The following suggestions were either put forward at the meeting on August 3 or sent to Peggy or me by email. They are listed in alphabetical order to avoid any possible interpretation of order in list as being some kind of value judgment. Please review the entire list thoroughly. If you have any additional suggestions, please let me know, and I will add them as updates to this post.
Nonfiction
Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab by Christine Montross, 320 pages, available in paperback
As a medical student, Christine Montross felt nervous standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags was initially unnerving. But once Montross met her cadaver, she found herself intrigued by the person the woman once was and fascinated by the strange, unsettling beauty of the human form. They called her Eve. The story of Montross and Eve is a tender and surprising examination of the mysteries of the human body, and a remarkable look at our relationship with both the living and the dead.
Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, The by Atul Gawande, 240 pages, available in paperback, a New York Times Bestseller
We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. And the insights are making a difference. Already, a simple surgical checklist from the World Health Organization designed by following the ideas described here has been adopted in more than twenty countries as a standard for care and has been heralded as “the biggest clinical invention in thirty years” (The Independent).
Night Shift, The by Dr. Brian Goldman, 288 pages, available in paperback.
Goldman shares his experiences in the witching hours at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. We meet the kinds of patients who walk into an ER after midnight. The Night Shift is also a frank look at many issues facing the medical profession today, and offers a highly compelling inside view into an often shrouded world.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain, 368 pages, available in paperback, Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012
How many introverts do you know? The real answer will probably surprise you. In our culture, which emphasizes group work from elementary school through the business world, everything seems geared toward extroverts. Luckily, introverts everywhere have a new spokesperson: Susan Cain, a self-proclaimed introvert who’s taken it upon herself to better understand the place of introverts in culture and society. With Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Cain explores introversion through psychological research old and new, personal experiences, and even brain chemistry, in an engaging and highly-readable fashion. By delving into introversion, Cain also seeks to find ways for introverts and extroverts to better understand one another—and for introverts to understand their own contradictions, such as the ability to act like extroverts in certain situations. Highly accessible and uplifting for any introvert—and any extrovert who knows an introvert (and over one-third of us are introverts)—Quiet has the potential to revolutionize the “extrovert ideal.” – Malissa Kent (Amazon review).
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, 336 pages, available in paperback
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
Fiction
Garden of Evening Mists, The by Tan Twan Eng, 352 pages, available in paperback
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.” Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?
Glass Palace, The by Amitav Ghosh, 560 pages, available in paperback
Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel by Amitav Ghosh tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls “a master storyteller.”
History of the Present Illness, A by Louise Aronson MD, 272 pages, paperback available January 2014
A collection of short stories written by a doctor of geriatrics at UCSF, which takes readers into the lives of doctors, patients and families in the neighborhoods, hospitals and nursing homes of San Francisco. It introduces a striking new literary voice and offers a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in America today
Home to Big Stone Gap: A Novel by Adriana Trigiani, 304 pages, available in paperback
Tucked in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia is Big Stone Gap, the bucolic backdrop for Trigiani's popular series. In this fourth entry, Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney and her husband, Jack, must come to terms with the absence of daughter Etta, newly married and living in Italy. (The country holds a special place in Ave Maria's heart: her biological father, Mario, whom she learned of and met only after her mother's death, is Italian.) Ave Maria has plenty to keep her mind off missing her only child (the MacChesney's son, Joe, died of leukemia at age four). She's a full-time pharmacist and the newly appointed director of the town's annual musical. Then comes news that her longtime friend, glamorous librarian Iva Lou, has been keeping a startling secret for nearly 20 years. Other developments, including a health scare for Jack and a Christmas visit from a colorful former resident, move the plot along briskly. With her original cast of characters, playwright and television writer Trigiani blends playfulness and pathos in this evocative portrait of a small southern town. Fans of the Big Stone Gap series can look forward to a feature film; Trigiani has written the screenplay and is slated to direct. (Allison Block Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.)
Kindred by Octavia Butler, 264 pages, available in paperback
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi, 336 pages, available in paperback, Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, One of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists
Fairytale romances end with a wedding. The fairytales that don’t get more complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can’t stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It’s not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox’s game. And so Mr. Fox is offered a choice: Will it be a life with the girl of his dreams, or a life with an all-too-real woman who delights him more than he cares to admit?
Orphan Master’s Son, The by Adam Johnson, 480 pages, available in paperback, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
(Summary lifted from the LitLovers site). Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
Patrick Melrose Novels, The by Edward St. Aubyn, 688 pages*, available in paperback, a national bestseller, an Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle. By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation. Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.
Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead, 320 pages, available in paperback
Winn Van Meter is a WASP: He approves of discretion, shorts with little whales on them and Bloody Marys — lots and lots of "Bloodys," as they're called. Seating Arrangements takes place on a Nantucket-like island where the Van Meter family is hosting a wedding for their daughter, Daphne, who's hugely pregnant (this is the 21st century, after all). Winn, the father of the bride, shambles around in a polite funk because he's been quietly shunned by the island's exclusive golf club, and because his house has been invaded by the bridal party, who deposit makeup and bikini tops everywhere…. Author Maggie Shipstead mocks the pretensions of this tightly enclosed world even as she thoroughly — and compassionately — inhabits it. She's Edith Wharton with a millennial generation edge. And while the society of Seating Arrangements may be select, Shipstead's range as a writer is democratic: She roams from a slapstick subplot starring an escaped lobster to sublime reflections on marriage and death.
Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple, 352 pages, available in paperback
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.
Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon, 416 pages, available in paperback
For fans of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It, comes an irresistible novel of a woman losing herself . . . and finding herself again in the middle of her life. “…when the anonymous online study called ‘Marriage in the 21st Century’ showed up in my inbox, I had no idea how profoundly it would change my life. It wasn’t long before I was assigned both a pseudonym (Wife 22) and a caseworker (Researcher 101).”
*Because of the length of this volume, Linda had suggested that we might read just the first book of the volume for the discussion meeting.
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