Reading About Reading (and Gardening)

At the close of World War II, countries around the world were competing for the next great technological achievement. In the United States, six pioneering women were racing to figure out how to program the world’s first electronic computer, the ENIAC. There were no instructions or programming languages to guide them – everything they figured out they did on their own. To write this book, researcher Kathy Kleiman met with four of the six women, recording extensive interviews about their experiences as some of the earliest women in technology. I am such a fan of books that explore the hidden contributions women have made in science, so getting this one is high on my list.

Who doesn’t love reading a book about reading? In this linked essay collection, novelist Elaine Castillo explores the politics and ethics of reading, going beyond the traditional arguments about empathy and diversity to find “a more entangled relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.” She looks at our relationships with the classics, “settler colonialism” in beloved authors, and more to encourage “a more complicated, embodied form of reading.” That all just sounds so good.