What Susan's Reading Now (And Why)

Welcome, Chairman Ann, to the wonderful world of eBooks. We’ll expect a pithy comparison of Kindle to Nook by the end of next week, at the very latest. I put my wordy (per usual) review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in my response to Bethie’s last post, so I’ll move on to current books.

The book group is doing The Help next week. It’s waiting for me on my Kindle in audio form, but I’m doing my usual procrastinating, so haven’t started it yet. In the meantime, I have been bouncing around reading Books of Consequence and Books of Inconsequence, alternately.


Books of Consequence: A very interesting novel with a nonfictional feel called Left Neglected, by Lisa Genova. The author has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard and is obviously putting her studies to good use. The basic bones of the story have to do with the impact of a traumatic brain injury on the quintessential Type-A superwoman: workaholic, mother of 3, torn between the demands of both roles and convinced she’s failing at both. She crashes her car on a rainy morning as she’s on her way to work, late for a meeting and held up by a traffic jam; to make good use of her time, she fishes out her cell phone to review her email, loses control of her car, and wakes up 8 days later, with a good chunk of her right brain damaged. She has a condition called “left neglect” (scientists among us: I think this is sometimes called Hemispatial neglect, also called hemiagnosia, hemineglect, unilateral neglect, spatial neglect, unilateral visual inattention,[1] hemi-inattention [1] or neglect syndrome, according to the Gospel of Wikipedia). She can no longer see anything to her left and cannot feel anything on the left side of her body. Otherwise, her sight is fine. It’s just that there’s only half the field to see, and it’s unlikely things will improve. She can’t read because she sees only half the page, if people stand on the left side of her hospital bed, she can’t see them, when she puts on makeup, she only puts it on the right side of her face because there IS no left side to see. When she forces herself to position her left arm so it’s within the right side of her sight line, she recognizes things like her wedding ring or her watch, but she can’t figure out why they are on someone else’s arm/hand. The book was recommended to me by someone who thought it sounded like what has happened to my dear friend Ben—Bethie, you may have missed this but he had a massive stroke last fall and now is “blind” except that he can see perfectly well in the instant he’s looking but the messages don’t reach his brain, so in a second, it’s gone. He can’t retain anything he’s seen. Dorothy and Garrett are turning up this weekend, and as my local medical consultants since Bethie left us behind, will know whether this diagnosis is accurate or not. In the meantime, and unrelated to Ben’s situation, it’s a fascinating book.


Books of Inconsequence: I have mentioned that the library’s stash of eBooks and audio books is fairly limited at the moment, so I am kid of stuck with books I might not be desperate to read. Last week, I read Blacklist by Sara Paretsky; haven’t read her in years. It was entertaining, not great. And then I read a young-adult book written by Wendy Lichtman, someone I met briefly when I was 18 and she was the best college friend of my high school best friend. Fast forward 47 years and she reappears as a Berkeley writer. She's doing a series of books called Do the Math with a 14-year old girl who solves mysteries based on mathematical principles. Pretty entertaining—did we not predict that the next genre of mysteries would be mysteries with pre-teen detectives? We are so on-trend, as Nina Garcia would say, condescendingly.


The worst Book of Inconsequence is Barbara Walters’ autobiography (hey, it was free), called Auditions. Don’t even bother. The End.


(editorial note:  written by Susan, posted by Ann)