Hi everyone. My daughter started school last week and so we’re back into a structured routine. All in all, this past summer seemed like it passed fairly quickly. I have been very busy with house meetings and selections and we’ve had some travel, camps, and playdates… and in-house card tournaments. 🙂
It’s been 10 months since I picked up a paintbrush but I began again on Monday making a large canvas for our new house and it felt so good.
I hope you enjoy these reviews. I’m almost done reading my second novel this September. We were in Austin for the weekend and I got to go to my favorite bookstore. I saw so many to add to my list! Let me know if you have any more book recommendations!
The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable–and How We Can Get There by Vincent T. DeVita, MD and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn
Wow. Really good. This is part memoir, part history of cancer research and treatment, and part prescriptive. DeVita was the longest-serving director in the history of the National Cancer Institute, working there for 26 years. Before that, he developed the first successful chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma using a combination of drugs, which was then unheard of.
Since Congress funded and launched of the war on Cancer in 1971, we have spent more than $100 billion on cancer research. Huge strides have been made, and yet there are bureaucratic regulations and outdated beliefs that hinder progress.
I enjoyed his personal stories the most. DeVita describes many of his colleagues who were hesitant to let go of long-held beliefs, determined patients who participated in research studies, and how cancer has touched him personally. Recommend this one for sure.
“… it illustrates what has been, for me, a source of perennial frustration: at this date, we are not limited by the science; we are limited by our ability to make good use of the information and treatments we already have. Too often, lives are tragically ended not by cancer but by the bureaucracy that came with the nation’s investment in the war on cancer, by review boards, by the FDA, and by doctors who won’t stand by their patients or who are afraid to take a chance.”
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
A beautiful look into a rare condition that causes him to age very slowly so that he has already lived hundreds of years. He married in the 1600s and still misses his wife, who died of the Plague, but knows his daughter has the same condition and he’s determined to find her. Can you imagine living long enough to meet Shakespeare or Scott Fitzgerald and travel all over the world? I have so many excerpts from this book that I love… it’s such a beautiful look into the meaning of life and time. If you hold yourself back to prevent yourself from loving and getting attached to someone, are you really living?
“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here. Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”
The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes
A detailed look into the entire expanse of the Obama years, from the campaign’s idealistic beginnings to accepting and working within the divisions in politics to finally leaving the White House. Rhodes was a writer before being a communications director and he has intimate access to Obama. Thus, we get image-rich descriptions of meetings and true portraits of our country’s leaders as if we were a fly on the wall.
Excellent and engaging writing is difficult for me to put down, and so even though this memoir is exceptionally long, I enjoyed it and loved knowing things about life in the White House that I hadn’t known before. I learned about the long process of negotiating for relations with Cuba, or the Iran deal, and what the president’s relationships with foreign leaders were like. Of course, I’m also saddened that a contemplative and diplomatic leader has been replaced by the absolute opposite (who it turns out had no interest in all the material the WH staff prepared to ease the transition). I hope Obama will write a memoir, but until then, this is the closest I’ve come to understanding what his administration was like. Oh how I miss it.
“Every presidency is a story with one person at the center of it. This is how America organizes its political life and history books. This is how the world consumes the disparate elements of American democracy in an age of American dominance. The president as hero or villain; the president as the person who decides, consoles, commemorates, and reacts; the president as temporary royalty, in command and at the mercy of events that share this time with him.”
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
I realize that it is through reading that entire worlds and experiences open up to us. This one, though, was just too much for me. Tallent writes about the isolated world of a 14 year old girl living with an psychotic and abusive father. The amount of courage this girl must have had to get out of that environment… wow. I sincerely wish I had not read this book, and I can’t sort out if it was anything more than the subject matter. It has been reviewed very highly and I’m not entirely sure why. Such disturbing writing and he goes on and on when his descriptions are enough. The language, the repetition, the extremity of it all. The language the “narrator” chooses, which is irrelevant to the plot. I wish it were not even published because of the way it portrays violent sexual abuse. I want that reading time back to spend with a much better book.
She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself.
“And even if you tell no one, if you give no sign, if you never breathe a word, but someone, anyone, comes to me again and so much as suggests, I will open your little neck, and won’t that be a goddamn beautiful thing. Then we’ll find out if you can be had. Then we’ll know. You think on that. You’re along for the ride, you little bitch. We will see what light is in your eyes then, what ineffable little spark they might lose. Watch your goddamn little corneas drying up like fish scales.”
My Oxford Year: A Novel by Julia Whelan
The only way to describe this one is that it’s chick lit for grad students. I identified with the main character spending time abroad, got wrapped up in the love story, and laughed out loud and cried a lot. The references to literature were bonus.
“… it turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up. Which isn’t a bad thing; if anything, it only serves to strengthen my resolve.”
