave from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Progressing down the Red River and on eventually to the Mississippi river down to New Orleans, along the entire Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean to Trinidad, up the Orinoco River and finally down the Amazon to Belem. The story is told in diary style by the father.
Krakauer has summited some of the highest peaks in the world. He has a lot of stories of heroism and tragedy. This book is a compilation of articles that Krakauer has written about his experiences (mostly in Alaska) and the tales of others in the climbing world. Not all of these pieces are incredibly interesting, however there were two that I really enjoyed.