book review: the smell of rain on dust

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by MartĂ­n Prechtel

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by MartĂ­n Prechtel

What are the main ideas?

If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?

when grief is present in me, reach out to another human for support. if that isn’t possible, go to the ocean.

How would I describe the book to a friend?

this is a powerful book that explores in the most surprising and gentle of ways exactly what grief is, isn’t, and how to engage it to create more wholeness and humanness. prechtel’s language flows in a way that i have come to appreciate about indigenous writers: anchored in story and non-linear as fuck. as he says in the acknowledgements about the process he went through with his editor, this book is/was “unruly swelling paragraphs whose endless tributary sentences eventually collide into a single river of thought called a book.” once i learned how to release my conditioned way of reading and could step into his flow, i was pushed, bumped, tumbled, sped, and bounced along, deepening in the most joyful of ways, my awareness of the true nature of grief.


reminder: book review structure

words / writing / post-processing
367w / 13min / 4min