What I have been reading...(Summer Reading Program Edition!)

The summer reading program for adults is happening at my local public library so we are going for quantity and not book reviewing so maybe we can win a prize! So unless there is a book that is AMAZING only snippet reviews until it's over :)

The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science is Still a Boys Club by Eileen Pollack. So this woman busted her ass her whole life and got into Yale (in the 70s) for Physics. She was one of the very few women in the "hard science" departments and she really struggled in part to the systematic sexism that she came up against. There were some definitely good and valid points in this book but I couldn't get over the fact that when she was at Yale and there were so few women she looked at all of them as competition like, she really wanted to be the first woman to graduate from Yale with a BS in Physics. And the whole time I'm sitting here thinking "oh, you feel isolated and stupid and unprepared and so damn lonely I bet those girls feel that way too. So maybe get off of your own pedestal of eliteness and go talk to those girls and make yourself a support system and help support them too!". It REALLY irritated me.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick. I picked up this book because the author was one of the talking heads on a documentary series that I was watching about science fiction movies and I thought it sounded interesting. It was interesting but there was also a lot of physics in it. I learned a lot though! A few quick facts: 

-Mark Twain had a telephone installed in it's house the very year it was patented (maybe the first in a private residence?) and two years before he got a typewriter!

-There is a section about Daylight Savings and Time Zones - did you know that when the Nazis invaded France they had everyone reset their clocks to the same time as Berlin? Megalomaniac power move.

-Isaac Asimov invented the word "robotics". (Was also a bit of a toolbag, wrote great stories though)

-Ursula LeGuin went to the same school as Philip K Dick

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn. This is indeed a novel of letters. It's told in letters back and forth between people. And it's also about a town that's whole life changes once letters start falling off of a statue. That town council (who be cray) tell the residents that once a letter falls off it can never be used again. Then in the letter between people there are no mentions of that letter ever again. Like when the "D" falls off and they have to rename all of the letters of the week. I thought this book might be a little gimmicky but I was intrigued by the premise. I was really pleased when I found it to be a super compelling book about a city gone mad.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong. Microbes are EVERYWHERE. In your eyelashes, on your hands, on your pets in your car. These tiny microscopic organisms influence your life and health in more ways than you possibly know. I am not a person with a lot of scientific background but have worked at a medical school with neuroscience researchers for the last 5(!) years and have grown to really appreciate interesting science writing, so I picked this book up. I was surprised (but shouldn't have been) by all the way that neuroscience factored into this book. The brain and your gut (the gut microbiome, as the cool kids call it) are linked closely, often in ways we don't understand. Someday maybe I'll tell you how I ended up with the job of "secondary poop wrangler" for a study that involves that exactly.

Two real interesting things from this book - did you know that your emotional state effects your rate of digestion? We know this in part because there was a guy in the 1800s that got shot in the stomach and it never healed right so a doctor could physically watch his stomach acid digest food. Sometimes even dangling food through the hole and pulling it in and out. (It was a big hole). Secondly, there was a very interesting study about pregnant mice - if a pregnant mouse was injected with an infection (measles, influenza - something microbial) the baby mouse would develop just fine but then at adolescence would start developing symptoms that to scientists look like schizophrenia and autism in humans. One of my coworkers is getting his PhD and is studying schizophrenia in developing brains and does a very similar study to try to figure out if we can do anything to prevent or predict if someone will get schizophrenia. Science ya'll. We are doing big things when we can go to work. Damn pandemic.