@ Your Library
I have often heard people say the month of January lasts a year and at times that has rung true. Not this year. Welcome to the last day of January. I’m not quite sure how we got here so quickly. February begins tomorrow and it doesn’t look like time will slow down anytime soon.
Reading is definitely one of my favorite ways to slow down and take time for myself. Reading in winter can also provide an escape from whatever is outside (and I often like winter, but the dark does get to me). Reading after dark helps me forget that it is dark outside and I can just enjoy whatever I am reading.
Our 2025 reading challenge asks individuals and/or families to read (and that included listening to) 25 books selected by reading prompts. The third reading prompt is to read a book about a woman overlooked in history. Here are some fiction and non-fiction titles to consider. Please don’t view these titles as the end all to be all. They are just suggestions, and you are welcome to read whatever you want and you can also ask library staff for additional recommendations.
I’ll start with a handful of nonfiction titles about women across many fields. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is about hundreds of women during WWI who painted clock faces with the new substance radium after being assured that the luminous material was safe only to fall mysteriously ill. Another title with medical roots is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. This book is about a poor Southern tobacco farmer whose cells were taken from her without knowledge and are still used to this day in medical research more than 70 year after her death.
Tisha by Anne Purdy as told to Robert Specht is an older title about a young schoolteacher seeking adventure so she accepts a teaching job in Chicken, Alaska in 1927. Locally, another woman who led an adventurous life is Betty Berger Lessard, who lived almost her entire life on Namakan Lake. Her life is retold in A Bit of a Legend in These Parts by Neil MCQuarrie. Condoleeza Rice’s autobiography No Higher Honor would be a fascinating choice for someone interested in politics and foreign affairs.
Fiction titles include Half Life by Jillian Cantor about Marie Curie, Mrs. Mike by Benedict Freeman about Katherine Mary Flannigan or The Instrumentalist by Harriet Constable about Anna Maria Della Pieta. Consider The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict about Marie Mileva Einstein, The President’s Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud about Harriet Hemmings, Miss Morgan’s Book Brigage by Janet Skeslien Charles about Anne Morgan and Jessie Carson.
Amanda Flower has written about Katherine Wright Haskell in To Slip the Bonds of Earth while Mariah Fredericks writes about Betty Gow in The Lindbergh Nanny and Libbie Grant writes about Emma Hale Smith in The Prophet’s Wife. Many of these titles are fiction because the author had to fill in pieces to tell a story.