Book 9: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A book club book! And one that read with some trepidation, because I don't always vibe with a short novel that's more about mood and language than it is about plot, and I am more lukewarm on stories set in space than others. 

However! I really, really loved this book. The prose is certainly stylized, but I think the structure and format of the novel (24 hours on a space station that's rotating around Earth 16 times in that timeframe) made it all work for me. There are six astronauts up there, from a variety of backgrounds - two from Russia and then one each from Italy, the UK, the U.S. and Japan - and the book tells the story of what they go through on a typical day up there, and what they see of the world below. It's not a lot of plot, but it isn't just descriptions of the glory and wonder of the planet below, and even that stuff made me so happy. I just had a great time reading this book, and in the end that's worth a lot!

Grade: A 

Book 10: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

This book has been on my radar since it was published in 2019, but I only just now decided I was in the right headspace to read a book about all of the ways that global warming will destroy the fragile equilibrium that enables humans to survive on our planet. I don't know that I actually was in the right headspace for that, frankly, but one of the other interesting elements of reading this book now is that all of the science is at least 5 years out of date. And when it comes to climate science and, more importantly to the thesis of this book, climate projections of how warm it will get by when and even more crucially, what that will have done to various systems, none of the predictions contained in this book had the presumably desired impact of shocking me out of complacency. If anything the timeframes presented in the book feel almost naïve from here, to say nothing of the chapter on the impact a warmer planet has on the likelihood of future pandemics. I don't say any of this because I'm a climate doomer, or think there's nothing that can be done, or even that we're on exactly the same bad trajectory we were five years ago. I just think this book was actually not meant for me, at this time. Also, the book was written during the middle of the Trump presidency, and the despair present from that in the writing did remind me of how that felt to live under every day, and I would really like to not return to that. 

Grade: C

Book 26: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

A book about the longterm impacts of trauma on people's brains and bodies was certainly an interesting thing to read at the height of the pandemic in New York City. It's a very good book, with a lot of fascinating insight into the development of the fields of trauma psychology and psychiatry, but it did leave me thinking 'oh wow okay so there's just going to be so much trauma to deal with on the other side of this, great.'

I found this book interesting both in terms of how it made me look at my own life and responses to trauma, but also in thinking about this area of study and work and how underserved it is, and whether it's an area I would want to work. This has been something I've tossed around for many years at this point, with the same issues always stopping me: it would take a ton of work and effort and money, and the system is so broken. One of the most affecting aspects of this book was the description of how hard it is to get anything done because of politics and policy surrounding mental health (not just in the U.S., but in particular here), and it feels like both an impossible thing to dedicate your life to, and also something that's actually worth doing so. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book, and also found it deeply affecting, on multiple levels.

Grade: A

Book 16: The Body by Bill Bryson

This is another one of Bryson's broad book of information, this time about the human body, from both a scientific and historical point of view. He is a very strong history of science writer, exploring how and when we learned various scientific information, and is able to contextualize that information in interesting and often funny ways.

I have to say that I'm very glad I read this book in February, before the world exploded, because reading about how fragile and frankly insane our bodies are and how little keeps them working properly was at time anxiety-producing when I wasn't living through a global pandemic, and well. We all know what happened next. But it was an entertaining read, and a good companion book to the Sawbones podcast, which does much the same thing only with medical history rather than simply anatomical history.

Grade: A 

Book 42: Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

The subtitle of this book is "The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle," which gives the reader a pretty good sense of what kind of book it is. But unlike a lot of more classic self-help books, it actually acknowledges and references the systemic oppression and gendered expectations that so often lead to burnout in women (and non-binary people who are viewed by others as women). I read a lot of self-help in my early twenties, and stopped reading it in my late twenties when they didn't seem to make a difference other than to make me feel bad for failing in ways I hadn't even known I was before reading a book. But most self-help starts from the place of Personal Responsibility, the idea that if we just own our own emotions and reactions and so forth, we can overcome anything, no matter what the external obstacles may be. And that's a nice idea, kind of, in a world where we're not in control of the soup of misogyny and racism and homophobia and classism we live in and the way that all of those biases are built into our institutions and expectations of our personal relationships. But it's also gaslighting, and either incredibly naive or extremely manipulative to assert that we shouldn't be impacted by any of that. I found it extraordinarily affirming to have those issues actually addressed as real, and the chapters on the misogyny of burnout and where body image fits into that were both really affecting.

This book kind of splits the difference between being a book that examines the cultural conditions that allow for burnout, and a how-to guide for ways of processing our stress, identifying stressors we can control and ones we can't and formulating an approach to each, and doing the self-care that enables us to heal and live our purpose, not the catchphrase. I found it both really confronting and intuitive, and for once it was written by authors who felt like women I could know (or would want to know). There's a lot that rang true for me in terms of when I've felt the most satisfaction and fulfilled, and what I was doing for myself during those times, and it was also challenging in terms of pointing out that changing certain aspects of my life is long overdue, in both big ways and small. It also made me want to read two of the other books on my current list, Down Girl and Health at Every Size, both of which feel frightening to me for a variety of reasons. This year I've opened myself up to adding additional books to my reading list when I come across books that sound compelling, because I don't view reading as a chore but rather something I chose to do for a variety of reasons. And one of the results is how so many of the books I've read this year have been in communications with each other. This book in some ways is the practical version of How to Do Nothing, but I think it's more that they're approaching the same question of how to live a meaningful life from two very different angles. I recommend them both.

Grade: A 

Book 79: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

One of the challenging aspects of attempting to read a certain number of books per week is that some books are obviously going to take much more time than that. This book is one of them. 

I've read a number of other books by Bryson; his books on travel are delightful and well-known for a reason, and I really enjoyed his short biography on Shakespeare, as well. This book is ambitious on a whole other level. It's a book that manages to be both an overview of a wide number of scientific concepts and also the history of science: how we know what we do (and what we don't know). The focus on how we discovered and expanded upon (and also were proven completely wrong) scientific knowledge gives a context to many scientific principles that I hadn't thought about since I was in high school. His writing is crisp and clear and entertaining, and he is extremely good at telling the story rather than listing dry facts. 

The book was unsurprisingly a combination of a review of things I had once known and a completely new exploration of other topics that I had never learned (or had forgotten completely). Beyond the big names like Newton and Darwin and Einstein, I was fairly unfamiliar with the biographies of many of the scientists who were so influential. One aspect about those biographies that I loved was the revelation of how much we know as a result of longstanding feuds between individuals who were driven by little more than spite. On the other hand, I found myself newly enraged at the constant dismissal of women scientists by their peers and the institutions and organizations of their disciplines for centuries. Bryson certainly doesn't skip over this reality, but it made me want to read a book just like this one that only focused on the contributions of women to scientific discovery that have been neglected and ignored and deliberately hidden for far too long. 

I bought this book almost ten years ago while I was in Germany, but somehow never got around to reading it until now. I'm glad I finally did. 

Grade: A