Linda

Mary Roach's science writing is always reliably well-sourced and entertaining, and Bonk was definitely no exception. Reading this was even more entertaining because I consumed it over the course of about 24 hours of travel time between London and Seoul, which earned me a few funny looks at Heathrow, and a ton of funny looks on my Asiana 777 flight, surrounded by scandalized young families. I went into this book with the same prurient, pervert-laughing curiosity that I think plagues the researchers Roach talks to in the work, which is a sort of humbling thought, but I came out of it with a new perspective on the thing, and an even deeper appreciation for the lengths to which she's willing to go in order to get her story. Anyone who can talk her husband into having sex with her while someone X-rays them is a champion as far as I'm concerned.

I knew absolutely nothing about Bess of Hardwick before I picked up this book, and I'm grateful that the cover was intriguing enough to catch my eye. It's hard to separate out what made this book more interesting: Bess's life, or the writing, but if you'd never known of her, it's worth a read just to get to know the former, regardless of the latter. She had four husbands and built an empire during a era that saw women sacrificed to the ambitions of men left, right, and center. The book gets a little dull and draggy toward the end – as most of these things do – but all in all, it's a really well-researched, very sweet biography, and I think if I had known Bess in person, I would have liked her as much as I liked this volume.

It's about football, data, and families. Also, in the movie version, Sandra Bullock played a Sassy Southern Lady. I was never not going to love this book, all right?

This was definitely a trainwreck book. I won't say I didn't enjoy it, because obviously I finished it, but it was a sort of perverse curiosity enjoyment. This is the sort of romance novel people who hate romance novels indicate to argue their point about it being a blighted genre.

Bought this in a secondhand shop off of Rue de Severin in Paris and consumed it by the time I was back in London less than a week later. A really gorgeous, lively biography of a really gorgeous and lively woman, and it has one of the best lines about Eleanor of Aquitaine, about how she was the wife of two kings and the mother of Richard the Lionhearted, but whenever we think of her, we only ever think of her as Eleanor. Really, really wonderful.