Lady Tan's Circle of Women - Lisa See

 

A great read from my book club.  I'd previously read her book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and enjoyed it according to my review.  This is the true story of a female Chinese physician from the 1400s who became renowned for her writings on medical treatment and medicine for women.  The writing was flowing and engaging while immersing the reader in Chinese culture over 30 years before Christopher Columbus came to America.  I loved learning about the history of women's lives and those of the elite class of people. A moving story of a legendary woman. 

Reference to the first book on forensic science: The Washing Away of Wrong Sung Tz'u

Published: 2023  Read: May 2026  Genre: Historical fiction

The Instrumentalist - Harriet Constable

 

This one was shared with me from my book club.  It's the story of Anna Maria della Pieta, a real life, violin virtuoso in the 17th century.  She was raised in a well known girl's orphanage in Venice that trained them to play instruments and had a world renowned orchestra which Anna Maria eventually ran until she died at 87 in the orphanage, having lived there her whole life. Her mentor was Vivaldi, the composer of the classical music composition, The Four Seasons. 

The author takes these facts and tells a tale of a virtuoso with the drive to become a maestro who sacrifices her relationships for a career that ultimately would not be allow to a woman.

I found the purse overly descriptive, flowery and difficult to get through as it didn't add to the story. 

Published:  2024  Read:  2026  Genre: Historical fiction

Know My Name - Chanel Miller

 

This book was difficult to read as it tells the true life experience of a young woman raped while unconscious who is further harmed when her attacker is prosecuted.  But it is much more than that.  Chanel Miller remained anonymous until four years after the attack.  Brock Allen Taylor had brutally attacked her outside at a party and was caught in the act by "two Swedes" walking by.  He was convicted of 3 of the 5 sexual assault counts brought against him and only served two months.  Chanel's victim impact statement was released under her anonymous name used in the trial and went viral, reaching millions of readers, revealing the impact of the attack and its aftermath on her life, her family and friends.  She wrote this book in 2019 and has become an advocate for victims of sexual violence.

Quotes:

"You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine.  It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do."

"We named our dog Mogu (Chinese for mushroom).  Every day she reminds me of the Muttville slogan:  It's never to late for a new beginning.  It was a promise to her and a promise to myself.  Whatever past you came from, you don't have to go back."

"It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something.  Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place.  I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving."

Published:  2019  Read: June 2022 Genre: Memoir

Purge - Sofi Oksanen

 This was a dark story.  It covers the experience of the women in one family in Estonia (a county I had to look up to find out where it was) throughout its troubled history of war and occupation, from about 1920's to the present.  Some chose to stay during the period; others were forced to live elsewhere and others were born during it.  Their experience and intertwined relationships are revealed as the story unfolds.  I liked how the author slowly revealed their ties.  Their stories were painful and horrific with the choices they made to survive.

Published: 2008  Read: June 2022  Genre: Fiction, Historical

Motherhood - Shelia Heti

My sister suggested this a few years ago and I finally got to it.  The authors chose a unique way of writing, using 3 coin flips to answer 'yes' or 'no' and responding based on the result of the coin flip.  She leads us through several years of trying to decide if she wants to have children before her biological clock runs out.  The story read like a stream of consciousness as she struggles with the expectations and norms of society and her own personal desires.  A good read.

Quotes:

"What is the better thing to steer your life by? Whatever seems to bring happiness? Yes.  So your values, happiness and the things the people around you need.  Those are he things by which you should steer your life."

"I have only two choices: to trust him or be suspicious of him; to believe in him or to doubt.  Then I ought to make the choice to trust him, because what good does it do me to be suspicious or to doubt?  That is causing myself pain in advance of any real pain."

"Happiness and joy are feeling like you belong to the world, and are at home in the world, at the level of nature, humanity and time."

"And you are never lonely while writing, I thought, it's impossible to be--categorically impossible--because writing is a relationship.  You're in a relationship with some force that is more mysterious than yourself."

"Only when a woman is no longer attractive to men, can she be left alone for enough moments to actually think."

Published: 2018  Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir/Philosophy 

In Five Years - Rebecca Serle

A young, successful, woman lawyer (Dannie), engaged to the perfect, considerate man (David) experiences her future one evening - and she's with a different man, in a different place.  She's shaken to her core and we she meets that future man (Aaron) she's convinced she can alter the future.  This was a clever take on predestination and what we think we can control in our lives.  I finished it up in a  couple days. Her relationship with her best friend since childhood (Bella) plays counterpoint to her structured, managed life.

