A.J. Jacobs has a formula, and I guess it’s working for him. He spends a year or two of his life devoted completely to “living” a concept, and he writes a book about it. In The Know-It-All, he reads the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. In The Year of Living Biblically, he adheres literally to the Bible for a year. In Drop Dead Healthy, he spends a couple years doing everything that’s recommended to be healthy. To me, his books are like Mary Roach books if instead […]
Well, this disease sounds terrifying…
I’ve seen Brain on Fire a few times at the bookstore, and it was the subtitle that kept catching my eye – “My Month of Madness” – and so when I found it on sale, I picked it up. I thought I would be getting a book about a Nellie Bly-style reporter who feigns mental illness to write an expose on our country’s health care system. Instead, I got a terrifying account of what happens when a young woman can’t get the right diagnosis, and […]
I finished this book, exhaled, and flipped it over to the beginning again.
Reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s spectacular memoir When Breath Becomes Air, a meditation about love, literature and science in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis was a strange experience “The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats and Stephen Crane,” Kalanithi wrote to a friend. “The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.” He was trying to be funny, using the kind of dark humor you get from people facing the unfaceable. But it also revealed Kalanithi’s tremendous ambition. He […]
Less painful than I thought it’d be
My book club picked Still Alice and I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t excited to read it. My grandmother with dementia died not too long ago and reading a book about early onset Alzheimer’s disease sounded unbearably grim. It took me longer to get through than most books, but I’m glad I read it. While sad, it wasn’t nearly as depressing as I thought it’d be. I think what saved it from being maudlin was the way Genova set up the book. As readers, […]