The reading has been slim, the blog-writing has been slim, the British Bake-Off and Victorian Farm watching have been high, the workload has been picking up, and the travel has been improving as well. Fully vaccinated meant I could have lunch with my friend Betty in San Francisco, and a weekend with my Aunt and Uncle and cousin in the Santa Rosa area, whom I've been waiting about a year to see since we were first supposed to visit them in April of 2020.
So in the last couple months I did a typical summer load of reading, that is: two books. I tried for four. But didn't quite make it: one was a non-winner, and the other I wasn't able to get through before it was due.
The two books I did manage to get finished were doozies, and both took me more than a month (one of them took about 4) to finish.
The first was Hidden Figures, the book that inspired the movie. I went into it thinking that the book would simply be the same story as the movie. What I discovered within the first chapter of the book was that this was a proper historical treatise on about a dozen different women's stories of the hundreds of Black men and women that worked for NASA and its predecessor in the 40s through 80s+. The movie covered a very small period and just a few key women, but the book detailed an entire culture of mathematically-minded women of color who encouraged and scouted each other for this golden opportunity in a day when segregation and sexism kept many women from excelling in maths-based careers. Kudos to the author who recognized that these stories she grew up with were missing from our general popular history in the U.S., especially with regards to the space race, and managed to get this epic book published (and then get a movie deal after that!).
The second book I finished (the one that took the better part of 4 months) was The Overstory. I had a recommendation from a coworker on a fire assignment to read it, and then I saw it in the list of recommended/impactful books from 2020 for a theater group that I've been participating in virtually since last summer. So I went ahead and got it on ebook - only to find out that when I'd read all the way to the last three chapters I had only read the first quarter of the book... it took 6 more weeks to get through the 3rd-to-last chapter, at the end of which something terrible happened and I decided I didn't want to read it anymore. However, I was still curious what happened next, so I got it on audio for what was still almost another 10 hours of listening. All said and done - I don't think I recommend the book. But it was very interesting in the things it made you think about trees. But I don't know that it was worth the slog.
And that's it for now. Jack and I went to the coast this weekend and I'm taking a week off of work before the season gets really busy - whatever that's going to look like in this weird halfways normal year.