Clever, quick read.

Quote:

"You mistake love.  You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't.  It's the only thing that does not need to become at all.  It matters only insofar as it exists.  Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future."

Published:  2020 Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction

Bless Your Heart, Tramp - Celia Riverbark

 I'd tried to find another book by this author and wasn't successful, so I tried this one.  It's a bit dated with references to old technology and cultural references of the prior decade.  The author is a columnist for a southern publication and this appears to be a collection of her previous articles.  It's stories of southern life from a woman's perspective, poking fun and reveling in their traditions.  A cute read, bless her heart.

Published: 2000  Read: February 2022  Genre: Humor

Easy Crafts for the Insane - Kelly Williams Brown

Sub-title: A mostly funny memoir of mental illness & making things

The successful author of Adulting spills all about her struggles with bipolar disorder and a very bad year where she gets divorced, her father is diagnosed with cancer and she breaks both arms.  A tough read and brave recounting of the impact of mental illness.

The author explains how simple crafts helped her through the struggles and illuminates the reality of living with the condition.  Funny and moving book.

Quotes:

"It would be great (both narratively and, um, for my life) if there were some fixed finish line [to mental health illness].  And I had crossed it. And now I was Better, Forever, and You Could Be, Too.  This is not the nature of anything, though.  There is not a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It's a constand coaxing, reinforced with boundaries and medication.  ..."It is patiently asking myself the same questions: 'Can you do anything about his right now?  Should you?"

"[On losing her girlfriends] Someone on Reddit once said that when you break up with someone, you lose the language you've cultivated just between yourselves."

Published:  2021  Read: January 2022 Genre: Memoir

Maiden Voyages - Sian Evans

 Sub-title: Magnificent ocean liners and the women who traveled and worked aboard them

I'd found out about this book while listening to a genealogy zoom discussion.  The author's great-uncle was a ship's captain and her research into his life led to the book.  I have to admit, I only read about a third.  Evans goes into great detail to document the lives and history of the times of the great ocean liners and that detail became tedious.  Unlike some authors who can make history riveting ( Erik Larson comes to mind), she does a poor job of making a story out of the facts.  I found it to be a litany of "so and so" did "such and such on this date" over and over again.  A disappointment and I chose not to finish it.

Published: 2020  Read: December 2021  Genre: History

The Codebreaker - Walter Isaacson

Sub-title: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

This was a wonderful read for so many reasons. Isaacson introduces the story by explaining the three great revolutions experienced in modern times: the industrial, the information and now, the life sciences revolution.  He compares the growth of people being able to do digital coding by manipulating bits, the on/off switches of the information technology world, to the future growth of people who will do genetic coding by editing and manipulating our DNA.  The innovators in both are those who can not only read the code but write it.

 I'd heard the term "CRISPR" and knew it had to do with DNA but didn't understand what it was.  The author took us through the life of Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize winning microbiologist whose curiosity led her from an early age to pursue RNA, the messenger part of our genetic makeup.  She won the Nobel Prize along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, for their research on how to alter our genes and how to "cut" DNA using  RNA to point to the edit point.  CRISPR -  Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - that were discovered in the 1980s, provides this pointer to where the editing of  DNA is desired. Doudna and Charpentier showed how to use CRISPR as an editing tool. 

I was swept along in the story that wove the history of the discovery of DNA, the effort to map the human genome and the ability to edit genes with CRISPR into a coherent, understandable whole.  At the same time the author revealed the cooperation and competition among scientists and their human side as collaborators and competitors.

I was uplifted to read of their cooperation in finding ways to test for Covid-19 when it emerged in 2020 and of their dedication and single mindedness in pursuing solutions. Several chapters are devoted to explaining and exploring the ethical use of the CRISPR technology and how it might be regulated, providing thought-provoking discussion.

 I can't recommend this book enough.

Quotes:

"[from Emmanuelle Charpentier] I began to see myself as a scientist and not just as a student...I wanted to create knowledge, not just learn it."

"1998 conference at UCLA...focused on the ethics of making genetic edits that would be inherited.  These 'germline edits 'were fundamentally different, medically and morally, from somatic-cell edits that affect only certain cells in an individual patient.  The germline was a red line that scientists had been reluctant to cross."

