Quick Hits

It's been a while, but I have been reading. Working 2 jobs 7 days a week makes for little time to blog. So I'm taking a few minutes to get some books down that I read this past month.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

I read this book at a weird time. I'm dealing with the anniversary of a loss, and reading about Kalanithi's journey with cancer helped heal a little. We're also going through a small scare with my mom, a 16-yr brain cancer survivor who had something new show up on her annual MRI last week. So Kalanithi's descriptions of neurosurgery and its effects were timely. Scary, but timely.

I can't say enough about how raw this book feels. I know he didn't have time to finish, but I think he really did finish it. He put down his pen prematurely for what he probably wanted, but it was right for this memoir. I appreciate Kalanithi sharing his hopes and dreams and fears with us, and I am grateful to his wife for her part of the book at the end.

The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

The narrator and main character of this novel, Lucien Bernard, is difficult to love. He has flaws, he's a bit selfish and egotistical, but he's talented and has potential for emotional growth. I've never really understood architecture, but while reading this book, I decided to look up a few things online and learned quite a bit. It was cool to imagine what Lucien designed and how it might function today.

If you want to learn a little about the French Jews during World War 2, this is a great fictional look at their story. I put it alongside City of Women and Sarah's Key if you want other fictional accounts from that period.

Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story by Nora Raleigh Baskin

9/11 is a day we'll always remember. However, how many of us remember 9/10/01? I do because something significant happened in my life that day, but I don't know if anyone else does. 9/11/01 is the last day of normalcy for most of us. So many things changed for us, and it's almost impossible to list them because the changes happened gradually. But I do remember how that day was surreal. Baskin's book retells the events of that day and the previous day through the eyes of our children. Each child in a different part of the USA with different backgrounds had his or her own experience that week. The stories they tell are fictional, but they could be stories any of us might tell. May we never forget the lives lost that day and the freedoms we lost too.