Books 36 and 37
I finished these quickly- they were hard to put down!
36. Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus. Read this for my book club. I can see why so much has been made of it. It's cliche but it will make you laugh and cry, sometimes within the same page. The book focuses on Elizabeth Zott, a smart, ambitious woman who lives in the 1960s, where brains in a woman aren't always valued, especially in her chosen field in the sciences. Scary thing is, while the book was set decades ago, too many of the issues Elizabeth deals with still resonates today. She contends with harassment (twice taken to brutal levels), theft of her work and the stigma of being an unwed single mother to a child who is beyond precocious. But Elizabeth holds her own through the power of her convictions and no-nonsense demeanor. The funniest moments, which make up half the book, is when she is coaxed into doing a televised cooking show, which mixes cooking with chemistry. Despite the reservations of some and the outrage of the producer, her unique approach winds up being a hit with the television audience - even when her uncompromising bluntness rubs some the wrong way.
37. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by Suzanne Collins. I read the initial trilogy ages ago and enjoyed it. So I was looking forward to this prequel set more than 60 years before the action of the original books, which centers on Coriolanus Snow, the main antagonist in the series. It did not disappoint. It's an interesting character study and origin story for the sinister and cunning Snow, who we see as a teen boy on the cusp of graduating and heading, he hopes, to the university and to bring the Snow family back to its glory days. The war referred to in the original books had just ended a decade ago, so there are many who still remember, including Snow, his grandmother and his older cousin Tigris (her appearance was a bit of a surprise). You see the sociopathy, but you also see a character who, at this age, may not be a lost cause. He's ambitious and coldly pragmatic, but he also cares deeply for his cousin and comes to fall for Lucy Gray, the District 12 tribute whom he has been assigned to mentor. Snow's family has hit on hard times, with the death of his parents and the devastation of the war. However, he's also attracted the attention of Dr. Gaul, the Head Gameskeeper who has no scruples, and Dean Highbottom, who seems to have a personal grudge against the 18-year-old Snow. It's hard to escape the comparisons between the Roman-style gladiator games and the Hunger Games in this prequel, especially when the characters residing in the Capital have Roman-inspired names. By the end, you can see that Snow has passed the point of no return, and how the Hunger Games as we see them with Katniss came to be.