One Last Thing Before I Go (migrated from bookblogger)

Posted on by marjorieseidenfeld

One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper

Here’s another fun read by Jonathan Tropper.  This story, which centers upon Silver, a divorced, ex-rock star,  middle aged man living in a sort of limbo of a life, who discovers that he has a potentially fatal illness for which he needs surgery and is deciding whether or not to have the operation.  That is, he is struggling over whether his life is actually worth saving.  In the meantime, his daughter presents a dilemma of her own, his ex-wife is about to remarry, and his father, a rabbi, tries to push him toward a decision, which brings him back into the lives of those he loves and has let down.

Tropper’s characters are almost always endearing.  His wit and sarcasm shine through and make the reader laugh out loud in spite of some very unhappy underlying story lines.  Even while Silver and his two close buddies are pathetic and sad, they make the reader laugh as they laugh at themselves.  And even when there is disappointment and resentment between father and daughter, Tropper enables the reader to see the underlying affection that still exists between them.  What Tropper is good at is balancing truly biting sarcasm with just enough warmth to pull the reader in to liking the characters enough to really need to know what happens to them.  And even while the characters are suffering, the reader laughs in spite of herself because they are really funny!

Thanks, once again, Mr. Tropper!

Midwives (migrated from bookblogger)

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Midwives:  A Novel by Chris Bohjalian

This novel, which feels like an autobiography (but isn’t), is a story about a teenage girl whose mother is a midwife brought to trial, accused of killing a patient while assisting her during a home delivery.   This story articulates well the debate between delivery in the home vs. in a hospital/birthing center.  It also speaks to the lay midwives vs. nurse midwives (are there any lay midwives anymore, in our culture of lawsuits and malpractice??).

As a physician, it was interesting for me to read this book, as I am not a fan of the home delivery.  Having seen first hand devastating outcomes from this, I feel one has to be out of her mind to be that far away from potentially life-saving procedures.  In a situation, where minutes, even seconds, count, you want to have everything close by.  The perspective of the author is much more sympathetic, however.  In spite of the bad outcome, the sympathy lies with the midwife in this account (or does it?) and it is a fascinating trial that the book leads up to.

Throughout the book, the author does not give the decision of the trial until the end, which maintains the suspense during the book.  It is a very interesting read.  I’d love to hear what others, especially non-physicians, think!

Barefoot Season (migrated from bookblogger)

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Barefoot Season, by Susan Mallery

This is an unusual story about a woman (yes, a woman) who returns home to Blackberry Island off the coast of Washington State from 10 years of army service in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  She brings home with her not only her PTSD but her previous baggage from a broken family and a broken best friendship.  She returns to an inn which she owns and has to readjust to managing and which her recently deceased mother has run down financially.  The story is an inspiring one of how she rebuilds her own personal life with the help of those around her, as she rebuilds the inn’s stability.

While the story is a bit predictable, it still has some surprises and it is written with humor and warmth.  It has many layers and the characters are lovable even while often brutally honest.  I sometimes felt that nobody really speaks quite as bluntly as these characters often do, but probably there are those who do.  (It was refreshing, actually, and sometimes I’d love to speak like that!)

A little bonus comes at the end, where the author shares recipes from the inn!

The Love Market (migrated from bookblogger)

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The Love Market by Carol Mason

Simply put, this is a fun summer read.  After the many heavy books I’ve completed this summer, this was a fun, light-hearted change.  The Love Market is a story about a woman just divorced who’s a professional British Yente (ie. runs a matchmaking service).  She rekindles an old flame of her own and it becomes a love triangle of sorts.

There is no larger meaning not did I learn about any major historical event.  But I enjoyed briefly getting to know these characters and sharing their romantic pursuits.

Sea Glass (migrated from bookblogger)

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Sea Glass, by Anita Shreve

Sea Glass is a quietly powerful novel that is centered around the crash of the stock market in 1929 and the growth of unions in its aftermath.  It is also a story of honesty and trust and how the absence of both can unravel a relationship.  The tale is told from the point of view of different characters who really are the strength of this novel.  They are endearing (or not, in some cases) and it is hard not to come to love them for the quirks that make each of them so real.   There is Honora, the main character and who is as her name suggests, tragically honorable and who just gets on with whatever it is she is dealt.  There is her neighbor and friend, the loyal Vivian, who is rich but generous and kind almost in spite of herself.  There is the young Alphonse, who stole my heart just as he’d stolen McDermott’s heart and made me want to take care of him as the tender McDermott had.  As these characters are eventually brought together by circumstance, the story becomes woven more and more tightly and the suspense of what is to come rises.   Beyond the story itself, the characters’ individual situations also enable the reader to appreciate the extremes of wealth and abject poverty that people experienced during that era (which unfortunately, sound all too familiar after our more recent stock market debacle).  The reader is very subtly pulled into the story and held there with such force that you actually want to continue to hold onto the characters after it’s over.

This is a beautiful, albeit sad, story that is beautifully written.  Read it!

