My current read is Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, which is proving hard to put down. Here’s a nicely crafted, gently damning paragraph in which Dr. Sandy Glass tries to comfort himself about his daughter’s decision not to go to medical school:
So she’d get her master’s degree in the history of science, Sandy mused. She’d finish up her little project and apply for medical school the year after. Robert Hooke was fine; he was eccentric; eccentricity was all the rage in med school applications. English majors, musicians, writers. Sandy had served his time on the committees. Harvard loved that kind of thing. She would be a doctor in the end. He knew it. Louisa was no soft-spoken library researcher. No math-fearing patsy. She was his son.
I love Goodman because she gives a character like this (father of three daughters, in case you hadn’t guessed) every chance, really she does, and when they waste their chances, she so cleanly severs the jugular.