A brief summary of what I’m currently reading or have recently finished, why I read it, and whether I’d recommend it. Although really, it’d have to be truly terrible for me to bother writing about a book I wouldn’t recommend……
Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (Ruth Lewin Sime) – Had I known, at the time I requested this book via interlibrary loan, just how much physics it would actually contain, I may have reconsidered, or at least hesitated for several seconds before pushing Submit. But I didn’t know, and I’m likely the better for it. Meitner was an Austrian Jew who worked in Berlin during the early 20th-century, right up until she had to secretly flee to Sweden in 1938. As the title suggests, physics was basically her life, and she was heavily involved in the discovery of nuclear fission. Despite her contributions, her name was left out of the majority of the published articles and journals on the topic since she was both female and Jewish, and she’s still not as well-known as she probably should be. I came across her name in the bibliography of a historical fiction novel a friend gave me, and looked for a biography in an attempt to determine how much of that novel was actually historical (very little, as it turned out). If you choose to read this one, you might want to brush up on the periodic table, particularly the element abbreviations. A little more knowledge there would have made this book significantly more readable.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown) – There are some books that I’m not sure anyone actually enjoys reading, and yet they should be read anyway. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is one such book. It’s history written by the victims rather than the victors, recounting the treatment of Native Americans as they were pushed into smaller and smaller parcels of land, cut off from their way of life and the land that sustained them. Honestly, it’s appalling. Page after page, chapter after chapter, and tribe after tribe. I reached the end of a chapter with a sense of relief that it was finally over, only for the same story to repeat again in the next chapter in a different geographic region and with a different tribe. This is not a happy book, but I think it’s important to see the atrocities and not look away, to bear witness to them in however small a way.
Schindler’s Legacy (Elinor J. Brecher) – Schindler’s List, the historical fiction novel by Thomas Keneally, tends to get all the attention, at least in part because it was turned into a movie. As a result, Oskar Schindler is rather well-known – his name at least commands a measure of recognition, if not familiarity – and the individuals whose lives he affected are lesser known. Schindler’s Legacy relates the true stories of the List survivors and their lives after the war, both the good and the bad. These biographical sketches demonstrate both resiliency in the face of trauma, and also the lifelong effects. May the names of these survivors become more familiar to us than the malefactors.
Slightly Foxed Quarterly (Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood, editors) – Not everyone who enjoys reading also enjoys reading about books, and if you’re one of those individuals who doesn’t, feel free to skip this. (You should always feel free to skip, but this one carries extra freedom to ignore.) Slightly Foxed is a British quarterly publication of essays about books; both the quarterly and also the monthly podcast of the same name are a great source of obscure book recommendations. This should perhaps come with a warning label, for the benefit of your budget and bank account; many of their recommendations are hard to find, even in other library systems.
So there you have it: 4 books I’m reading right now or have recently finished. If you’ve read any of these (or decide to after reading this post), drop me a note and let me know what you thought of them! And let me know what you’re reading right now too.