It’s been a while since I’ve written a post. The reason, mostly, is that this blog is a series of reflections, and when too much life is happening, there’s no time to reflect. That has been the case for some time now: I think I’ll need five years of therapy to digest the past year! But yesterday inspiration has come to me: I won’t write about any of that stuff, and instead, I’ll tell you about my weird taste in books. I’m mildly embarrassed by it, and besides Pink, not many people know what I read. But here you go, in case you need a reading list while you’re stuck at home in quarantine, of books you likely haven’t read. (And maybe don’t want to…)

Medical Stuff

When I was about four, I came down with the stomach flu. Afterwards, I became obsessed with the page in my “This is how your body works” book that explained puking. My parents had to read that page to me over and over, until I memorised it, and then I could be heard walking around muttering to myself “Vomiting happens when the food travels backwards all the way up from your stomach to your mouth…” My interest – in medicine, not in puking in particular – never waned, and a couple of nights ago when Pixie, now four, asked me whether his body is making more blood cells and bone and skin while he’s sleeping, I was pleased that he finds it fascinating too.

When I was about eight, my favourite show was a French children’s series about the human body called La Vie. In my favourite episode, a little boy got leukaemia and his white blood cells were battling his body instead of germs; he was then cured by chemo. At thirteen, I took a book on STDs to school: my friends and I passed it around and read it under our desks with morbid fascination, whispering about symptoms during recess. About the same time, my friend, whose dad was a surgeon, showed me a video of what must have been a keyhole appendectomy: it was magical! For my fifteenth birthday I asked my dad for medical texts.

Yet, the possibility of going to medical school never occurred to me – lack of examples in my family perhaps, or else I was scared of shift work.

Some books I’ve enjoyed (“enjoyed” might mean learned a lot, or cried a lot):

• Everything by the American surgeon and author Atul Gawande, his books are interesting and palatable even outside weirdos and med-nerds, I believe. The first one I read was Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science: a fascinating collection of case-studies around decision making in medicine.
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, also by Gawande, is a hilarious and uplifting study of growing old, losing one’s capabilities and independence, and slowly dying. (Seriously! I laughed more than I cried, and I’m not so deranged.)
• His other two books I haven’t read yet, but have just ordered and I’m sure they will be great: Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, and The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.
• The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby. I was introduced to this beautifully written book in a class on creative writing. It is a bit of a miracle that the book even exists: it’s a memoir of the author’s experience with locked-in-syndrome, dictated letter-by-letter by Bauby, while he was fully and permanently paralysed and could only blink his left eye.
• Autobiography of a Face by award-winning poet Lucy Grealy. Grealy had a third of her jaw removed at age 9 due to cancer, and the book is a candid, unsentimental memoir of how that event altered the course of her life. Not in good ways, mostly.
• The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer, by Siddartha Mukherjee. I asked an acquaintance who worked as a book editor if there’d been a book she didn’t think she’d be interested in but then really liked. She recommended this one: a sweeping overview of the history of cancer, its treatment, research, famous cases, funding… everything. A longer read, but packed with content and hard to put down.
• Classic Cases in Medical Ethics by Gregory E. Pence. I found this book abandoned on a shelf in a student office at the University of Toronto maths department. It’s a collection of accounts of the cases that have shaped medical ethics, split into four categories: end of life, beginning of life, research, and individual rights vs the public good. Euthanasia, heart transplants, brain death, abortion, involuntary commitment: you name it, it’s in there. A thought provoking and, at times, shocking review of how our thinking on human rights in the context of medicine has evolved, including philosophical and legal aspects.
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. A memoir of living, and dying, with terminal lung cancer. Perhaps not for everybody, but a worthwhile read if the concept of death doesn’t bother you too much.

Psychiatric Stuff

Not separate from medical stuff, but deserves its own category. My interest in mental illness is newer, from around my twenties when I had my own glimpse of how one looses touch with reality, and coming out of that quarter-life-crisis I went on a psychiatry book binge. Many of those books I have since donated or given away, but some favourites remain, and some I have read again and again.

• My favourite psychiatry author is probably Kay Redfield Jamison. I first read her book An Unquiet Mind, a memoir about her experience with bipolar disorder. She has a unique perspective as she is both a sufferer and clinical researcher of the illness, in addition to being a gifted and engaging writer.
• Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, also by Jamison. One of my all time favourites, though maybe not one for everybody. I’ll just say, for three hundred and eleven pages about people killing themselves, it packs a surprising amount of redemption.
• Darkness Visible by William Styron. Just barely longer than an essay, a poetic and descriptive short memoir of depression, by the author of ‘Sophie’s Choice’.
• The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog, by Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz. A lighter read, both in content and in language: a collection of striking case studies from a child psychiatrist, centred on how early life experiences shape children’s emotional development.
• Wasted: a Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher. A gritty, sometimes angry, darkly funny page-turner. It might mess with your head! I still remember my favourite line from it, where she describes the moment she fully committed to recovery: a doctor tells her she would die very soon, and she thinks to herself “Well f*ck you, then I won’t!”

Memoirs of Traumatic/Unusual Childhoods

I’m not sure where my intense interest in this subject came from, since my own childhood was so normal, almost boring: loving parents, school bullying, sibling relationships and sibling rivalry, disagreements with my parents about what age-appropriate dating involved… But I stumbled upon one of these books as part of the psychiatry book binge, and jumped right down the rabbit hole.

