This Week, I'm Reading...

Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel

The first 95 pages of Galileo’s Daughter required some expectation adjustments, but now that I’m past the halfway mark, at 212 pages, I think I’m settled in. I may have picked up this book at the Niantic Book Barn, an overwhelming used bookstore in Connecticut whose big barn overflows into numerous outbuildings, and I didn’t even know for certain when I finally cracked it open last week whether it was a work of fiction or non-fiction. Obviously, I figured that out pretty quickly, but then I began to suspect I’d been the victim of false advertising, as the entire first section is about Galileo with hardly a peep about his daughter, Virginia, better known as Suor (Sister) Maria Celeste. This is perhaps unsurprising because she was a cloistered nun whose life experiences were extremely limited as compared to his own. Finally, a special relationship among father and daughter is developing and her letters to him are beginning to play a larger role in the narrative. It’s not that I was uninterested in learning more about Galileo. On the contrary, his astronomical findings, his travels, and the fine line he learns to walk between his potentially heretical scientific assertions and the beliefs of the Catholic church is interesting. But if I’d wanted to read a biography of Galileo, I would have looked for a biography of Galileo. I’m looking forward to learning more about his daughter’s life and how she might have quietly and without fanfare influenced and supported one of the greatest men of scientific history.

What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comment section below!