A long-overdue EIGHT mini-reviews

It's time for a mega mini-review catch-up!  I think that I'm now up to date with everything I've read up to the end of February, so... shall we get started?

The Pearl by John Steinbeck (4*) - It's been a while since I read this, and honestly I think it will be quite forgettable in the long run - but I obviously really enjoyed it at the time, hence the four-star rating!  A kind of fable about greed, materialism and envy built around the discovery of a great pearl by a poor Mexican freediver, it's short, folksy, lyrical and poignant, and I very much enjoyed the musicality and dreamlike feeling of the reading experience.  Not necessarily one I'd rush to read again, but quite beautiful!

 

Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser (3.5*) - This is essentially a novel for young teens about bullying and gun violence, in particular the school shooting phenomenon. Its moral is perhaps a little simplistic and obvious to an adult, especially so long after it was first written, but the evolution of the two boys at the centre of the story has played itself out so many times in the intervening years that it still rings all too true. It's clear that the novel has used genuine incidents to formulate the story, with Strasser including footnotes to show where specific details echo real-life cases. If this makes even one kid stop and think differently about how they treat others around them, then that's got to be worth something.

 

The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet by Dr Michael Mosley - I can't really rate this one yet, and it's very unusual for me to read anything like this - but diet book, yaaaaay! I've put on weight since my last mega-depression, and with my family history of diabetes, high cholesterol, heart problems and all kinds of other ticking time bombs, I thought this would be worth a try! Michael Mosley is known here in the UK for his well-researched, well-presented TV health documentaries, which time and time again have thrown things into new perspectives and flipped over decades-old received wisdom, so I have high hopes. The book itself is made up of a swathe of detail about Type 2 diabetes (which this diet has been proven to actually reverse), blood sugar, the Mediterranean diet and the science behind the resurgence of the VLCD (very low calorie diet).  All very interesting and persuasive.  The last section is all recipes, most of which I didn't like the look of - but I HAVE started the diet, using my own menu made up from the same foods and principles, and it's going well so far, cake cravings aside!

 

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby (4*) - This was one of the longest-standing books on my TBR, and I'm SO GLAD I finally read it.  It's about four very different strangers who meet on top of a tall building on New Year's Eve, each planning to jump off - only they don't.  Instead, they grudgingly head back down the stairs together, and after a rocky night, end up making a pact to stay alive until Valentine's Day and see how things go.  I loved the four voices - disgraced TV presenter Martin, downtrodden Maureen, madcap young Jess and musician JJ (he was my favourite) - and the way this single shared experience unites them, separates them, brings them meaning but also trouble, creates opportunities but also slams doors.  It was real and blackly humorous and strangely uplifting and I can't wait to read my next Nick Hornby novel!

 

 

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon by Gideon Defoe (3*) - The fourth in the humorous Pirates! series, this one actually doesn't involved that much pirating.  After humiliation at the annual Pirate Awards, the Pirate Captain (with his luxuriant beard and pleasant, open face) has decided to retire - only his tropical island of choice actually turns out to be a bleak goat-riddled chunk of rock, and he'll be sharing the hearts of the local townspeople with none other than Napoleon Bonaparte.  Bring on the clash of the egos!  Funny, slightly surreal, and heralding the return of all my favourite pirates including Jennifer (former Victorian lady) and the long-suffering pirate with a scarf.  A fun way to while away an afternoon!

 

 

Plain and Simple: A Woman's Journey to the Amish by Sue Bender (4*) - Reading this slim little volume was like sitting down in your favourite armchair with a hot cup of tea at the end of a long day: soothing, comforting and deliciously peaceful.  Built around Bender's fascination with Amish quilts, this is the story of how her interest became a full-fledged quest for a better and calmer life.  Bender went to stay with two different Amish families over the course of a few years, and tried to use her experiences in their communities to pinpoint what was missing from her life and reframe it in a way that balanced Amish values with modern American living.  Unexpectedly relatable, interesting and quite lovely.

 

An Age of License: A Travelogue by Lucy Knisley (4*) - This was my third Lucy Knisley book (after Relish and French Milk) and despite the lack of all-out foodie emphasis this time, it was definitely my favourite of the three.  This time Knisley documents her trip around Europe promoting her books, meeting up with old friends and enjoying her three loves - comics, food and culture.  There's a dash of romance and a cheerful appearance from Knisley's lovely mother, and the overall tone is light and welcoming; she's mercifully lost that whining self-pity that made French Milk so much less appealing than it should have been.  Definitely a keeper!

