Steve’s Comments (group member since Jan 01, 2019)

Steve’s comments from the The Reading Challenge Group group.

For this month’ challenge, I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. For a good non-fiction book about women’s issues, I’d recommend ‘Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide’ which was published in 2010. The basic conclusion is that wherever in the wold women gain greater economic, social, or political power, things tend to improve for everyone.

I recently finished my January challenge book, Trinity, Louisa Hall’s third novel. The book consists of seven fictional ‘testimonials’, each of which reads like a short story. The characters narrating the testimonials are, I believe, all fictional and each has some tangential relationship to Robert Oppenheimer. The narrators focus mostly on their own lives, but by the end of the book a surprisingly intimate portrait of Oppenheimer emerges. Deception and it’s consequences are a common theme. Woven between the testimonials is a narrative of the day the first atomic bomb was tested, which over the course of the book builds to a powerful conclusion. I recommend this book! It inspired me to add American Prometheus, Kia Bird’s nonfiction biography of Oppenheimer, to my reading list. On to the next reading challenge!

I’m starting Louisa Hall’s Trinity, which came out in 2018. I read Hall’s novel Speak recently, which I thought was smart and inventive. Trinity is a novel that explores the life of Robert Oppenheimer through the narratives of seven fictional characters. I guess this book would also be classified as historical fiction.

Although I have several comfortable chairs in the house, I like to read while sitting on the stairs. I can concentrate more deeply and for longer periods of time.

Hi. I’m Steve M from Columbus OH. I’m looking forward to reading more in 2019. I read a lot of nonfiction, mostly science related themes, but I’d like to read a little more widely in the coming year. Most recently, I’ve read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, both great books. I joined Goodreads a couple of months ago.