The Red House

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The Red House, by Mark Haddon

When Mark Haddon wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he was using the voice of a character with Autism and so his flight-of-ideas writing style was fitting.  In this novel, about a family reunion of sorts, however, he has no excuse.  This book starts with a good idea, interesting characters, and important issues that arise between them.  Unfortunately, the writing is so choppy and confusing that it is a painful book to try to muddle through.  From paragraph to paragraph, the primary character changes and by the time the reader decodes whom the writer is speaking about, the character changes.   And after all this hard work, the story is largely bleak and dreary anyway.  There is no humor at all — not even the sarcasm and cynicism that would complement the pessimism of the book — but just a hopelessness that soaks through each character.

So, confusing and depressing — a pretty lousy combination!

Oxford Messed Up

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Oxford Messed Up  by Andrea Kayne Kaufman

This book was a disappointment.  It sounded like a fun love story about an American, Jewish girl, albeit one with severe OCD, who goes to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and meets an equally screwed up boy with whom she shares a bathroom.  They bond over their mutual obsession with the music of Van Morrison and their relationship becomes mutually therapeutic.  It’s a cute idea that unfortunately is poorly executed.  The writing is exhaustingly repetitive and each idea is drummed in ad nauseum.  There are no complex characters — they are all unidimensional and flat.  A number of subplots are left unfinished and there are many ignored opportunities to develop characters more deeply.  In addition, dialogue is limited and dull.

There was also a surprisingly offensive sentence in this book:  “While her family was not particularly observant, they were not among the reform and conservative Jews who celebrated Christmas.”   While some Jews may choose to celebrate Christmas, this sentence makes it sound as if anyone who is not Orthodox generally celebrates Christmas.  This is simply not true.  It’s a weird statement in a weird book.

If you are interested in knowing more about what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is like, you might find this book something of a psychology lesson.   I was just kind of hoping for a good summer read and this was not that book!

The Invisible Bridge

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The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer

I have a love-hate relationship with Holocaust-related books.  I hate them because they are painful and tear at my heart and I often can’t sleep at night because of them.  I love them, because they are essential to keeping the memory of what happened burning in our minds and they are often poignant and dramatic stories in and of themselves.  I have read many, although each time I am leery about starting them.  This one I put off for a long time, but it was recommended by so many people that I had to give in and take the plunge.

This one, though, was worth the heartache.  It is a brilliantly written story of a young, Jewish man named Andras who goes from Hungary to Paris in 1937 to study architecture.  While there, he falls in love and gets swept up in the politics of war.

This great literary saga truly captures the day-to-day miseries of the Second World War.  The characters are loved and lost just as they were during the war.  The separations and sacrifices are dramatic, just as they were in real life at that time.  This book is also unique both in how it goes into detail about the earlier antisemitic forces both in France and in Hungary (prior to the war) and in its description of the war in Hungary specifically, which is often omitted in Holocaust books.

In short,  The Invisible Bridge is worth every tear you will shed.

Gone Girl

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Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

This is truly the perfect summer/beach read.   The story is about a couple who are about to celebrate their 5th anniversary and suddenly the wife, Amy,  goes missing.  There are, of course, shady circumstances surrounding her disappearance and the story takes many, many very unexpected twists and turns.  This is the kind of book that when you read, your own spouse gets annoyed because every so often you’re yelling at the book (“Oh, no!” or “Seriously??”) like a bit of a fool.  But you won’t be able to stop yourself because it’s that crazy!

I had fun with this one.  The characters are very complicated and while the husband is certainly the protagonist, he’s not exactly a hero in my mind.  And until the very end, the author is relentless with the surprises!

I will admit, I did quite a bit of yelling at the book at the end.  It felt initially as if it stopped short.  But after digesting it for awhile, I realized that it was the way it had to end.

I would love for others to read this one to see if you agree!

The Dovekeepers

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The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman

Wow, is all I can say about this book.  This is a must-read for anyone with any interest in the dramatic, heroic story of Masada.  By telling the story through the voices of 3 main fictional women who live on Masada before and during the siege of the Romans, the author takes the reader through the harshness of desert life and the barbarism and the humanity that coexisted there.  As you develop an empathy for each character and their personal plight, you then go through the actual siege with them and even though the outcome is known, the story is still gripping and suspenseful.  This is to the Masada story as Mila 18 was to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the story is just as dramatic.

I learned so much from this story.  I learned about the Essenes, a sect of Judaism that existed at this time which dictated strict adherence to the Jewish laws and a strict avoidance of any violence whatsoever.  I also developed an appreciation for the mystical beliefs that still prevailed at that time.  Even though Judaism preached belief in one god, there was a lot of belief in sorcery and spirits and angels and demons as well.  Mostly, though, this story gave me, in vivid — really graphic —  detail, an idea of how harsh life in the desert is.  I felt as if I myself was tasting the sand in my food and feeling the pelting heat of the sun.  I felt a relief as they did when the rains came.

I loved this book.  I’d love to hear how you feel about it if you have the good fortune to read it!