Fans pick 100 books like The Exceptions

This book opened my eyes to how higher education actually works to advance social mobility for a few while primarily reproducing social inequality. I was amazed to learn that the way that today’s elite universities select among applicants started as a solution for limiting the enrollment of “outsiders.”

Top universities feared that having too many of these outsiders would lower the status of the institution and make it less attractive to the ruling class. Beginning with Jewish students, continuing with Black students, and now emerging with Asian and low-income students, this pattern continues and affects our entire society. 

It turns out that privilege, entitlement, and lofty ambition are baked into every aspect of the top private boarding schools in the United States. The authors are two sociologists who took me behind the scenes of an elite school whose graduates are subtly—and not so subtly—groomed for power and success.

On magnificent residential high school campuses, students are surrounded by wealthy peers, portraits of celebrated alumni on the walls, seminar-style academic debates, famous guest speakers, and more. The authors paint a convincing and readable account of how exclusive schools imbue their students with the habits, dispositions, and ambitions to join society’s elites.

Lorene Cary tells her own story of attending an elite boarding school through a talent-search program for low-income students of color. Lorene’s experience shows vividly the costs of being a token in a setting of privilege.

This vivid memoir was dismaying to me as someone who wants students to have opportunities to realize their potential by having access to top-quality schools. 

I loved this novel, in which a former Princeton admission officer actually made me feel sorry for the staff members who have to choose who gets into the Ivy League!

The protagonist winds up in the kinds of ethical and practical tangles that ensnare would-be do-gooders as we try to “help the disadvantaged.” And it’s a rollicking good read!

Margaret and the Moon tells the story of Margaret Hamilton, who wrote the computer code that was key to the US first landing on the moon. The story is full of suspense. Margaret—not the astronauts—is the real hero of the story. But what is best about this book is that it is bursting with curiosity. Margaret wonders, Why are there only DADDY Longlegs? Why aren’t more girls scientists? How big is the moon? And with each of her questions, readers themselves became more and more curious! Isn’t that fabulous?!

The ‘obsessive genius’ of the title is Marie Curie, the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes. I love Goldsmith’s book because it humanizes Curie, starting with her childhood in Poland and progressing to her determination to someday become a scientist, the difficulties she faced as a woman seeking an education in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, and finally the combination of serendipity, enduring curiosity and fierce determination that led to her groundbreaking discoveries about radioactivity, a word she is credited with coining.

I love this novel for its hilarious, unique take on the rage-against-the-patriarchy trope. Elizabeth Zott, the novel’s lead, is a refreshing portrayal of a woman battling the world of mansplaining while doing it in the most stereotypically “female” way—cooking up a storm! As a chemist, her scientific breakdowns of how ingredients chemically react with one another make for many humourous moments on the page. 

This is a book that will have you hooting with laughter and rooting alongside the protagonist till the very end. It mirrored the frustrations I have often felt as a working woman and left me vindicated for the times I, too, have “behaved badly” in male company.

Deeper than the Dead is so well written! It took me a bit to get into since it jumps around a bit, and there are a ton of characters, but the budding romance between Anne and Tony kept me hooked through the entire thing!

This one is more of a police procedural, but I really enjoyed the start of their relationship! This book is part of a series, which I absolutely love as well! The longer I can stay in a setting, the better! The suspense in this one was a little more of the focus, but I still had to include it! I read it in 2023, and it has stayed with me!

I adore everything about the premise of this book—a secret society of lady scientists, working away in an old house in London, trying to invent solutions to the problems of the day. Yes please! I also love that Lady Violet is worldly. She's knowledgeable about physical relations between men and women, and she knows about her body, what she likes, and how to prevent pregnancy. She’s very down-to-earth, empowered, and sex-positive, and she brings our brooding hero Arthur to his knees. There’s something very special about historical fiction with a modern sentimentality. Add to that a swoon-worthy hero, a cast of colorful side characters, and dark forces working against our heroine, and you’ve got a recipe for the perfect start to a super fun series.

Women have been involved in mapping and studying the Moon and the stars since the late 1600s. Women’s stories have almost never been told largely because most cultures considered women only as helpmeets, and because women scientists could only publish their work under their husband’s or brother’s names. Altschuler and Ballesteros, award-winning Puerto Rican and Spanish male astronomers, have selected the 28 women pioneer astronomers whose names graced lunar craters by 2019 to tell representative stories of hardship and success of woman astronomers and promoters. Although women's names are rare on the Moon, it is fitting that for Venus all the features are named for women and goddesses. 

I end by mentioning that since 2019 five more lunar craters honor women. Many more women are studying the Moon and the rest of the universe than ever before, and a woman will be on the next American mission to the Moon.… show more.