Figuring By Maria Popova : Not A Review

"We girls need our heroines!"

Peanuts published a comic strip with this line when Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was raging across America. The same thought came to me over and again when I read through Figuring with a pace that is slower than a snail's, almost taking a year to imbibe the beauty and inspiration in these rare life stories, making it the longest time I ever spent with a book.

Words fall short when I want to describe what sort of a book Figuring is. It has poetry, science, history, revolution, romance, friendships, nature -- in short everything that makes us human with all its imperfections. At the same time, it unearths so many accomplishments of women which were buried deep inside the forgotten piles of history. Living through these stories made me realize that how far we have come and yet it is still not far enough.

I have been following Maria Popova's brianpicker for more than a decade now and I shudder at the thought of the person I would have become if not for the stories Popova unravelled through her unrelenting research and love. Even though I never fully grasped the meaning and depth of every story I read, it stirred up my curiosity to go after things that I didn't understand. In that never-ending process of quenching my curiosity, I found a world that was more relatable than the world I live in.

I couldn't help wondering about the profound impact it would have had on my life if I were to read it at a younger age. A sense of loss for my younger self, yet uplifting and inspiring for my present self and a will to make things better for the future – that is what in short Figuring helped me to figure out.