Though one should take a bit of distance from work during holidays, one of my holiday books concerned laboratory life, not from bone scientists but from a botanists point of view. The book does contain similarities to us bone researchers, such as the frustration and victories of a researcher. "Lab Girl" by Hope Jahren was recommended to me one year ago by visiting Americans. The autobiographical book is a tasteful description of the career until mid-stage of the main person, Hope Jahren, alternated with chapters on plant

 life essentials. I could not agree more with the characterization of the book as "Does for botany what Oliver Sacks's essays did for neurology" - for sure a great achievement!
For European scientists, the American way may seem a bit remote from our reality. Consider that Hope Jahren moved from Berkley to Atlanta to Baltimore to Hawaii and, finally, to Norway, well before reaching the age of 50! Setting up your own laboratory, starting every time from scratch instead of joining in and sharing others lab ware may seem very inefficient. Also, I have never come across European scientists who start their experiments on a Friday night at 9 p.m. and remain analyzing the results in the lab for the next 48 hours. My institution's regulations certainly do not allow for this. The enduring search for grant money, however, is quite similar as here, with increasingly less funding for curiosity driven research.
The book is written from the autobiographical, thus female perspective. Consider yourself being both the only female and the only young scientist in a men dominated field, such as it was in the 1990s for her field. Now and then, Hope Jahren's awareness of being a female scientist pops up in the book. The woman-in-science part is more explicitly worked-out in Hope Jahren's columns and is also addressed in an interview with the author.
Her description of the special, lasting friendship of decades with her laboratory companion Bill, remaining loyal to each other wherever in the world they go, is worth mentioning. How beautiful to read about this relationship of respecting each other's differences but making use of each other's strength! As a team, they are involved in wonderful expeditions, creative experiments and road trips to meetings. I certainly can recommend reading this book and I am looking forward to her second book in 2020.