Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo

Beacon Press, November 2010 (original publication 2003)

In January 1919, an enormous molasses tank on the Boston waterfront burst, and unleashed a flood of molasses on one of the most congested sections of the city.

"Molasses flood" sounds like a joke. It sounds funny. It was January. We all know the expression, "as slow as cold molasses."

Twenty-one people died. 150 were injured, many of them very seriously, resulting in life-long crippling problems that either ended or seriously hampered their ability to work. Also, hundreds of working horses were killed by the molasses flood--some directly, some shot afterwards, because there was no way to extract them from the molasses before they would be suffocated by the weight of it.

Children died. Workers died. Houses, businesses, and the local fire station were crushed, shattered, knocked off their foundations and nearly swept into the harbor.

It was an enormous tragedy.

Unmarriageable, by Soniah Kamal

Ballantine Books, January 2019

This is Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice through Pakistani eyes, and it's not just a simple copy with names of people and places changed.

Soniah Kamal is a Pakistani writer, who grew up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, received part of her education in the USA. Jane Austen was one favorite author, and she was stuck by the ways that these very English novels, written two centuries ago, reflected the core daily concerns of modern Pakistani life, and in many ways universal concerns: family, love, success, happiness, respectability, security.

Alysba Binat is like and not like Elizabeth Bennet, and while if you've read Pride & Prejudice, you know the basic outlines of her story, she's well worth getting to know in her own right. The other Binats and their friends and neighbors are also alike and not like, and the similarities and differences are both reasons this book is worth reading.