Eli Bendersky's website - "Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel" by Bonnie Garmus - a research chemist finds her way in the world following multiple personal tragedies and facing extreme gender discrimination. I have some mixed feelings about this book. On one hand it's original, enternaining, well-written and thought provoking. On the other hand it's full of shallow plot twists and extreme characters tuned all the way to 11. I sort of understand some of this is done on purpose to make a point, maybe a bit like in "Atlas Shrugged"; that said, this book is here 60 years after the period it tries to cover, so I'm not sure that applies. Oh, and the dog is certainly my favorite character!
- "Network Effect" by Martha Wells - book 5 of the "Murderbot Diaries" series, this one a full-length novel. Murderbot and some of his human "clients" go on another mission, meet old friends and get close to dying - the usual plot. I found it mostly tedious, because all the original concepts were already covered in the earlier books. On the other hand, without reading 1-4, this one would probably be too confusing.
- "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" David Sheff - the story of Nintendo, how it evolved from a card-producing family business in 1889 to a video game empire in the late 20th century. A nice, imformative read, though having been written in 1993 the book shows its age. It also spends way too much time on lawsuits and not enough time on the underlying technology, IMO.
- "G-Man: J. Edgar Hooever and the Making of the American Century" by Beverly Gage - a Pulitzer-winning biography of Hoover; long and detailed. Through Hoover, this books provides many interesting insights into important events in the US during the mid 20-th century. Even though the author is clearly biased, she manages her bias well and tries to keep the writing as objective as possible overall - this is something I appreciated.
- "The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder" by David Grann - the story of a famous shipwreck of a British man-of-war in Patagonia in the mid-1700s. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was somewhat over-dramatic, but otherwise the book is interesting and enjoyable.
- "On the Banks of Plum Creek" by Laura Ingalls Wilder - the next book in the "little prairie" series; here Laura and her family live on a farm in Minnesota, the girls going to school and Pa trying to grow wheat.
- "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking" by Samin Nosrat - the author was a chef in upscale restraurants and then turned to writing about cooking. This book is not a cookbook in the usual sense - at least half of it is dedicated to explaining how cooking works. I liked the scientific explanations - while not too deep, they're really useful. The recipes in this book are all on the fancy / complicated side but there's a lot of general knowledge here that is important and can be applied in day-to-day cooking.
- "We've arrived!" by Gregory Khait - (read in Russian) another collection of short stories focued around Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union to the USA.
- "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson - a glimpse into the migration of black Americans from the Southern states to the North between WWI and the 1970s. Told through the stories of three migrants with several detours into other stories. Nice, informative book.
Re-reads:
- "The Log from the Sea of Cortez" by John Steinbeck
- "Shadows of forgotten ancestors" by Carl Sagan
- "Don Quixote" by Miguel Cervantes - found it very tedious this time, barely managed to finish.