Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: Librarian Picks

Browse our "Librarian Picks" bookshelves, where every book has been thoughtfully selected by one of our librarians. This month's picks feature the following:

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Traces the author's adventurous trek along the Appalachian Trail past its natural pleasures, human eccentrics, and offbeat comforts. (Publisher Summary)

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

The award-winning author of Everything Is Illuminated exposes common misconceptions about how animals are slaughtered and processed for food, drawing on sources from popular culture to national tradition to reveal how the meat industry misrepresents its practices. (Publisher Summary)

Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

In an exploration of the limitations of language in understanding and describing the Holocaust, the award-winning, best-selling author of The Life of Pi presents a tale about a novelist and a taxidermist who collaborate on a play about a donkey and a howler monkey who have survived a genocide. (Publisher Summary)

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

Librarian Picks

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