March has predictably come roaring in like a lion. We met at Denise's lovely home on the lake. The temperature was perfect and though the wind kept us from sitting outside it didn't keep us from enjoying the view.
This month begins our shift to Sunday afternoon meetings. Sunday afternoons worked well after the hard quarantine was lifted but we were still trying to keep our safe distances by meeting outside. We decided to switch back to Sunday afternoons to avoid work traffic on Friday evenings and driving at night.
Denise provided a hearty white bean Italian vegetarian soup, corn muffins with honey butter, and two bottles of Pinot Noir. Leslie brought a Sherry cheese dip with crackers and celery, and Barb brought Hummus with crackers and peanut butter pretzels. Sherrie brought asparagus. Diana brought us beautiful, individual chocolate cakes. Arnora brought beautiful flowers and mixed nuts. There were other assorted wines but I didn't see who brought them.
Lessons in Chemistry is a bestselling novel from 2022. The story chronicles the life of Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist who is forced to become a television chef when she finds herself a young, single mother in the late 1950s. The story focuses on Elizabeth but is about women's lives, careers, struggle for empowerment, and their relationship with each other in the late 50s and 60s.
Like the author, Elizabeth teaches herself chemistry at the library. They share the same hobby of rowing and similar dogs. Six-thirty was based on a dog that Bonnie Garmus had who'd been abused but was highly intelligent and had a large vocabulary of words he recognized.
After my son was homeschooled during High School in the mid-1990s, I observed that if you had great reading and comprehension skills, you could teach yourself just about anything. I'm not sure that I, personally, could master any math on my own. I have to say that impresses me about the author and her main character. However, my friend Linda has a granddaughter who just taught herself some form of chemistry when the professor of the college she attends left and was not replaced. She moved colleges and did not miss a beat.
I read a book written in the late 1980s that talked about how many of the popular TV shows of the post-war like Leave it to Beaver and Donna Reed were literally a form of propaganda to encourage women to go back to being homemakers. But women liked their freedom and began to campaign for equal pay and other equal rights. Elizabeth finds herself, unwittingly, at the forefront of that movement.
This book provided a walk down memory lane for some of us who had experienced similar sexual harassment in the workplace. And, that subject has been recently revisited by the "Me Too" movement. We talked about how things have changed but there's still much work to do regarding equal rights. And, we've seen recently how quickly the "rights" you have can be taken from you.
Most of us liked the book and it rated a 4.125. One member raised her rating after the discussion.
Our next book is Ruth Ozeki's, "The Book of Form and Emptiness" and we meet at Diana's.
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