I’m trying to decide which overused sentence I should start this post with, and I can’t make a decision.

Because unfortunately, while I haven’t read this book before, I feel like I’ve written this post before. Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of a genius, and, well, I think you probably already know if you want to read a really good biography of Galileo. The title makes it sound like a thousand different literary fiction novels– there are so many The So-and-So’s Daughter novels out there that I’m surprised that there isn’t a parody of them with that exact title– but no, this book is at least a third or so about Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s oldest daughter, through the prism of the surprisingly large corpus of letters we have from her to him. Suor Maria was a cloistered nun, and her letters, or at least the translation of the letters in this book, show her to be a woman of lively intellect and wit, and starting each chapter with an excerpt of one of her letters was an inspired choice.

But ultimately this is a book about Galileo– a book called Suor Maria Celeste’s Father would not have sold many copies– and, well, Galileo was Goddamned fascinating, so if the author is of even middling talent writing a good book about him should not be especially difficult, and as it turns out Dava Sobel possesses far more than the typical allotted share of talent. So maybe this isn’t as comprehensive a review as I might have thought I was going to write when I sat down, but I assume the You Should Read This is still coming through at sufficient volume for you to hear it. Because you should.

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Most of us have some sort of memories of Spring Break, although I suspect for most people they involve parties, or beaches, or some form of public drunkenness. For me, on the other hand, my strongest memory of Spring Break, one I reminisce about every time my own break rolls around, involves going to see a movie on the first night of a Spring Break in grad school with a good friend of mine who is a professor at Oxford now. We had to stand outside to wait for tickets in a driving, wet, utterly bullshit snowstorm in downtown Chicago, and Bill stepped out of line for a moment, threw his arms over his head, yelled “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of his lungs, and rejoined the line without another word.

I may not have partied enough as a young man, is what I’m saying here. And I openly laughed at anyone who asked me what I was “doing” for my break. I’m going to be sitting in a damn chair reading a book, that’s what I’m going to be doing. And it will be glorious.