"On most great moral issues, there are two competing perspectives.  One emphasizes individual rights, personal liberty, and deference to person choice [Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia].  The other are those that view justice and morality through the lens of what is best for the society and perhaps even the species [John Rawls's A Theory of Justice].

Notes:

"Count Me In" - public database with DNA shared by cancer patients.

1997 film Gattaca (the title is made up of the letter of the four DNA bases) told of the potential of genetic screening and selection.

Preprint servers such as Rxiv and bioRxiv, free and open publishing of scientific research papers.

Published: 2021   Read: May 2021   Genre: Science, Biography

Rules for Visiting - Jessica Francis Kane

 The reviews on this one were good and I liked the concept - a woman reaches out to connect in person with her friends from the past in the age of instant communication.  It missed the mark.  The heroine, May, is strange; a detached, disconnected, landscape gardener.  The author interweaves descriptions of the personalities of various North American trees into the narrative to illustrate the choices of personalities we can adopt.  I think that what was she was trying to do.  The back story of May's life was so obscure that when it was revealed it was anticlimactic.  Some thoughtful observations kept me reading but in the end, the book fell flat

Quotes:

"Friends are God's apology for relations (Hugh Kingsmith)"

"...the Dunbar number--the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships--and how, despite predictions, it hadn't gotten any bigger in the age of social media."

"A house is a physical thing that is build with wood and bricks, furnished with furniture and carpets, while a home takes time and is built with memories." 

"Perhaps a best friend is someone who...holds the story of your life in mind.  Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest.  Maybe that is friendship.  A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don't have to be repeated." 

Published: 2019  Read: April 2020  Genre: Fiction 

 

The Accidental Adventurer - Barbara Washburn

Subtitle: Memoir of the First Woman to Climb Mt McKinley

Some people who achieve amazing feats are the most humble, down to earth people.  This was my takeaway after reading the story of a WWII housewife and mother who became the first woman to climb Mt McKinley (Denali) in Alaska because she knew "her husband wanted her to be with him".  The book is written plainly with little overstatement or waxing eloquence or boasting.  I wonder at her stamina and grit to survive multiple arduous climbs.  Her and her husband, Brad, spent years of exploring to produce their map of the Grand Canyon that was published in the July 1978 National Geographic magazine.  A quick read that left me wanting to know more about their adventures.

Published: 2001  Read: January 2021  Genre: Memoir

Varina - Charles Frazier

This was a delightful read by the author of Cold Mountain.  The writing is lyrical and the images he creates swim in your head while you follow the story.  Varina was the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.  A complex woman living a life she did not chose.  I was struck by the fact that she died in her 80's in 1906.  It put the impact and immediacy of the Civil War into perspective for me when I think of family alive at that time.

A favorite quote:

[Varina reflecting on a group of sisters defending their home in the South]  "Their yearning she recognized fully from that age, the need to become something at least within the vicinity of your dream of yourself.  She shaped a ragged philosophy to tide them through lonesome nights.  It was simple, and not one she'd ever found the strength to follow.  The idea was, the you you are with others is not you.  To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are."

Published: 2018 Read: February 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction

The Signature of All Things - Elizabeth Gilbert

This was for the most part a delightful read.  Alma is the only daughter of a self-made man of the late 1700's and early1800s.  He serves on a ship to atone for a crime and travels the world, picking up skills that allows him to make his fortune and build a plantation in Pennsylvania that provides medicinal plants, among other ventures.  Alma grows up in this privileged world, exploring their estate and becomes and expert in plants and horticulture, specifically the miniature world of mosses.

Her parents take in a beautiful orphan girl and declare they treat each other as sisters, a relationship that colors the rest of both of their lives.  The family story evolves against the scientific discoveries of the period, in particular Darwin's evolution of the species.  The title of the book refers to the belief that every thing that exists bears the signature of a creator.

Alma finds love, loses it, and strikes out on her own in the world, writing a parallel theory of life to Darwin's, based on her studies of mosses and her life experiences.  The story gets off on a tangent about two thirds of the way but winds up satisfactorily reflecting on the lives of women of the period, family relationships and the natural world.

Quotes:

"Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place.  The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one's own life before its natural end.  To do so is a weakness and a pity--for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one's eventual and inevitable demise.  Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly.  Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life."

