This Week, I'm Reading...

Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl was recommended to me by a couple of friends, and I’m about a quarter of the way through it. Hope Jahren is a geochemist/geobiologist now living and working in Oslo (how cool is that?), but the book starts out with an evocative chapter about her Minnesota childhood and her adoration of her father’s lab. Last night I listened to a chapter about her college job in a hospital pharmacy, which was both enlightening and a bit frightening. Interspersed between these personal chapters, Jahren speaks poetically about seeds and leaves and trees. There’s the 2,000-year-old seed, the tree rooted stubbornly 100 feet down in the Panama Canal ditch, the seed that Jahren discovered was made of opal, the beloved tree outside her childhood bedroom window. I’ve been thinking a lot about trees lately, too, mostly for my job, but also because I care about them. So, I’m enjoying both threads of Lab Girl. But I’m also wondering whether I might enjoy it more in print. For one thing, it’s well-written, and I find I enjoy the language best on the page, whereas audio books are a good choice when the factual information or the storytelling put attention to language in the back seat. But I’m also finding Jahren’s whispery, quivering voice a bit distracting. Sometimes when she talks about trees, it seems as if she might cry, and I find myself removed from the content by the emotion. Audio books are funny things, quite different in some ways from reading silently. If I weren’t still reading David Copperfield—though in the home stretch this week!—I would probably drive to the library for a print copy of Lab Girl. But David must come to the end of his tale, so listening to Hope in the car is where it’s at this week.

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