The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (by Siddhartha Mukherjee)

In my head this was going to be a Read Harder Challenge book, but I ultimately realized it doesn't qualify as "investigative journalism" so it actually doesn't fit any of the categories. Still, a challenging read, since it's dense with scientific information and jumps around in time somewhat. I enjoyed the deep dive into cancer genetics and the history of cancer treatment; not so much the time jumps, which made an already dense book more difficult to parse.

As a side note, I've always known that the father of one of our friends had a Nobel prize for something or other. But now I fully understand what he got it for and why his discovery of reverse trancriptase (aka retroviruses) was so important. I also have to say on a personal level that when Mukherjee is taking about risk factors for cancer, he mentions obesity, but more specifically in the context of genetics. That is, people who are genetically predisposed to obesity may be genetically predisposed to certain types of cancer.  This feels much better to me than "you eat too much and this will probably give you cancer," which is the message I have absorbed without even realizing it.

Anyway, glad that (even if it doesn't "count" for anything) I read this! Ironically, my backup choice for "investigative journalism by a POC" is turning out to be an extremely easy read, so at least I feel like I've done some Reading Harder with this one.