Every summer my husband and I have this fabulous tradition where we swap books and we each pick out a book that the other person HAS to read. It really forces you to go out of your comfort zone and provides great topics of conversations as we read through the books. My background is in all things culture & history (I have a degree in Art History) & his is the sciences (his bachelor’s is in Macro & Microbiology) so usually our books reflect those backgrounds but we always pick a read that has the other person in mind. A key part to making this fun is that the other person is NOT allowed to have a part in the book picking beyond questions like “fiction or nonfiction.”
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Here are the books he’s made me read:
- Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (tracing man’s evolution to the first fish with limbs)
- Atlas Shrugged (I guess you could call it a “capitalist manifesto”)
- Man’s Search for Meaning (a psychiatrist’s memoir of his time in various concentration camps during the Holocaust)
- The Genie in the Bottle: 67 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life (the chemistry of everyday life)
- The Hot Zone (the first emergence of the Ebola virus in the 90’s)
- Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen (about the Tarahumara tribe & their superhuman running)
- Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War (about biological warfare and America’s role in global conflict)
- The Beak of the Finch: The Story of Evolution in Our Time (about Darwin’s accidental discovery on the Galapagos Island)
Here are the books I’ve made him read:
- The Handmaid’s Tale (Christian-based dystopian future that restricts female sexuality)
- In the Name the Rose (medieval murder mystery with a monk detective)
- Slow Food: The Case for Taste (the origin and importance of the slow food movement in Italy)
- La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language (one woman’s adventure learning and falling in love with Italian language and culture)
- A Wrinkle in Time (sci-fi fantasy children’s novel)
- The Count of Monte Cristo (a long tale of love and revenge in early 19th century France)
- Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking’s classic book about astrophysics)
- China in Ten Words (a thematic look at China’s Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong)
- Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community (about the changing landscape of community-based events & neighborly cooperation)
JMF