 

Breathing Room by Marsha Hayles (4.5*) - I picked this up on Amazon when it happened to pop up in my recommendations at the same time as one of those sudden 'last copy of the current stock' price drops.  I had never heard of it before and had no idea what to expect - but I'm glad I took a chance!  It's a YA novel set in a Minnesota TB sanatorium in 1940, and is told from the perspective of Evelyn, a 13 year-old new arrival on the girls' ward.  Although it's undoubtedly sanitised for younger readers, there are some genuinely shocking moments alongside the friendships, intrigues, medical interventions and the relentless strict monotony of the sanatorium routine.  Whenever I started to forget, something drew my attention back to the fact that these patients were literally fighting for their lives, every single day.  I cried several times, and learned a lot both from the novel itself and from the historical images, background information and research details that Hayles includes in the book.  A well-written little gem.

 

 

Aaaaand that's me all caught up, finally!

May: What I Read, What I'm Reading

Flipping 'eck, the months are just rocking by in 2014 aren't they?  It's terrifying, really.  It's actually been quite a busy month for me, heralding my valiant attempt to get up and start living again after my months of crippling depression.  The sun's finally started shining after the long damp winter, and I've been outside on a sunlounger every day it's been warm enough, absorbing Vitamin D and relaxing.  Here on the blog, life has been quiet, despite the fact that I've taken part in a readaTHON, a readaLONG, and been book shopping with Hanna. 

I'm just... not feeling the whole 'writing about what I'm reading' thing at the moment.  It's actually been quite liberating.  For the first time in YEARS, I'm reading books without stopping to scribble notes and page numbers on a piece of paper every five minutes!  My reading is more eager, knowing that I don't have to write a book report before I can fully commit to my next read.  I guess after everything that's happened, I'm just enjoying reading in the moment, living in the moment, sunbathing in the moment, without worrying about sharing these experiences online immediately afterwards.  HOWEVER, that doesn't mean I can't share the love at the end of each month, does it?  :)
  

 

~ What I Read ~

Life Support

by Tess Gerritsen

This is my second taste of Tess Gerritsen's medical thrillers, and although it didn't live up to Bloodstream (which I read and reviewed back in 2011), I still really enjoyed it.  I think part of my disappointment stemmed from the poor blurbing, to be honest.  It was made out to be a kind of bio-weapon imminent-epidemic novel (at least, that's how I read it) whereas it's actually far more contained and subtle than that.  It's more about medical ethics and the pursuit of youth than anything.  That said, it was still veeeery creepy in parts, outright shocking in others, I liked the characters, and it definitely kept me glued to the pages enough that I finished all 460-ish of them within a couple of days.  3.5 stars, tentatively recommended.

 

 

Bossypants
by Tina Fey
I'd initially decided not to bother with this book, even though it sounded funny, because I haven't really seen any of Tina Fey's work and I thought that might exclude me from great swathes of what she was writing about.  Then I read Charlotte's audiobook review and decided to give the paper version a try after all.  The blurb on the back made me laugh, which seemed to bode well!  Happily Fey has the same knack - like Caitlin Moran and Charlie Brooker - of making her writing accessible and hilarious even when the reader hasn't seen the sketches or shows being referenced, and I ended up really enjoying the insight into things like photoshoots and TV production, even when I wasn't familiar with the end results.  There's also plenty about TV comedy, family and being a woman in the public eye, which I found thought-provoking and relatable even as it was making me smile.  An easy, interesting and very enjoyable read for the summer, 4 stars!

 

 

Damned

by Chuck Palahniuk

Although this still hasn't topped my first Palahniuk - Rant - I definitely felt a sense of the familiar madness descending as I plunged headfirst into this novel.  Basically, Damned is the testimony of a thirteen year-old dead girl called Madison, who wakes up in a cell in Hell and proceeds to take Hades by storm, befriending a demon (and a bunch of other teenage inmates), defeating Hitler, finding she has a knack for telemarketing (one of the two career options in Hell - the other being dodgy porn webcam sites) and generally becoming a bit of a celebrity in the Underworld.  Meanwhile, we slowly piece together bits of her life and death, while Madison hunts for Satan to try to find out exactly why and how she ended up here.  It's all very bizarre, a bit gross, vaguely jumbled and occasionally shocking - and I raced through it, as usual.  I'll be reading the sequel in June!  Very tentatively recommended (Palahniuk is definitely not for everyone!) - 3.5 stars.
 

