“Love Story” was published 55 years ago and “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1998. We went looking for more recent books that walk our halls, cross our bridges and get stuck in our traffic. Here are a couple for sale in local bookstores.
“Measuring Up: How Oliver Smoot Became a Standard Unit of Measurement” (2025) by Jenny Lacika and illustrator Anna Bron
A clever idea that plays with the principle of nonstandard measurements by telling how Oliver Smoot, a first-year frat pledge at MIT in 1958, got laid down repeatedly along the length of the Harvard Bridge, with paint being used along the way to mark off every 5-foot-7 of his height. (The bridge is roughly 364.4 smoots.) Now he’s in the American Heritage Dictionary. Lacika, herself an MIT grad, gets into the school’s history of pranks too.
“The Apocalypse Seven” (2021) by Gene Doucette.
A coder wakes up one day seemingly alone in a Cambridge overgrown with vegetation, where the roads out of town are clogged with empty cars. He finds a couple of Harvard first-year students, an MIT astrophysics adjunct and joins more wanderers into a ragtag crew trying to navigate what they dub the Whateverpocalypse – a devastation in which the Covid pandemic lockdown resonates but manages to get much, much weirder than millions of people learning to make sourdough bread. Kirkus called Doucett’s book “riveting,” with “vibrant prose.”
Tell us your favorite books set in or about Cambridge and Somerville at editor@cambridgeday.com.
A stronger
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