For once, I am ahead of the game. It helped that I took some time off during Christmas to do things like read. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus was the January Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. I think that I would also be remised that if I didn’t say that this is not the normal Friday book review. I will talk later about what is happening next week.

This is not the typical type of book that we have been reading. For the last five years, it has been cookbooks and memoirs. We are not going to abandon those completely but lighten things up dispersing genre related fiction. This one you might say loosely relates to food as the main character Elizabeth Zott hosts a TV show about cooking.

This was one of the hottest books of 2023. It was the most checked out in the New York Public Library. It was the number one download in audiobooks and a New York Times bestseller. Of course I have never heard of it, but it was suggested by one of the book club members. It is safe to say that this is on the leading edge of trendy fiction last year.

There is a lot to say about this book. The plot has some things very familiar to me as well as things I know nothing about. It is set in the 1950s and 1960s about a woman who is in a man’s world in many ways. She is a chemist (something I know a little about) trying to be taken seriously in a science which I could imagine.

Elizabeth is a bit of a dichotomy. She wants to make waves in research but refuses to play the game in order for her to compete or gain respect for that matter. I am certainly not excusing wrong doing or even pretend that I totally understand the mindset of the 1950s because I wasn’t there. I was born post women’s revolution and a child of the 1980s, Women were always in the workforce, including a very few chemists.

I do have a bit of an Elizabeth streak in me too. Maybe it is a chemist thing, but sometimes you get a bit of right is right and it doesn’t matter what the consequences are. That attitude is not without its drawbacks however. I think that the trick is to deploy that tactic at the proper time. It is really hard to do and something that Elizabeth really doesn’t master either.

The major theme of the book to me is women’s rights. In my class of ten or so graduates, I think two of them were women. So, I have been watching the small tidal change of females in STEM for the last thirty years. What I am seeing is the shift of the sex demographic in higher education. The numbers are overwhelmingly female at all higher education institutions so it eventually has to trickle into the male dominated fields at some point.

I enjoyed the book. I suspect that if it had not been set in chemistry, maybe I wouldn’t have as much. It has that Mississippi Burning kind of appeal to it. The injustice is so strong that you root for the character to get vengeance. I suppose that I never gave it a thought about what life would be like for a woman in the 1950s trying to make a go of science in the academic world.

I have never read a work of fiction where chemistry played such a major role. I am also saying that I never really read Michael Creighton, so maybe that would qualify my statement a little. But, the Back to the Future/Weird Science/Honey I Shrunk the Kids type of portrayal is much more common way to put science out of reach for most people. The writers don’t understand it, so they are not going to make an attempt to make it approachable.

Heads up for next week I am starting Dante’s Devine Comedy. Dystopian fiction has kind of run it’s course for the time being. I thought that we might investigate the afterworld, not just our current one and so that is what I am picking for the next book. I have read the first third before. That is what we typically refer to as ‘Inferno’ and talks about the layers of hell and their corresponding sins. I am trying to figure out exactly how to break it down at the moment.

End Your Programming Routine: There is a good reason that this book was so popular last year. It is a fresh subject and a new approach to mystery. It reminds me a little of an alternate Julia Child plot. She shares many of the traits of Elizabeth with a little more worldly acumen. The story line kind of follows a similar arc but you can read that for yourself.