 

~ What I'm Reading ~

Yes, that's four books on the go again, ooooops.  I actually finished Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon yesterday - I only had one chapter left, plus the short essay in the back of my PEL edition - so that'll be the first title on my June wrap-up.  I'm also reading A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning by Gretel Ehrlich, which is a tad purple of prose at the beginning, but already extremely interesting, so hopefully it'll turn out to be a winner.  Alongside that I randomly started reading The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort, mostly because it sounds so much fun to read, all scandal and excess.  Perfect summer reading, in other words.  I haven't seen the film yet, but I will!  And finally, I'm still slowly working my way through The Pleasures of the Damned, a collection of Charles Bukowski's poetry. 

REVIEW: Confessions of a GP, by Dr Benjamin Daniels (4*)

(The Friday Project, 2010)

This book, written under a pseudonym of course, didn't get off to the best of starts - not because of the writing or the narrative style, but because of the silly editorial slips.  You all know how much I LOVE those!  Within the first few pages I had noted a 'passed' instead of 'past', the use of 'sixteen' and '16' in the same sentence, and a 'their' and 'there' left side by side, as if the incorrect one should have been edited out but wasn't.  Later on, I even stumbled across an 'illicit' instead of 'elicit'.  Really glaring mistakes, in other words.  FORTUNATELY the actual content of the book was absorbing, interesting and funny enough to redeem it - hence the four stars.

One thing I really liked about Confessions is how 'everyday' this doctor's stories are.  He's not an A+E doctor (though obviously there are one or two stories from his training days) or a surgeon, but a garden-variety GP, a man on the front line and the gateway to most NHS services.  Rather than extreme cases, this book is more concerned with giving insight into the variety of presenting complaints made to a GP on a day-to-day basis and showing how much further a GP's role goes than we might realise.  I reckon I'll be less inclined to grumble next time my doctor's running late, for example, because it's clear that not every problem can be tackled in ten minutes, and often the patients that cause appointments to run late are the most vulnerable and important of the day.

Of course, the most delightful moments in the book often stem from Daniels' stories of memorable patients, from the hilarious (an elderly lady's rectal exam had me in fits of laughter) to the tear-jerking (like when the hospital doctors conspired to reunite a lady who had been paralysed by a stroke with her beloved pet cat on her birthday, despite the strict ward rules).  What I also really liked about this book was the fact that because it's written under a pseudonym, the doctor behind it is able to be brutally honest about various political and social issues he has come up against over the years.  For example, he unleashes his contempt over a posh London yuppie who came in with a son suffering from a severe bout of measles.  The boy had never been vaccinated against any of the horrific diseases that can affect children, because his mother was convinced that she could "boost his immune system naturally" with a whole food diet.  As a reader, I was horrified at her naïvety - and Daniels was understandably even more so:

"I believe the one great achievement of modern medicine is the widespread vaccination of children.  Vaccines are cheap, safe and have saved millions of lives both here and all over the world...  There it was: measles...  As a doctor who had only practised medicine in the twenty-first century, I should never have seen this disease...  He can eat all the organic dates and wholemeal rice in the world, it won't give him immunity to measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, tetanus, meningitis C, whooping cough, haemophilus influenza and tuberculosis...  Not all children can have vaccines.  They can be harmful to children who have diseases of their immune system such as HIV or those having chemotherapy for cancer.  Previously, these children were protected because healthy children were all vaccinated and so a disease outbreak was prevented... Vaccinating isn't just about protecting your own child."

It is stories - and explanations - like this slotted alongside the funny anecdotes, bizarre patients and heartwarming moments that make the book so thought-provoking and elevate it beyond 'just another doctor memoir.'  Daniels shares his thoughts on everything from a doctor's role in society, doctor-patient relationships, the cost of NHS treatment, privatisation and the differences between hospital and general practice work, to time wasters, sick note scroungers, drug addicts, government meddling, NHS targets and the way drug reps operate.  Not only that, but he manages to do it in a way that is simultaneously funny and telling, pithy and insightful.  In the end, despite those dreadful editorial mistakes, I really enjoyed this book, and might even keep hold of it to reread sometime.  It made me think about certain elements of healthcare in a different way, and made me laugh out loud more than a few times... what more could I ask for?
 
