Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: UK

Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts

Just announced: 2012 Orange Prize shortlist

The Orange Prize, an annual UK award honoring English-language fiction by female authors, has just announced this year's list of finalists. Three American authors have made the cut: Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (a debut novel!), Cynthia Ozick for Foreign Bodies, and Ann Patchett for State of Wonder. The other three finalists are Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues, Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz, and Georgina Harding's Painter of Silence, which is not yet available in the United States. Check these books out from Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library, and decide for yourself which of the finalists deserves to be the winner!

Surprise winner for UK's Orange Prize

At age 25, Tea Obreht is now the youngest person ever to win the UK's coveted Orange Prize for fiction. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, was received across the English-speaking world to great critical acclaim and has now achieved yet another distinction with one of the UK's highest literary honors, which also comes with prize money in the amount of £30,000. The book is set in the Balkans just after their civil war, and is partly inspired by Obreht's own personal history: born in the former Yugoslavia, Obreht emigrated to the United States at the age of 12. Other books in consideration for this prestigious award included Emma Donoghue's Room, The Great House by Nicole Krauss, Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love, and Annabel by Kathleen Winter, all of which are available through your Community Library. Click here to read the full report on this year's Orange Prize from The Guardian.

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