I’ve found myself still with some wanderlust after summer travel. I always get this way after spending months planning and anticipating a trip. This first book is how I informed my recent trip to Iceland. The other two offer armchair travel to another time and place. I took all of them to Good Day Alabama on WBRC Fox 6 this month.
How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island
by Egill Bjarnason
Go far beyond chasing waterfalls! This funny, informative book is a quick, easy way to get to know Iceland before you go—its history, culture, people, and all the many things (Puffins! Icelandic horses! Volcanos! Artic char! Glaciers!) that make it special. Few people realize how this tiny island in the middle of the North Atlantic has shaped the wider world around it. While it was founded 1,200 by a frustrated Viking captain and a less-than-capable navigator, Iceland has played an outsize part in the world’s history, impacting such diverse events as the French Revolution (thanks to a volcano), World War II, the moon landing, and the foundation of Israel. Know before you go! Pro tip: Listen to this book so you can learn how to pronounce Iceland’s unique (and difficult) place and people names.
By Bonnie Garmus
If you haven’t yet read this buzzy book, go get it today. You’re welcome! It’s a funny, shrew and thoughtful read that has been topping charts since it was released about a year ago. Elizabeth Zott is a gifted chemist. She’s also incredibly self-assured, which serves her well because this novel is set in the early 1960s when female chemists were few and certainly not appreciated. Her all-male team at the Hastings Research Institute follows a highly unscientific view of inequality—all except for Calvin Evans, the center’s international star. He’s a lonely, brilliant Nobel Prize-nominated (several times) scientist who falls in love with Elizabeth’s mind. Theirs is a true chemical reaction. But a few years later Elizabeth finds herself alone, a single mother and the reluctant star of what becomes the country’s most beloved cooking show—Supper at Six—where Elizabeth teaches chemistry lessons while helping women get dinner on the table. But she’s not just teaching them how to make chicken pot pie and the science behind making pastry and browning veggies—she’s instilling in them a sense of accomplishment and confidence. She’s daring them to change the status quo for themselves and for other women, too.
By Kate Morton
The new and noteworthy book opens on Christmas Eve 1959 in Australia’s Adelaide Hills. At the end of a scorching day, police find a woman and three of her children dead beside a creek on the sprawling property of their grand country home; they’d been having a picnic beside the cool water. The youngest child—just an infant—is missing. And this becomes one of the most baffling murder mysteries in South Australia’s history. Decades later and miles away in London, a journalist named Jess has lost her job, her partner and her way. She returns home to Sydney—to the grandmother who raised her—in search of a story she can sell and some solace for herself. At Nora’s house, she finds a true crime book about the Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. And in the pages, she discovers a connection to her own family. It’s certainly not the breezy travel piece she had planned, but Jess uncovers a story that is truly her part of own. This novel spans generations—across a beautiful, vast country—and looks at the lengths people will go to protect their loved ones.
I link to Amazon to show you exactly what book I’m talking about, but I love to shop locally at Church Street Coffee and Books, The Alabama Booksmith, Little Professor, and Thank You Books in Crestwood. And I visit my local library often in person and online!
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