February Reading

I know, it’s April. But for the sake of tracking, I’m going to go ahead and follow through on my February and March lists.

Both months were lighter reading months for a variety of reasons, but there were some good books in there!

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

This is a classic I didn’t get to during my 20 Classics In 2020 challenge. Given that I knew nothing of the plot prior to picking it up from the library, let’s just say it was a … surprise. Not a bad one — I enjoyed the book — but definitely not what I was expecting. Partially based on Vonnegut’s actual experience living through the bombing as Dresden while an American POW being held by Germans, the book can pack a punch. But it also intersects with the narrator’s belief that he was, at some point, captured by aliens who teach them their non-linear concept of time (hence, the non-linear timeline of the novel). It’s an odd book, but the writing is superb even if the topic is not at all my normal fare. Fun fact: in the novel, a character refers to the tool you use to change channels (what most people call a “remote” or “clicker”) as a “channel selector.” That is the exact term my family uses and I have never seen the phrase in print. So maybe it’s a Hoosier thing?

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab

After seeing this novel on a lot of recommendations lists, I decided to give it a try. While it took me some time to get into it, (For the record, other people I know also felt it was slow-to-start.) The premise is a woman is given immortality with one catch: no one will remember her. She lives for centuries before someone, miraculously, does. The story’s protagonist was neither completely likeable nor unlikeable. The same was true of the antagonist. There were beautiful passages of writing. Overall, I enjoyed it and toward the end, the pages started flying.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

This book is LONG — I started it in January and nursed it all through February. Oppenheimer is not a figure about whom I knew very much, so I learned a lot. While I’m a big biography fan, I tend to gravitate to ones about less-recent figures which made reading this work a different experience. Because Oppenheimer’s life was so recent, the book could pull from a lot of primary sources not always easy to come by with figures from the long-ago past. If you’re a person interested in WWII biographies, this might be up your alley but bear in mind it covers all of Oppenheimer’s life, of which the Manhattan project was only a small part. Also, if you’re a physics nerd, it is really fascinating to read about Oppenheimer’s connections with other eminent physicists of the time (e.g., Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, etc.).