Reading List for December 2023

Today is the last day of December of 2023. I normally would post my reading list on the first, but this is a special one. As mentioned in my November reading list, this is the last reading list that I will be posting.

As mentioned in that post a majority of the books that I read are ones that I have read before. And December is not much different. Also as mentioned in that post, I have actually cancelled my Audible subscription which means that I will not be purchasing new books beyond what I have already purchased; at least not a regular basis.

Now, here is my reading list for December.

In December I listened to 22 books total. Four of these titles were new, or approximately 18.18 percent. I want to highlight two of the new titles that I listened to. The first is The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush.

When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group then made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000 six elite women were selected in 1978—Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.

In The Six, acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic—and sometimes deeply sexist—media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride’s history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark.

It is likely that you might have heard of Sally Ride, but the remaining five women are likely people that you have not heard about before. If you want to learn more about the early history of women astronauts.

The second book that I want to highlight is The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough.

The dramatic and enthralling story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the world’s longest suspension bridge at the time, a tale of greed, corruption, and obstruction but also of optimism, heroism, and determination, told by master historian David McCullough.

This monumental book is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events in our nation’s history, during the Age of Optimism—a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all things were possible.

In the years around 1870, when the project was first undertaken, the concept of building an unprecedented bridge to span the East River between the great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the great cathedrals. Throughout the fourteen years of its construction, the odds against the successful completion of the bridge seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle; it is a sweeping narrative of the social climate of the time and of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or exploiting the surpassing enterprise.

The reason I want to highlight this one is because it is a good detailed history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I do not normally listen to abridged books, but this one I did because the abridged version was narrated by Edward Herrmann.

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