Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: forgotten waltz

Showing posts with label forgotten waltz. 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!

2011 Top Fiction and Nonfiction

It's a daunting challenge to select the best books of the year, but Booklist has done it! They have chosen Susan Orlean's Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend as the best adult nonfiction book of 2011; their selection for best adult fiction book of 2011 is The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright. But regardless of what you're reading and how (print or electronic), we at the Community Library would like to wish you a 2012 filled with wonderful reading material.

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