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Cooking, Sexism, Rowing, and Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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I think Lessons in Chemistry had been recommended to me no less than 10 times, by different people, before I decided to give it a try. I don’t know why I delayed reading it, probably mostly because I was trying to complete my 2023 reading challenge and couldn’t figure out how to make this fit. But this year’s challenge required a book set 24 years before I was born, and Lessons in Chemistry fit the bill! I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Based on […]

Let Her Cook

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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This is my first ever audiobook experience. I decided to take the plunge because Spotify Premium is now offering 15 hours of listening per month as part of a membership. I am also currently reading a physical book that will probably take me close to a month (hint: Russian names) so I decided to shift some of my copious podcast listening time to audiobooks. So why was Lessons in Chemistry my first “read” in audio format? Well, I’ve always been a little resistant to listening […]

a thousand apologies and what feels like a thousand reviews (through November 2023)

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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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The Starting Over Game by girl_with_kaleidoscope_eyes

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Edinburg by Alexander Chee CBR15: Sex True fact, when someone British asked me what I was reading I pronounced this “Edin-BERG” and to their credit they didn’t laugh but instead asked, with some horrified sincerity, if that’s how Americans say it. It’s not! At least, not on purpose. It’s just how can the English language claim to have been invented in a country that seems to not have grasped even a shred of understanding of how the various letters in it work? I digress. This is […]

“Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books recommended by friends Elizabeth Zott is a chemist struggling to be taken seriously by her male colleagues at a lab in the 1960s. She never completed her degree because her academic advisor raped her, but her lack of degree in no way means she’s not intelligent. Despite her brilliant mind, her male co-workers either treat her as nothing more than a lab assistant or steal her research and present it as their own. The one exception to this is Calvin Evans, […]

“Sometimes I think,” she said slowly, “that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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CBR Bingo – On the Air This book came highly recommended by a few people who have similar reading sensibilities as me, so I went into it presuming I would like it, and I was not wrong. However, bit of a quick disclaimer: I was shaken up at the start of the book because in this instance, judging the book by its cover will leave you on uneven footing as you get your book legs (I’m workshopping it a la “sea legs.” You heard it […]

Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

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First off let me say that everything this book asserts about rowers is true. We’re a weird little bunch of obsessives who think our terrible hobby, which we hate, is the best thing on earth. I even heard about it from another rower: my mom, because rowers getting together can only talk about rowing. When some tiny piece of our insular world breaks out into the wider one, it spreads like an old fashioned “send this to ten friends or die” chain email. I felt […]



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