Reading in Rondavels

I have a whole list of books that I want to discuss, but I thought it would be fun (and satisfyingly dilatory) to look back at the books I read while in Lesotho.  Sure, as a kid I had endless summers to read, checking out 10 books at a time from the library and discovering everything from Charlotte Brontë to Mary Higgins Clark, but what glory to have a year of unimpeded, unregulated reading time as as adult!  The only limit was the lack of access to bookstores, but the happy side-effect of that was picking up some books from the pile contributed by former volunteers and visitors that I probably would not have read otherwise.

So, here it is, my list from the year of magical reading:

September

True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl
Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl
The Little Book, James Selden
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

October

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
(Two books?  What happened in October?  I blame Ellen and Will's arrival and Charles Dickens's verbosity.)

November

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
The Sea, John Banville

December

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway

January

People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Twilight, Stephanie Myers (one guilty 18 hour flight from D.C. to Jo'burg)
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon

February

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfield
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Unless, Carol Shields
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Moo, Jane Smiley
White Noise, DeLillo
Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

March

Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

April

The Ambassadors, Henry James
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Net of Jewels, Ellen Gilchrist
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

May

The White Lioness, Henning Mankel
The Smell of the Night, Andrea Camillieri
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenberger
Emma, Jane Austen
Written Lives, Javier Marías

June

A Homemade Life, Molly Wizenberg
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos

And....then apparently I stopped keeping track.  So close to the end!  54 books, not counting whatever it was I read in June, July, and August.

Utterly subjective ratings:
Highly recommended (even if you're living somewhere a bit more hectic than a rondavel on the edge of Mokhotlong)
Fun (if you have close to unlimited reading time)
Skip it (would kind of resent having to read this again)
I suppose all of the others would fall somewhere in between.

Cutting for Stone: Brief Review

The recently-read books are piling up and inducing guilt, so I'm just going to post a quick couple of thoughts about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  We read this for our book club, suggested by one of our members whose family is peppered with medical professionals.  Verghese is himself a doctor, and shares a similar background as his main character, Marion Stone, a child of Indian and British descent who is born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrates to the United States to complete his medical training.  The other details of Marion's life are, one hopes, a little more fantastical than Verghese's.

Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born to an Indian nun at Missing Hospital, where she and their supposed father, the surgeon Thomas Stone, both worked.  The twins are connected at the head, and their traumatic labor causes the death of their mother.  Stone, unable to cope, flees Ethiopia.  And yes, I just spent a whole post complaining about bildungsromane, but this book is going to have to make me hedge a little.  While a large portion of the novel is concerned with Marion's coming-of-age,  Marion always seems to be looking back on his childhood in a believable way, and Verghese does not particularly attempt to make Marion's voice the voice of a child.  Additionally, Verghese establishes the other, adult, characters in such a compelling and warm way that Marion's voice never really grates.  Hema, the twin's adoptive mother, and Ghosh, their stand-in father, carry a large portion of the first half of the book with their combination of strength and limitations.  Hema and Ghosh are both also doctors, and somewhat reluctant surgeons, so the whole book is infused with the air of the hospital.

We discussed in our book club the many "coincidences" and fantastic plot twists, but decided that in some way the book makes you buy into the possibility of such happenings.  Perhaps the emphasis on science and medicine actually helps this buyability--Marion is not an irrational man, so his retelling of the story, filled though it might be with improbabilities, seems trustworthy and reasonable. 

Though I had a hard time getting away from the prejudice that Verghese writes well "for a doctor," I think it would be more just to say that Verghese writes well, period.  His descriptions of Ethiopia and the life of the hospitals both at Missing and in New York are revealing and often beautiful, and most of his characters are finely drawn.  The exception to this, I would say, is the character of Genet, Marion's love obsession throughout the book.  Verghese never really seems to fully access insight into her motivations or Marion's attraction to her.

These thoughts are getting longer than originally intended, but, hey, this is a long book.  More reviews to come soon!