Hm.

On the one hand, this biography of Marie Skłodowska Curie was good. I learned a lot about turn of the 19th century science, the very cool group of ladies in STEM educated in the Curie lab, and—my favourite detail—that Marie was not only Polish (I’d thought she was French?!) but also kind of a Polish Nationalist nut and I loved that for her.

There was one detail I didn’t love: that this book told me she wanted to be called Marie Skłodowska Curie (aka she kept her Polish last name) and yet the book almost exclusively referred to her as Marie Curie? That felt weird.

And maybe I don’t like biographies? They have a kind of ‘neither here nor there’ quality, for me:
▪️ they’re neither memoirs—they don’t have the personal insight into their thoughts and motivations;
▪️ nor are they historical nonfiction—they don’t have the zoomed-out, ‘stopping to tell me why a moment is significant’ information, a big thesis, and explanatory power

… so I just got the feeling that every scene in this biography was probably cooler and more significant than it appeared in the book. Either because personal motivations were out of frame or because this event or discovery was more significant than this biography was pausing to explain to me.

So it was just a meh reading experience, overall.