Reading Roundup: Exoplanets, Memoirs, and the Science of Aging

This quarter’s reading list covers a broad spectrum, from astrophysics lectures and memoirs to fiction and economic treatises. Here are the highlights and notable takeaways from each work, starting with the non-fiction and science-focused entries.

Science and Big Ideas

Joshua N. Winn’s audio course, The Search for Exoplanets, delivers an astrophysical survey of the current state of planet hunting. Winn reviews the primary detection techniques, the telescopes used, and possible future directions. The presentation offers a clear sense of both the scale of the challenge and the creativity of the solutions.

David A. Sinclair’s Lifespan: Why We Age - and why we don't have to presents a popularized account of his research as a Harvard genetics professor specializing in aging. The first quarter is scientifically compelling, detailing recent research and prevailing theories on aging’s causes. However, the book’s second quarter shifts into speculative advisory territory, offering recommendations based on slim evidence—a disappointment given the author’s credentials. The latter half devolves into diffuse commentary on futurism and environmental topics.

Memoirs and Biographies

Hans Rosling’s posthumously published autobiography, How I Learned to Understand the World, chronicles an eventful life with engaging prose. Written in his final months, it offers a fitting capstone to his career.

Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey traces his life from childhood through his sixties. The book successfully illuminates the origins of his intellectual views, though it also paints a portrait of a difficult individual, with occasional asides devoted to settling scores. Despite these detours, the writing is excellent and provides a solid framework for understanding his ideological development. Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics revisits familiar themes of inequality for readers of his prior works but contains thought-provoking statistics, particularly regarding the economic status of Black Americans in the northern states before and after the 1960s.

Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction

Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, is a touching account of growing up as a mixed-race Korean American, centered on the year of her mother’s illness and death. The writing is strong, likely leaving readers with a somber mood and an interest in Korean cuisine.

Kristin Hannah’s novel The Four Winds, set in the Dust Bowl-era Texas panhandle, follows farmers who migrate to California for work. While historically valuable and offering a more detailed look at the pre-migration hardships than Steinbeck’s work, it inevitably invites comparison to The Grapes of Wrath—a comparison that does not favor Hannah.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness presents a challenge for a modern reader. While likely a poignant critique of colonialism when published in 1899, its narrative about a ferry captain in equatorial Africa makes little contemporary sense to this reader.

Jerry Dennis’s The Living Great Lakes alternates between his month-long tall ship journey from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic coast and substantive discussions of the Great Lakes’ geology, history, and biology. While interesting, many travel-focused sections stray from the book’s core subject, though they do generate significant wanderlust.

Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea presents the geological, natural, and human history of the Gulf of Mexico, offering an uneven experience; some sections engage, while others drag.

Games and Stories

Ben Orlin’s Math Games with Bad Drawings catalogs dozens of games that use only pen, paper, and sometimes dice or fingers. Each entry explains the rules and sample sessions before moving to mathematical strategy and related concepts. It is entertaining to read in full and offers practical fun for friends and family, though the author’s signature humor and illustrations are likely what draw younger readers into the deeper mathematical material.

Sidik Fofana’s Stories from the Tenants Downstairs collects tales from residents of a Harlem subsidized housing building. The cost of rising rents serves as the common thread, yet the stories vary widely. The audio edition, however, was somewhat difficult to follow; while voice actors typically enhance narration, several performed with heavy cultural accents that hindered comprehension, particularly in the opening sections.

Re-reads

Alongside these, revisits included Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking beyond stage one.