"[reflecting on her theory of life] "For here was the hole in Alma's theory; she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if out-competing one's rivals was the key to  dominance, adaptation, and endurance--then what was one supposed to make [of these traits]? 

[discussing her dilemma with a spiritualist] "There is no evolutionary need, you see, for us to have such acute sensitivities of intellect and emotion.  There is no practical need for the minds that we have.  We don't need a mind that can invent religions or argue over our origins.  We don't need ethics, morality, dignity, or sacrifice.  We don't need affection or love, certainly not to the degree that we feel it.  If anything, our sensibilities can be a liability, for they can cause us to suffer distress.  So I do not believe that the process of natural selection gave us these minds--even though I do believe that it did give us these bodies, and most of our abilities.  We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us...it wants union with us, more than anything."

"I know that just because people can hear each other across the divide does not mean they can necessarily understand each other."

"..I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me." 

Published: 2014  Read: 2019   Genre: Fiction

I Remember Nothing - Nora Ephron

Subtitle: and other reflections

I enjoyed one of the author's other books, I Feel Bad About My Neck, and her smart, snappy writing here is as good as that in her screenplays for When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle among others.  This book is in the same spirit, though a bit more unfocused.  I laughed out loud when she explained her addiction to mobile Scrabble games.  Her life took her to all parts of the world and encounters with countless interesting people.  I enjoyed her sharing a part of it.  Sadly, she passed away shortly after the publication of this book.

Published: 2010   Read: December 2019  Genre: Memoir

Future Home of the Living God - Louise Erdrich

"The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don't know what is happening".  This quote is the background of this depressing story.  Evolution is running backwards, birds laying eggs that hatch raptors, cats giving birth to saber tooth tigers and humans giving birth to ...we don't know what.  The story is told in first person by Cedar, an adopted Native American child raised by hippie-like liberals, who is pregnant and writing a journal to her unborn child.  She is pursued throughout the story because pregnant women are being "sequestered" to monitor the births of their children. 

I've read books by Erdrich before a long time ago and my reviews weren't great on those.  This one kept me reading and I had no inkling of where the story would lead.  In the end, its a statement about our society and the world with a ominous outlook.

Published: 2017  Read: September 2019  Genre: Fiction

Enchantress of Numbers - Jennifer Chiaverini

Sub-title: A Novel of Ada Lovelace

Picked this hardback, large print up on trip back from Alaska.  It was a good read by the author of another title I read of hers, about Mrs Lincoln's Dressmaker. 

It's the story of the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the great romantic poet of early 1800s.  The story is told in first person by Ada, sharing her life from her birth through her attendance at the Great Exposition just shortly before her death.  It's an example of one of the century's scandalous families, who were always in the press, much like current talented, yet flawed celebrities of today.

I despised Ada's mother's manipulation and poisoning of Ada's mind and manner and the sad destruction of so many lives.  A tidy bit of history worth reading.

Published: 2017  Read: September 2019  Genre: Historical fiction

Pioneer Women - Joanna L Stratton

Letters from early 1900's tell stories of homesteading in Kansas territory.  Contains biographical names list.  I enjoyed reading this book.  The author came across letters sent to her great-grandmother who published a newspaper or magazine but had never gotten to these.  Stratton weaves them into a tale of what life was like in the settler's time. 

Published: 1981  Read: August 2019  Genre: History

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana - Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Sub-title: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe

This was a good read for the perspective it provided on life in Afghanistan for women during the reign of the Taliban.  I enjoy history and getting an understanding of countries I've never been to and cultures I know little about. 

The writing was rather trite, not even good journalistic style, which is the author's background.

As the title and sub-title explain, a woman (one of the 5 sisters) supports her family as a dressmaker.  She creates an entire business, producing clothes in their home, employing other women in the community while the Taliban's rule forbade them from any freedom.  The woman, about 17 at the time, went on to become an official in Afghanistan's post-Taliban government working on business development. 

Published: 2011  Read: July 2019  Genre: Non-fiction

Contents May Have Shifted - Pam Houston

Isn't that a catchy title?  That and the recommendations made me take this off the check-in shelf at a campground.  A very adventurous young woman is constantly traveling the world while trying to find and keep a meaningful relationship.  Roughly based on the author's life, it was a good read.  She used a technique called fractured narrative where she tells brief snippets of the story that your mind stitches together as your reading.  I liked learning about new places to visit and explore.


Published:  2012   Read: July 2019  Genre: Memoir