Just because I can, I am going to tell you about what I am reading right now and it is not textbooks ZOMG.
In no particular order:
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, in which a precocious 11-year-old British girl is elbows-deep in a thrilling mystery involving a red-haired man who died in the vegetable garden on her family's estate. Claire and I are both reading this one. It's just tongue-in-cheek enough to avoid taking itself too seriously, whilst also giving us a heroine we can adore. (seriously, a brilliant young chemist with a macabre sense of joy in things that terrify her obnoxious older sisters? Who has named her bicycle Gladys and self-narrates about 'giving Gladys her head' when coasting downhill? What's not to love?) Also, it has some major laugh-out-loud moments. One of my friends shoved this into my hands when I was volunteering at the library one day, and then one of my former teachers came in, saw it in my hands where my friend had just shoved it, and RAVED about how wonderful it is, so of course I had to start it right away. (Then of course I had to study for midterms and finals and presentations and what not so it's taken me about six weeks to get to page 100 but I'm really rolling now that I've remembered how to read for pleasure.) We are also thrilled, Claire and myself, that it is the first in a series. If one book is delightful, five are five times as delightful, generally speaking.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which is a cat of an entirely different color, by Siddharta Mukherjee. I am only eighty pages into this beautifully thick book (all of which I read in a free hour and a half this afternoon), and it's one of those times when I am so glad to have so much of it ahead of me because I love it so much. I have always wondered, since I was a little girl and first became cognizant of the existence of cancer, how long people had known about it, how it worked (well, I wondered that until I took sixty-six units of RN program prerequisites), and how people explained it before they knew about things like cells and mitosis and DNA. How did we first begin to figure out how to treat it? How far have we come against it? The author, an oncologist who originally set out to write a daily journal of his own professional battles against cancer but who found himself writing something much bigger, has taken on this complex and painful (and, in some areas, somewhat... triumphant) subject in a way that makes me need... to... keep... turning... pages.
I mention this here because it's another beautiful and heartbreaking and heartwarming book (though fiction) set in the world of medicine: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. I started listening to this on my way to and from school, and found that I hated the wait from Wednesday night to Monday afternoon when I could listen to more of it, so I got the hardcover from the library and devoured the rest of the book while I should have been sleeping over the course of a few days, a few months ago. Another beautifully thick, dense, rich, affecting story whose mental images have stayed with me since the first words floated out of my car stereo as I started off down my driveway early in the semester. It's about medicine and history (I'm ashamed to say that I knew very little about Ethiopia before or beyond the We-Are-The-World era until I read this book), and the bond between two identical twin brothers, and the families we make and the families we find.
Ah, great, now I've forgotten what else I'm reading.
Oh yes. Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger. I loved Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife -- it's one of those books that I try hard not to brag about having read before most of its fans had ever heard of it, but I usually fail. This one, though... eh. I don't love it. I liked it OK, though I found it a bit off-putting somehow, until it started to get ghosty and now I'm just not terribly fond of it at all. I will probably keep going, in between other books, just because hey, maybe it will get better. (Judging by the Amazon reviews, which I just glimpsed for the first time when I went to find the link above... maybe not.)
Because books can't be all just for fun: Spanish for Healthcare Professionals. It's on my nightstand, which is across the house, and Amazon has something like five books with that title and none of them look like mine, and I can't remember the author, and it's not like you want to buy this one anyway, most likely, so whatever, no link. This being California, I hope to be needing this information sometime relatively soon. ;)
Claire and I are putting ourselves through The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. We bought this book for Claire last Christmas. We are having SUCH A GOOD TIME. So far we have done the pre-instruction exercises, which I would scan and show you except that I am supposed to put them away and not look at them again until I'm done with the course. We've also replicated an abstract sketch by drawing it upside-down, which was fascinating. My friend Cate told me once that "anyone can unlearn how not to draw," and I think this book might prove her right. At any rate if it can do me good, you know there's hope for anyone. This time last year I couldn't even draw decent stick figures.
And that's all I can think of right now, though I feel like I'm missing something. I'll add it in if I remember. IT'S SO NICE TO BE WRITING ABOUT BOOKS AGAIN.
*****edited to add:*******
Oh yes. Heft, by Liz Moore. Memorable (I promise) heart-tugging novel about unlikely-but-likable characters including a morbidly obese man who hasn't left his house in years, a cheerful and enormously pregnant young house-cleaner, and a kid from a poor neighborhood who commutes to a snooty prep school where his mother worked until she couldn't anymore because she went what appears to be a little bit crazy. The ways in which their lives intertwine makes for a book good enough that I put off schoolwork for it more than once. (This should be me new star-rating system: How many evenings did I spend reading this when I should have been buried in index cards and powerpoint slides?)
********************
PS: Things I have been WATCHING (oh man how I love break time. Have I mentioned that?) The family has been watching Downton Abbey with me a little here and there over the course of the last few months -- I've seen it before; they haven't -- and we are all loving it. Also, T and I watched a remarkable German film (subtitled), about the last days of the Third Reich as they happened in Hitler's bunker in Berlin, called Downfall (in English) (German: Der Untergang). Oddly, we first became aware of its existence when we saw it used in a meme. Yes, OK, ha ha, Hitler found out his rare classic Mopar is a fake, very funny; wow, this looks like a really good movie and does the library have it? The library did. If you are interested in WWII history at all and can keep up with subtitles that go past rather quickly, this is well (WELL) worth watching.
And I recently watched (500) Days of Summer, which was OK but I didn't love it super much. But now I really want to watch Whip It again, because there was a preview for that at the beginning of the DVD (yes, I am one of those people who love previews on DVDs) and it reminded me of what a gem of a movie that was.
And thatisall! For now. Who knows, maybe someday I will write here again. Stranger things have happened.