• The book that started it all was One Child by Torey Hayden. Hayden is a special-ed teacher and child psychologist who writes about children she has taught or treated, usually in the context of a class or group. The stories are gripping, the writing is more colloquial, less literary, but engaging. One Child is about a four-year-old girl who had lit a neighbourhood boy on fire, and landed in Hayden’s special ed class while she was waiting for a bed to open up at a residential psychiatric facility.
• After “One Child” I read everything Hayden had ever written. The one that still stands out in my memory is Ghost Girl, about a young girl who didn’t talk outside her family. Hayden’s special interest and research topic was elective mutism in children, and when eventually she got through to the child, she was told some unbelievably gruesome stories.
• The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison: a memoir about her childhood with her distant mother, and later, as a young adult, getting tangled in an affair with her long-absent father. According to the New York Times, “appalling but beautifully written”.
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, about her turbulent childhood that she and her siblings convinced themselves was an epic adventure.

Dystopias

Maybe the most mainstream of this list are dystopias. As a teenager I read and loved the classics: 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm. Recently, I’ve gotten into this genre again:

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I saw the movie before I read the book, so much of the suspense was gone, but still, a hard to put down, tense, disturbing novel. Most of the tension filters to the reader only through the everyday squabbles of a group of three childhood friends, and still, you can feel it in your bones.
• I’ve just started reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and it’s great so far.
• The Girl With all the Gifts by M. R. Carey… perhaps not so much a dystopia as a zombie apocalypse, but I’ve included it here as it’s the only zombie apocalypse book I’ve read. The beginning of the story has a “weird childhood” element to it, which I loved, it was super interesting. The middle is what I would describe as a “march with monsters”: a group of people walk, monsters come, they fight, they walk, monsters come, they fight. I hate marches with monsters, not a Lord of the Rings fan, so at this point I was disappointed with the story, but the momentum from the first part carried me through, and the end was interesting again. So much so that I’ve just ordered the prequel, The Boy on the Bridge.

Parenting Books

For most of the past four years I’ve been desperate to find the magic tricks that would get Pixie to do certain things (sleep, play independently for 3 minutes) or stop him from doing other things (screaming, stalling, throwing epic tantrums). I’ve never come across any magic, but from time to time I’ve found solace in parenting books. Mind you, I dislike most of them: the even mildly authoritarian ones are too harsh for my taste, while the more gentle/respectful ones are often preachy and make me feel like a failure of a parent. These two books though, are right in my sweet spot: principles I agree with, but without the pre-tense that a real human being would be able to live up to such principles day in and day out, in the face of a two-, three-, four-year-old. I recommend:

• How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen, by Joanna Faber and Julie King. Very practical, relatable, and hilarious. Lots of anecdotes and examples.
• Raising your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, Ed. D., for those with kids who are on the more intense end of the spectrum.

Books for Kids

For those of you with kids under five, here are some of Pixie’s favourites, past and present. I’ll stick to those which exist in English, or in multiple languages.

• Everything by Robert Munsch for 3 years and up, but especially: A Promise is a Promise (ages 3 and up) about an Inuit child’s misadventure with mythical creatures of the sea; 50 Below Zero (2 and up) about the dangers of sleepwalking when it’s very cold out; and The Paperbag Princess (2 and up) about a princess with a mind of her own. Musch has a unique, slightly absurd style that never gets old.
• The Prince and the Porker by Peter Bently (2 and up, with great lasting power): a story written in verse, about a pig who dresses up and gets mistaken for the prince. No deep moral takeaway, just great little-kid humour with a catchy rhythm.
• Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson (2 and up or even younger, and will last): a warm, imaginative story about a little boy who goes for a walk in the moonlight and creates adventures with his crayon.
• All the Moomin books by Tove Jansson (all ages). The Moomins are sweet-looking, friendly imaginary creatures, who inhabit a whimsical world of adventure and magic. There are Moomin books, comics and animated movies for all ages from babies to adults, in almost any language, so you might just get hooked on them yourself. We were introduced to them by my sister and my Finnish brother-in-law, who grew up with Moomin stories.
• The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch by Ronda and David Armitage (3 and up). A British classic about a lighthouse keeper’s fight with the pesky seagulls, who steal his scrumptious lunch every day.
• I Want my Hat Back by Jon Klassen (3 and up, fun for grownups to read in funny voices). Wonderfully deadpan, you’ll wonder why kids would even love this book, but they do.

Cookbooks

Since restaurants are closed all over the world, here are some cookbooks I love that you can get quite a bit of mileage out of.

• The Culinary Institute of America Book of Soups. For those of us heading into winter, this book has a wonderful, diverse collection of soups for every taste. There are even chilled soups for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, including my favourite chilled green pea soup. Not to mention the gruyere cheese puffs at the end, renamed “toddler crack” by our friends.
• Quick and Easy Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey. A non-intimidating, achievable first Indian cookbook for those who miss curry but don’t yet make it at home.
• Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. In case you have some time on your hands and want a bit of a project, I learned a lot from this book. For desserts, feel free to slash the sugar by 30% if you’re like me, they are very sweet.

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That is all for now, folks. I hope there’s something in here that will brighten your day or keep you entertained while everything else sucks.

What are your favourite books?