Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: blue nights

Showing posts with label blue nights. Show all posts

Another Top 10 Books of 2011 List

Want a second opinion to the New York Times top 10 books of 2011 list? Here's the top 10 picks of the year (including both fiction and nonfiction) from a Shelf Awareness freelance book reviewer (read the full article here.) Only one book made it onto bost 'Top 10' lists: Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, about a disasterously thrown baseball that affects the lives of five people in surprising ways.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach *
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier
Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman
Volt by Alan Heathcock
Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert
History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

The Other Walk: Essays by Sven Birkerts

Grief and a mother's guilt in Didion's touching new memoir

Celebrated author Joan Didion has released a new memoir brimming with emotion. In Blue Nights, Didion "reflects on her grief about her daughter's death, her guilt about her choices as a mother, and her fear of mortality," according to Goodreads, which has named this book a "Mover and Shaker" for the month of November. Didion's 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, won the the National Book Award in nonfiction and is also worth checking out. Keep your tissues handy!

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