Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
I read this because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2022. I REALLY liked this book. Set in the 1960s, Elizabeth Zott is a chemist, and like most women in science in that era, is underpaid and taken advantage of (not just professionally, but sexually as well). But she's also a woman out of her time, with an unconventional lifestyle. She and a fellow chemist, Calvin, fall in love, but he dies in an accident just about the time she finds out she's pregnant. Trying to support herself and her daughter, she agrees to host a television cooking show that's really more lessons in chemistry than cooking. I found this book funny but also poignant, reminding me a lot of the early years (1977-1986) in my career (state and local government) - things hadn't improved much for women in male-dominated careers between the 1960s and the 1980s.
I was pleased to learn that Garmus is just two weeks younger than me, and this novel, her first, was published a few days before her 65th birthday. There's hope for me! And I really liked the cover of the ebook I read, with the periodic table in the background, and a (headless) woman in a 60s-style dress and heels carrying an old-fashioned television with antennae.
Butterfly Games by Kelly Scarborough
When I read the description of this book in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers list for December 2025, I knew I had to request it. It's about Jacquette Gyldenstolpe, who was involved with Prince Oscar Bernadotte, heir to the Swedish throne, from about 1811 to 1817. Author Kelly Scarborough was inspired by the 1951 (in German) / 1953 (American edition) novel Désirée by Annemarie Selinko, which I first read in the late 1980s and still reread periodically, as it is one of my favorite books. Luckily, I won a copy of the book to review.
Jacquette is mentioned only once in that novel (first name without a c), on page 563, just 31 pages from the end of the book. Scarborough was curious about her, and started doing research, including trips to Sweden, visiting the national archives there, and translating numerous letters and other writings by Jacquette and others.
I really appreciated the maps, and the historical note at the end where Scarborough explained some of the decisions she made while writing the book, particularly names and nicknames she used. Her website includes a helpful timeline and a page with images and brief biographies of major characters. In a September 2025 interview with Foreword Reviews, she explains the title and one of the names she came up with for a group of characters, and also hints at an upcoming sequel (which I would definitely read).
This is a good debut novel, although I feel it could have been tightened up a bit (and thus made shorter). I found myself wishing to read some of Scarborough's source material (like Jacquette's letters and her husband Löwenhielm's diaries) myself - and that's always a good sign, that I learned something from the book and it captured my interest.
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
I watched an interview about this book in 2025 with author John Green, best known for his award-winning young adult books, and I immediately placed a hold on it. I started 210th on the list. I'd moved up to 127th when I was lucky to get a "skip the line" loan for this book this past week, when we had an ice storm and I felt I could definitely get it read in the shortened 7-day loan period. It's a fairly short book and I read it in about three hours over four days.
It's a powerful book about a disease that most of us in developed countries don't think about because, as Green says, “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.” Tuberculosis still kills many in the world, and this book delves into the reasons why, centering the story on a personable young man Green met at a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone named Henry Reider.
Besides fascinating information on the history of tuberculosis, the book how the focus in public health funding is in terms of cost-benefit analysis rather than the well-being of humans. Under our current U.S. administration, it's only going to get worse, with its cruel and short-sighted cuts to international health programs. Currently, tuberculosis continues to spread, especially in drug-resistant forms, and could someday be as deadly as it was before cures were developed.
Time Management by Charles Harvey, and Organization Strategies by Tammy Garner
These two short e-books had been on my Kindle for some time, so I read them in about 45 minutes before starting on a longer book. Apparently I got them for free at some point, and that's what they're worth - nothing. Time Management had nothing in it I didn't already know, and seemed to be promoting the Evernote software. Organization Strategies was full of misspellings and grammatical errors, and seemed like it was originally written in another language and then translated. At least now I can delete both books from my Kindles and my cloud storage.
Mattie by Kathi Jackson
This book was written by a friend and former coworker in Seattle. I'd bought the book a long time ago and finally got around to reading it.
I was disappointed. The story is set before, during, and after World War II in Hudson, Texas - a real town east of Lufkin, although I'm not sure how much the town's history played into the book. There was no author's note in the ebook, and Kathi's website is no longer active.
Mattie is a young woman being sexually abused by her father - a church deacon - while raising her four younger siblings, as her mother is mentally ill. She longs to escape to Dallas and become a nurse, but instead becomes pregnant with her father's baby. Steve, the owner of a local general store where she works part-time, is in love with her and marries her, raising the child as his own. Conveniently, both her father and the baby die. But Mattie becomes very depressed, her husband has an affair, they make up, the war comes and he enlists, she goes to nursing school while he's gone, she's sent overseas, he conveniently goes missing, she falls in love with a doctor (James) and they reconnect post-war at the VA hospital in Dallas. She becomes pregnant with his baby, Steve comes back (prisoner of war) but is not the same, and the story ends not long after she has the baby and seemingly makes the decision to be with James - and that's where the book ends. I would have liked to know what happened to Steve, even though he's the one who apparently called James to tell him Mattie had his baby.
Kathi wrote good nonfiction - I've read her book on World War II nurses and a biography on Steven Spielberg for young people. This book was fairly well-written (I did find some grammar and punctuation errors) but I just did not like the storyline. Although it wasn't very good, there was some birth control available in the 1940s - and maybe Mattie and her partners should have used some.
