Nonfiction was only a fraction of what I read in 2025, but The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (2023) by Loren Grush made me want to read more. While some of the individual women that were part of the first women to be part of NASA’s first astronaut class to include women (such as Sally Ride) have their own biographies, Grush’s book tells their stories as a group, including their relationships with each other and with the space program as a whole. Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon were their names.
It’s a captivating story–one that I thought I knew, having come of age while it was happening (the Challenger disaster happened my senior year of high school–I was one of those who was watching on TV). But it was so interesting to find out about the behind the scenes happenings with the benefit of my forty more years of life experience. And Grush’s writing brought out each woman’s unique personality, so much that I cried reading about Challenger, even though I don’t recall feeling terribly affected at the time because it was just one more thing in the news far away from my life. Learning about who Judy Resnik was, how brilliant she was, and how much she was loved made the Challenger tragedy real to me.
I also loved learning about how each woman learned about NASA opening up the astronaut class to women and about how their backgrounds made them suited for the job. I entered the workforce not long after they joined NASA, and I remember what it was like then and have seen how it has changed, mostly for the better since then.
I highly recommend The Six — it was a great story to listen to. I think also that it’s weight-neutral, although there was some discussion about body size in relation to space suit sizes, and pregnancies of a couple of the astronauts who became mothers during their participation in the program.
Reading While Fat 