The Periodic Table

I've just filled in the Books section of my profile. I've always avoided filling in sections like that as the pressure is too great.

But today I felt I had to. In honour of my degree.

And my god, it was hard. And I don't feel I've done it justice.

Just looking at the list though, I feel strangely proud and protective of my choices, and one of them especially I feel needs a little backstory - Primo Levi's The Periodic Table.

Possbily, if I ever had to choose a definitive favourite, impossbile though it would be, I would probably settle this one.

Levi was an Italian chemist, who (being a Jew) ended up in Auschwitz and survived. Although he wrote books about his war experiences, in The Periodic Table, he explicitly says that this book is not about that. For the remainder of his life he was held up as a holocaust survivor, and with that came an overwhelming sense of guilt - something he never really managed to overcome (he committed suicide in 1987).

The Periodic Table celebrates the life that he really wished everyone to see - his life as a chemist. It is a brilliant, moving, comic and profoundly insightful book, and I urge anyone who hasn't, to read it. As I bore all those that know me, the last piece of punctutation at the end of the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last chapter of the book is the most emotional things I have ever read.

It is a book about a man who wanted to be famous for what he loved, and yet spent his whole life being famous for something he wished to forget.

And putting aside all the sentimental crap, the life of a chemist is really really funny.