Notable Quotables:

• "One gripe I have with alternative practitioners is that they are ultimately private.  Somebody is making money out of your illness and having only ever worked for a free at point of access health service, I find that an uncomfortable concept."
• "Patients often take it upon themselves to bring in various samples of their body fluids for my perusal.  I would like to emphasise that this is normally not appreciated.  A pot of urine is generally not too bothersome.  Often in a jam jar, I hold it to the light, stroke my chin and let out a 'hmmm'.  I like doing this as it makes me feel like an old-fashioned doctor from the nineteenth century."
• "I listen to Radio 4, grow tomatoes and lately have found myself remarking on how comfortable and practical a combination of socks and sandals is.  Until recently, I thought the Arctic Monkeys were a result of climate change.  Your children will quite rightly view me as a geek and will under no circumstances take any lifestyle advice from me."

Source: I bought this book in a mammoth box of books from Amazon, way back in May 2011.  It's one of the handful from that pile that I've now finally read!

REVIEW: Direct Red - A Surgeon's Story, by Gabriel Weston (4*)

(Vintage, 2010)

I picked this up on a whim, out of a bag of incoming books at the shop, because I've rather enjoyed other 'medical memoirs' I've read in the past.  I find them fascinating, perhaps because the medical profession is such a world apart - men and women caring for every kind of person in every kind of difficult situation, often at absolutely critical moments in their lives.  Gabriel Weston's surgical memoir is definitely the best of the bunch so far, and I can see why it was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2009.

Weston is a surgeon in a big-city English hospital.  Her book is divided into short, deftly-titled chapters, providing themes for her anecdotes and creating an interesting structure.  'Speed', for example, illustrates the importance of quick thinking and rapid action in saving lives; 'Hierarchy' delves into the power relations of a surgical ward, and 'Children' covers her time in the paediatric emergency room and children's department.  Theming each section allows Weston to move around in time and to make important points about the surgical profession without muddling her narrative, and it really worked for me.

This is a beautifully written book that rings with the precise and matter-of-fact detail that a surgeon's eye is trained to notice.  Weston's disclaimer points out that no one character or situation here is 'true' - but I don't think it really matters, because at the book's heart is a thoroughly authentic and experienced voice.  There were some heartbreaking moments and some charming ones, some lyrical descriptions and some blisteringly earthy ones.  Far from being frightened by the graphic surgical scenes, I found myself reassured by how much the human body can withstand, and how much a surgical team can do to mend it when it is broken.  Highly recommended - though if you're squeamish you should probably give this one a miss!

Source: I borrowed this book from our bookshop shelves.

REVIEW: Bloodstream, by Tess Gerritsen (4.5*)

(HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004)

This was my first Tess Gerritsen and one of my first forays into crime writing – and wow, I was impressed! Gerritsen delivers a taut medical thriller that had me glued to the pages from the start. When the teenagers of the ironically-named lakeside town of Tranquility, Maine, are gripped by a wave of murderous violence, new town GP Claire is determined to find out what’s behind the almost superhuman levels of aggression in the seemingly possessed adolescents. Casting aside the arguments of the locals, who seem to be more intent on holding onto their town’s image as a haven for tourists than saving their children, Claire must do everything in her power to find a medical cause for the crazed killing and mindless fighting - particularly since her fourteen year-old son Noah is at risk too. Is it drugs? Some local pathogen? A chemical spillage of some kind? And could it be linked to the spate of similar violence that the town has been trying to forget for nearly fifty years? Whatever it is, the race is on to put a stop to it before it’s too late…

I found the novel haunting, chilling and utterly compelling from start to finish. Every time I had to set it down to do something else, I found myself thinking about the terrible events that had happened so far, and trying to piece together all the clues to work out what was happening. It is a testament to the book’s strength that it pervaded every waking moment so thoroughly, and I found myself completely caught up in the excitement as the pages flew by, gasping with shock one moment and welling up with tears the next. At the same time, Gerritsen balances the horror of the town’s predicament with a dry humour, which was very refreshing and helped keep the story feeling grounded and human; it stopped it – and the reader – from getting too swept up in its own darkness. Highly recommended!

Source: I borrowed this book from our bookshop shelves.