August 1 (BC Day), 2022
It continues to be a challenge to find those books that pull me in and hold me in their grip, but I’ve been fortunate to stumble upon a few in the past months. Today I finished one: A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain, by Sara Manning Peskin
Peskin is a brilliant and caring neurologist who also knows how to write and to tell a compelling story. She approaches the brain with a narrative outlook, telling us the story of the cells and molecules and DNA of the brain, and how those provide us with “empathy, memory, language, and other critical parts of our identities” and also what can go awry, robbing us of those traits. Woven into the science are the extraordinary stories of the extraordinary individuals who made the discoveries over the centuries to shed light on these complex intricacies of our anatomy. Equally powerful and gripping are the personal stories Peskin tells of the victims of an array of neurological disorders. She clearly won the trust of the individuals and their families, and shared those stories with compassion and respect. I learned so much (which I’ll try to remember), and loved reading this.

Another good find was Emma Hooper’s Etta and Otto and Russell and James:
A moving and gripping book, but also hard to fathom, and hard to summarize. I have no turned down pages to help, only a happy memory of a Canadian story (both character and landscape-weaving in a vast and diverse array of individuals and an impressive swath of the landscape, too). Not a perfect book or story, sometimes a bit convoluted and tough to follow, but still well worth reading.

And another, given to me by a special student back in 2019, and waiting for me since: Florinda Donner, Shabono. I found this one intriguing on so many levels. It’s not fiction, though the name of the people, place, and society are fictionalized to protect their privacy.
This is the account of a tribe of the Yanomama Indians who live between Venezuela and Brazil. Donner is an anthropological field researcher who traveled there to learn and study the ways of their curing practices, which were intriguing. She finds her way into a community, is accepted, cared for, and taught their ways and language until she is a skinny white version of them, though never, according to her, fluent in their language. She’s taken in by two young wives, who become her sisters and don’t let her out of their sight. A recurring theme is the different perspective towards time and memory and mortality.

Finally, there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr finished in April. A giant book (600+ pages!) that sat on our bookshelf for ages, and which I almost gave up a few times. Then I had one of those insomnia nights, and after 3 hours of reading, I was committed to finishing. Doerr is brilliant, and a beautiful writer, but there’s a staggering number of threads to this story: not only complex individuals, each with her or his own context, but also leaping from ancient times into the future, from Constantinople (1452) to space (2146). There’s the two world wars and Korea, the current pandemic (there’s even a character called Omicron!!). It’s brave and brilliant, but was close to too much for my poor brain. I became attached to a few characters, but had a hard time, as their their chapter would end, being catapulted into another world.
Doerr was himself pushing through COVID as he writes this, and he cares deeply about things I care about too: finding the good and kindness in humanity, connections with our natural world, and yes, libraries and books and story.