I started Lessons in Chemistry.  It's been sitting on my kindle for a while and I'd like to read it before I watch the show so I can be disappointed that the series is different from the book as a matter of course.

When the movie Wild came out, we wanted to see it but DW insisted on reading the book first. It took her forever to get around to it; after she read it, she decided that now she didn't want to see the movie.  I think I ended up watching it on my own on a plane.

 

For real.  Though I wouldn't dare say anything like that on social media or my mutual friends would tar and feather me for daring to besmirch the great Beastie Boys in any way.

 

I started Lessons in Chemistry.  It's been sitting on my kindle for a while and I'd like to read it before I watch the show so I can be disappointed that the series is different from the book as a matter of course.

Lessons in Chemistry is on my list, too, but I don't get Apple TV so I will never see the series.

I am probably going to supersede it with David Baddiel's Jews Don't Count and Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews. It's been that kind of week (month).

I borrowed Look Out for the Little Guy, by Scott Lang. Yes, Ant-Man. It’s basically a recounting of all the stuff that happened in the Marvel movies, from his perspective. It seemed like it would be enjoyable, since everything Paul Rudd does as that character I find hugely entertaining. However I don’t know if he had anything to do with the book—it sure doesn’t read like it. It’s a retelling of everything you already saw in the movies, in a sort of casual, conversational style, trying to inject humor into it but not being very successful. It’s terrible. I toughed it out for a while, but ultimately decided to give up.

MTA: I told DD about it; she said they should have had Luis write it, then it would be worth reading.

Finished A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. 

I know Tom Hanks is in the movie. If I do watch it I’ll watch alone.

Continuing my trends of frustrating and depressing reads, my library hold become available so I had to abandon Lessons in Chemistry.  I'll pick it back up eventually.  It's probably my most neglected Kindle book to date.

 

I'm reading The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore.  She also wrote Radium Girls, so I anticipate this will also be a well researched, captivating, and depressing read.  Eight chapters in and I'm already mad. lol

I have virtually nothing but depressing reads! I enjoyed Radium Girls; great story, although her writing style...meh. When I was reading that, I looked up other stuff she had written, and it was mostly romance novels.  Anyway, the one you're on now sounds like a good (i.e. horrible) story too.

I read The Wager, the latest book by David Grann, the author of Killers of the Flower Moon. The latter was outstanding, so I was looking forward to the new one. I was not disappointed. Add it to my list of harrowing tales of seafaring disasters, a recurring theme in my reading. It was a riveting story of shipwreck, mutiny, and conflicting accounts of what really happened. I’m usually pretty slow and push the Libby 3 week limit, but I flew through this in less than a week. Highly recommend.

I just finished this two days ago. My Dad loves these kind of books and sends them to me. Mostly what I got out of it was how tough people used to be. Nobody in today's world would be able to survive the hardships that they went through (although the majority of those sailors died). Also how dumb they used to be with things like scurvy and diseases. Doctors in 1740 weren't much good at anything other than sawing off limbs.

 

I read a lot of these kinds of books, so can make some recommendations, but I imagine your dad has read all the same ones.

To me these books are more than anything a testament to the human survival instinct. How many people died during some of these disasters is not nearly as shocking as the fact that any of them lived. And yes they were tough, but it's mostly sad they also didn't have many options in life. It's striking how after going through such near-death ordeals, almost every one of them got right back on a ship putting themself in the potentially the same situation.

And yeah, medical science didn't really advance too much from ancient times till relatively recently. Getting treatment was often more harmful than doing nothing. A good book about John Hunter, who revolutionized things by applying more scientific methods to surgical techniques, is The Knife Man by Wendy Moore.