Unsheltered - Barbara Kingsolver

Yet another author that I read because of my mother's recommendation (though admittedly she did win the Pulitzer, so I don't think my mom can be credited with discovering Barbara Kinsgolver!). 

Despite the fact that some of the more romanticized passages about the house and the locations of the novel bored me a bit, this was a truly pleasant read. 

Surprisingly, even the 19th century part of the plot kept me entertained, and brought to life the scientific debate of the time in a much more persuasive way than many other works of fiction. The optimism in the face of uncertainty that transpires through much of the contemporary part of the plot was at times a bit overdone for me, but hey, I acknowledge that the author might need to sell some books (and that she might feel optimistic about life in general...). 

The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy

  

McCarthy is 4895 years old (actually 89) and it doesn't show from this book. Either he's still extremely sharp, or he has a heck of a ghost-writer...

The Passenger is a beautiful story that makes the American South fascinating (unlike, well, Faulkner, as per my previous post). Bobby Western is the kind of troubled anti-hero that should be played by McConaughey, just like in Mud. And its pages on nuclear research are rather interesting for a non-scientist (in particular as I had casually read this and Giordano's Tasmania back-to-back). 

Oddly enough, at the time of reading I had also just finished advising a student on an essay about Thalidomide, so seeing Western's sister being pursued by "Thalidomide Kid" was bizarelly alienating.

Il Sistema Periodico – Primo Levi

 

One of the books I’ve read to distract myself as I was writing my Ph.D. thesis on Italian Fascism while still feeling like I was doing some academic work (I might have even thrown a couple of cheeky references to this collection of short stories for good measure).

Having only read works by Levi that had been marked by the Holocaust, it was rather refreshing to read stories about Levi’s life before WWII, finding even a trace of humour every now and then – something so sadly absent in most of his books.

I am not a fan of short stories, I never have enough time to be drawn into them, and I am by no means a scientist (like Levi was, and he titled every short story in this collection with the name of an element on the periodic table) so I think I missed a number of the book’s subtleties. Still, I liked it nonetheless.