Here's what I tackled over the summer, for personal pleasure. What did you read? Required? For pleasure? Tell me about it!
2016 Summer Reading
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean. (This wins for longest title, clearly.) I really enjoyed this book, which was definitely out of my wheelhouse! About the development/discovery and the history of the elements and their organizing principles, the book was mostly a breezy read. (I had to skim lightly when it came to the parts about electron shells, 'cause I'm out when the science gets that specific.) I feel good about tackling this text: I learned a lot about the intersection of chemistry and human history.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Dark and intriguing. It was a pretty disturbing murder, but the telling wasn't unnecessarily gory. However, what sticks with me after is feeling sorry for the criminals, but also not trusting that they weren't sociopaths (psychopaths?! grr. can never remember the distinction.) The family so clearly never deserved to be victimized, but it's tough to sort out if the killers were victims in some way also.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. This was a tough read. Well, an easy read in the sense of being super readable because of its narrative style, but difficult to read and consider the sad lives of our animal food. And now I feel guilty every time I go grocery shopping...
A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman. A surprise and a delight. I so rarely read fiction, but this was a much-passed around text this summer. A friend loaned it to me, I devoured it in 3 days, returned it so it could be read by someone else. (Also ordered a copy for my dad to read and then pass along to others down in NC.) I laughed, I cried, I did both simultaneously. Hooked from the opening chapter when Ove, a 60-something curmudgeon, tries to buy a computer....hilarious!
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. A graphic novel. Funny and interesting, the way the stories were separate and yet wove together.
Also: audiobooks while my family was travelling through the Gaspe Penninsula: Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Suzanne Collin's Gregor the Overlander.
2016 Summer Reading
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean. (This wins for longest title, clearly.) I really enjoyed this book, which was definitely out of my wheelhouse! About the development/discovery and the history of the elements and their organizing principles, the book was mostly a breezy read. (I had to skim lightly when it came to the parts about electron shells, 'cause I'm out when the science gets that specific.) I feel good about tackling this text: I learned a lot about the intersection of chemistry and human history.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Dark and intriguing. It was a pretty disturbing murder, but the telling wasn't unnecessarily gory. However, what sticks with me after is feeling sorry for the criminals, but also not trusting that they weren't sociopaths (psychopaths?! grr. can never remember the distinction.) The family so clearly never deserved to be victimized, but it's tough to sort out if the killers were victims in some way also.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. This was a tough read. Well, an easy read in the sense of being super readable because of its narrative style, but difficult to read and consider the sad lives of our animal food. And now I feel guilty every time I go grocery shopping...
A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman. A surprise and a delight. I so rarely read fiction, but this was a much-passed around text this summer. A friend loaned it to me, I devoured it in 3 days, returned it so it could be read by someone else. (Also ordered a copy for my dad to read and then pass along to others down in NC.) I laughed, I cried, I did both simultaneously. Hooked from the opening chapter when Ove, a 60-something curmudgeon, tries to buy a computer....hilarious!
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. A graphic novel. Funny and interesting, the way the stories were separate and yet wove together.
Also: audiobooks while my family was travelling through the Gaspe Penninsula: Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Suzanne Collin's Gregor the Overlander.
2016 Spring / end of year
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This was a romp! I thoroughly enjoyed this, and learned much in the process: about racism, about the medical field, abut reporting. It's amazing and disheartening to read the quote from Henrietta's daughter that their family can't even afford health care, and then read and recognize how much all the rest of us have reaped from the tissue taken without patient permission from her mother: vaccines, gene mapping and therapies, and all kinds of research.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This was a romp! I thoroughly enjoyed this, and learned much in the process: about racism, about the medical field, abut reporting. It's amazing and disheartening to read the quote from Henrietta's daughter that their family can't even afford health care, and then read and recognize how much all the rest of us have reaped from the tissue taken without patient permission from her mother: vaccines, gene mapping and therapies, and all kinds of research.