This was the first book I read this year way back in January, and I had just had my daughter (she turns one this week!) and it really just gave me a lot of feelings, and I didn’t know how to write them all in a book review, so I put it off to “let it settle” and whoooooops now it’s December! Hi guys! This is a feelings book. It is grim, but it is also optimistic and lovely and hopeful. Kalanthi was 36 and […]
Backlog #CBRBingo
According to Goodreads I shelved When Breath Becomes Air on December 6, 2016 so it is a pretty clear choice for the Backlog bingo square. “What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of thirty-six just as he was completing his decade’s long training to be a neurosurgeon. He had felt for months he may have cancer but put off getting any scans done until his back pain became unbearable. Paul had […]
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 […]