Book #53: The Middle Place

Title: The Middle Place
Author: Kelly Corrigan

Honestly, I still have a chapter or two left before I'm done with The Middle Place, but I'm writing the review based on the 200+ pages I have read. Kelly Corrigan writes the story of her struggle with breast cancer, which happens to coincide with her much-beloved father's diagnosis with kidney cancer. But it's also a story about couplehood and parenthood (Corrigan's girls are 3 and 1 when she's diagnosed). And yeah, she readily admits that she's the kind of person who loves the limelight, but she's so darn funny that you don't get annoyed by it (a trait she seems to have inherited from her father).

Case in point: I read this last night, and laughed so hard that Eddie came in from the other room to find out what was wrong. I tried to read it to him, but got all choked up and spat out the words in between guffaws, which didn't help the punch line much. She's writing about preparing for a trip with friends to Mexico to celebrate the end of her treatments and says, "Our travel bags get fatter and fatter-- filled with stuffed animals and books and rows of diapers, like all we're gonna do when we get there is lie in bed-- snuggling, reading, and peeing." I'm laughing right now as I type. And her description of male genitalia (p. 91) had me in stitches too. It's not the great American novel, or even the great American memoir, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fun book, if a story about nearly dying can be called fun.

Book #53: Cutting for Stone

Title: Cutting for Stone
Author: Abraham Verghese

I know, I just said that if you read one book this year, it should be The Help, but if you read two books this year, the other one should be Cutting for Stone (thanks for the recommendation, Lucy!). On the back cover, Mark Salzman says: "Absolutely fantastic.... This book has everything: nuns, conjoined twins, civil war and medicine. If Vikram Seth and Oliver Sacks were to collaborate on a four-hour episode of Grey's Anatomy set in Africa, they could only hope to come up with something this moving and entertaining..."

Cutting for Stone is one of those books that you ignore laundry, ringing phones, and children to read. I hid away on the scratchy couch in the living, room, letting my kids watch a Pokemon marathon (Isaac got 40 hours of DVDs to help him through the recovery process). By the time I was done reading, I felt like I knew Marion Stone, knew Hema, his adoptive mother, celebrated their accomplishments and mourned their losses. It's a dramatic book with lots of action and betrayal and redemption (and great religious themes too), and it's also a simple story of family.

Book #52: What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science

Title: What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science
Author: Robert L. Wolke

Wolke's humorous and slightly dorky approach to kitchen science really endeared me to him when I read What Einstein Told His Cook. While the science is just as interesting in the second volume, and I photocopied a few of the recipes for future baking experiments, I found myself groaning at Wolke's jokes this time around. I think he'd be a lot of fun to listen to in a one-hour lecture (he was a college chemistry professor before retiring to write full time), but reading corny joke after corny joke rubbed me the wrong way this time around. Still, if I need to know the best method for adding cream to coffee and keeping it piping hot (unlikely with my non-coffee-drinking status), he's the man I'd turn to to explain things intelligently and simply.

Book #51: The Help

Title: The Help
Author: Kathryn Stockett

If you're only going to read one new book in 2009, it should be The Help (and I've read some pretty darn good books this year). Several readers recommended it in the Stieg Larsson book giveway comments, and I was surprised when my library copy arrived two days after I reserved it. This was the other book I read at the hospital with Isaac, and it definitely made up for the other one.

The Help is the story of three women living in Jackson, MS in the 1960s: Skeeter is home from college, trying to adjust to living in a place where there aren't jobs for college-educated women and her peers are all married and busy with babies; Aibileen and Minny are maids employed by Skeeter's friends. Skeeter decides to become a writer, and hatches a plan to write sort of an ethnography about the real-life experiences of domestic workers in Jackson. At great personal risk, Aibileen, Minny and a dozen of their friends agree to help. The characters in this book are great, and the little side stories are so rich, and it's such a wonderful, multi-layered book about bravery and doing the right thing. I predict it becomes the next big book club book, if it hasn't done so already.

Book #50: The Grift

Title: The Grift
Author: Debra Ginsberg

I'd love to read a little bit about how book covers are designed, because I picked up The Grift on the basis of its cover (I like the font and the dotted border and the way the "r" is dropped down from the rest of the word) and its location on one of the tables at the front of the library. When I got home, I saw that it had 4 1/2 stars on Amazon, so I packed it in the bag I brought to the hospital, and it kept me occupied while Isaac and I sat around at PCMC.

Occupied, but not exactly entertained. The book started out promisingly, the story of a fortune teller who leaves Florida for California to start a new life. She becomes entwined in the lives of a few stock-character clients along the way, which isn't great, but still fine. And then she meets a man, falls in love, and goes absolutely CRAZY. Up to that point in her life, she'd been a sham fortune teller, more of an amateur psychologist than anything else, but after a personal tragedy she finds herself with a real clairvoyant gift, and it changes her life. And the book gets very weird. And not very good.

Unless you're better than I am at suspending disbelief, don't judge this book by its cover or its Amazon reviews and stay away.

Book #49: Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

Title: Intern: A Doctor's Initiation
Author: Sandeep Jauhar

I'll admit that I'm curious about the lives of the doctors who care for me and my family. How many kids do they have? Where do they go on vacation? Are they happy? But if they're not happy, do I really want to know? In Intern, Sandeep Jauhar describes the crisis he went through during his intern year (the first year after medical school-- a hellish, hazing sort of year when doctors are on call every third or fourth night and work LONG hours the other days). It's an interesting, well-written book, filled with stories about what Jauhar learned from his patients (not all that unlike Atul Gawande's writing about his residency experience). The main difference is that Jauhar didn't really know what he wanted from his life, constantly saw the grass as greener on the other side of the fence, and always second-guessed his decision to go into medicine (he started medical school after finishing a PhD in physics). In other words, he was a big whiner.

I haven't been an intern myself, but I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what interns go through. And after reading about Jauhar's experience, I feel exceptionally lucky that I was married to an intern who loved what he was doing, who came home from 36-hour shifts to shovel our driveway, who listened with a sympathetic ear when I talked about staying up all night with a baby and a toddler. I look back on Eddie's intern year as the hardest of our lives as parents and one of his hardest as a physician, but I think that if Eddie wrote a book about the experience, it wouldn't have been as whiny or angsty.

Book #48: The Wish Maker

Title: The Wish Maker
Author: Ali Sethi

Do you ever read the reviews on the back of a book's cover and later wish you hadn't? One of the reviewers compared the book to The Kite Runner, which unfairly amped up my expectations, I guess.

But really, it just wasn't that great a book. Sethi tells the story of Zaki Shirazi and his cousin Samar, growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s, against the backdrop of Muslim feminism and the rise and fall of Benazir Bhutto. But there's no magic in the story, and it dragged on and on. I kept reading just because I was waiting for something great to happen, but it never did. Sethi wrote the book as a 23-year-old Harvard grad, and my guess is that it draws heavily from his own experience, but it's really hard to say. But I will say this, The Kite Runner it's not.

Book #47: When the Emperor Was Divine

Title: When the Emperor Was Divine
Author: Julie Otsuka

I remember reading Farewell to Manzanar in middle school and being horrified that the US government imprisoned Japanese American during WWII. Then I read Snow Falling on Cedars as a young adult, and felt dismayed Guterson's picture of reassimilation after people returned to their h omes. In When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka shows, with painfully beautiful, spare writing, one family's experience with their father's arrest, being forced from their home in Berkeley, living in the Utah desert for several years, and finally returning to their home and trying to put their lives together. On the one hand, Otsuka goes into great personalized detail, describing things like the cold plums in the icebox that the mother in the family eats in an opening chapter or the suits that the father wears. On the other hand, she doesn't ever name any of the characters-- they're simply "the girl," "the boy," etc... making them, in a sense, both individualized characters and representative of all people who suffered in the internment camps. It's a short, easy book, and a solid, powerful story worth reading.

Hello autumn, my old friend...

...You've come to visit me again.

Looking outside you may think it's wishful thinking. I'm aware that it's supposed to be 90 this afternoon. But this morning I looked at the 10-day forecast, and there's not a 90 in sight after today. You know what that means? My first fall in four years is right around the corner!

Honestly, it was a great summer. Other than one day when I decided to run seven miles at three in the afternoon, running never felt oppressive. The kids played outside more in the last two months than they did in the four years we were in Texas. Isaac and Annie both learned to ride bikes and Bryce perfected many a trick on his scooter. We've been opening our windows in the morning and the evenings (no screens yet, so we've endured some flies, but it's been worth it).

And if the weather forecast is right, it's September and fall is on its way, just like it should be. I can't wait for changing leaves (we have a big maple in our front yard), and cool nights around the fireplace in our backyard, and pumpkins that don't rot before Halloween, and sweaters! I only have one or two sweaters. Mostly I'm excited NOT to wear shorts on Thanksgiving.

I've missed you fall.

I'm going back to bed

Crappy moment #1: I love running outside in the morning, and especially love meeting my new running friends to put in 6 or 7 miles a few days a week. One of those days is Thursday. Last night Eddie told me he had a 7am meeting at work, so I got up this morning and endured the boredom of the treadmill for 6 miles instead. I came back upstairs at 7, and he was still in bed. Anyone who doesn't understand why I was mad hasn't spent enough time on a treadmill.

Crappy moment #2: The wheel falls off my jogging stroller as we enter Bryce's new school. The same school where Maren cried for at least 20 minutes yesterday afternoon because I had Isaac in our single stroller instead of her. I'm sure I'm making a great impression.

Crappy moment #3: Wheel back on the stroller, I can't find a way out of the school that doesn't involve a set of stairs. So I tackle them. Maren falls down an entire flight and face plants on the parking lot. She now has two scraped hands and a scraped chin.

Crappy moment #4: We get home, with plans to head to Ogden to buy a steal of a chair and some tables I found on KSL. I'd made arrangements with the lady on the phone yesterday and told her I would buy both. So I tell the kids that we're going to Krispy Kreme in Layton, grab drinks and diapers and all of the assorted paraphernalia we need, and call her for directions. She says someone offered her more than the asking price for the chair and her husband was selling it to the other lady. I would have paid the same price and bought the tables, and still felt like I was getting a steal. And besides, they were PERFECT for my living room. I even bought stuff at the Habitat going out of business sale yesterday in anticipation of buying the chair and the tables. So the kids still want Krispy Kreme, and I'm a mean mom for not driving them up to Layton just for the heck of it.

Humph!