Top Ten Tuesday: Hidden Gems

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books that are great that don't get as much love as they should. I used Goodreads to get a sense of what's less rather than more popular, so here are ten books you may not have heard of that are pretty great!

The Big Rewind: I loved this debut light-hearted murder mystery with a romantic twist. It was delightful and I will continue to talk about how much I enjoyed it forever!

Valley of the Moon: Time-travely romantic drama does not sound like the kind of thing I would like at all, but I found it charming and a very pleasant read!

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Like so many other lady people, I've been fascinated for years by Anne Boleyn and this nonfiction examination of the stories told about her was really interesting!

City of Thieves: This coming-of-age buddy adventure story set during the siege of Leningrad from one of the Game of Thrones showrunners is short and in many ways predictable but so well-told it packs a powerful punch anyways.

The Guineveres: I thought this novel about the lives of four young women, all named Guinevere, that end up in Catholic convent for different reasons was lyrical and powerful and was disappointed that it never took off the way I thought it would because it's great!

A Leg To Stand On: I am always here for Oliver Sacks, and this book, about his own experience of suffering an alienation from his leg after a horrible hiking accident, has the kind of wisdom and compassion that are a hallmark of his writing.

The Man Without A Face: This nonfiction work by Masha Gessen about the rise of Vladimir Putin feels incredibly prescient and relevant to our times.

So Big: Giant is Edna Ferber's novel that got made into the big splashy Hollywood movie (I haven't read it yet, but I have a copy waiting!), but this one won the Pulitzer and its testament to inner strength and finding the joy in life is beautiful and powerful.

The Butcher's Daughter: If you like Tudor-era historical fiction but want to get out of the palaces and into the villages, this smart, insightful book about a young woman who becomes a nun and then has to figure out what's next after the Reformation would be an excellent choice.

Stay With Me: You read the back, about a woman in Nigeria whose traditional in-laws push her husband to take a second wife when she fails to get pregnant, and think you know where this is going. But it twists and turns far deeper than ever expected.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Hidden Gems

Book 129: A Leg To Stand On

"And in that instant, I no longer knew it. In that instant, that very first encounter, I knew not my leg. It was utterly strange, not-mine, unfamiliar. I gazed upon it with absolute non-recognition...The more I gazed at that cylinder of chalk, the more alien and incomprehensible it appeared to me. It seemed to bear no relation whatever to me. It was absolutely not-me—and yet, impossibly it was attached to me—and even more impossibly, 'continuous' with me." 

Dates read: February 26-March 2, 2017

Rating: 7/10

When I was in college, I quite often used a shortcut to get back to my apartment after a night at the bars. It was a short, dark path than ran next to a parking garage. I almost never saw anyone back there. A few times I saw some homeless people, but no one ever tried to stop me or talk to me. Thinking back on it, it sounds like the beginning of a horror film: a young, drunk, small college student walks down a secluded path into the dark. But it never occurred to me to be afraid. And, obviously, nothing ever happened.

We often feel impervious to danger until something happens to frighten us. In his memoir A Leg To Stand On, Oliver Sacks recalls a time in his life that began with a hike on a solo trip to Norway. Sacks was an adult man who frequently traveled and was in excellent physical condition, so the idea of going for a hike alone didn't phase him in the least. It wasn't until a chance encounter with a bull during the hike lead to a fall that drastically injured one of his legs that he realized how very precarious his situation was. The leg was incapable of bearing any weight. No one knew where he was. It would get dangerously cold at night, and the path was little-traveled enough that he very well might not be found until it was too late. Somehow, miraculously, he managed to get himself back down the hill where he was discovered by locals. But that was just the beginning of his tale.

After surgery to repair the grave damage to his leg, he woke up to feel as though that leg wasn't really his. It was like the opposite of phantom limb syndrome: instead of feeling as though a limb that had been amputated was still there, Sacks felt like his existing limb wasn't a part of his body. His recovery, both from the underlying injury and the neurological symptoms, make him, for the first time since he'd become a doctor, a patient. He finds himself feeling meek and helpless, and even though his situation wasn't contagious, he's treated as though his suffering might be.

Eventually, he did recover, and continued to be physically active and practice neurology and write books. But it's not hard to imagine that this experience of being a patient helped inform the compassion in his work. Writing case studies is a delicate balance: there can be an exploitative edge to it, the feeling that the writer is mining suffering for their own pecuniary gain. But for my money, Sacks' works never come off that way. The things that come across clearly are his endless curiosity for how the brain works, how symptoms can be treated, and a respect for the fundamental humanity of the people he worked with and tried to help. Which is why I've been such a big fan of his books, and why I'm a little sad each time I finish one because I know it means there's one more that I'll never again get to experience for the first time. I found this one in particular a fascinating medical memoir, and a moving meditation on the experience of being a patient. I would definitely recommend it, especially for anyone who works in the medical field.

Tell me, blog friends...have you ever realized how unsafe something you did unthinkingly was?

One year ago, I was reading: If We Were Villains

Two years ago, I was reading: We Need To Talk About Kevin

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Book 129: A Leg To Stand On

A Month In The Life: March 2017

 March brings the first tentative steps into spring (only to be followed, of course, by several backwards steps retreating into winter) and this year, somehow even more snow and rain into the general Reno area (we're having the wettest water year on record yet). Let's see what else it brought, shall we?

In Books...

• A Leg To Stand On: Oliver Sacks is one of my all-time favorite authors, and his memoir about the experience of recovering from a gruesome leg injury and finding himself as a patient rather than a doctor is, as always, touching and insightful and wise. 
• Die A Little: I've heard so many raves about Megan Abbott's work, and this is her debut, a female-driven Los Angeles noir. It's a quick, enjoyable read that made me look forward to the other books of hers that are living on my Kindle!
• Housekeeping: Our book club selection for March, I found Marilynne Robinson's writing exquisite, but the book's ultimate failure to develop much in either the way of plot or compelling characters undermined it. 
• City of Thieves: Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff is also a writer himself, and this book, about two young Russian men who get sent on a journey for eggs during the starve-out siege of St. Petersburg, was something I didn't expect to get too much out of but LOVED.
• Green Girl: I found Kate Zambreno's novel about a confused young woman from the US living in London and trying to recover from a shattering relationship and the loss of her mother, to be both alienating and very difficult to put down.
• Chemistry: I was lucky enough to score an ARC of Weike Wang's debut, which was one I was especially looking forward to, but although it was an enjoyable enough tale of an overachieving daughter of Chinese immigrants who hits pause on her Ph.D., it didn't quite live up to my expectations.
• Stranger In A Strange Land: This is a sci-fi classic, but I found it pretty dull, honestly. A standard messiah-sacrifice story with lots of long passages of exposition about religious/philosophical beliefs and I had a hard time keeping myself interested, honestly. 
• The Love Song of Jonny Valentine: This story about a Justin Bieber-esque 12 year-old pop star touring and starting to push back against the control of his momager develops a really great voice for its protagonist, who is both touchingly innocent and profoundly jaded. Never quite great, but very solid.

In Life...

• Still in session! Until June, this is going to be essentially everything in my life because I do nothing but work all day and spend all weekend recovering and we're not even halfway through yet and it already feels like it's been about a century. We just got through the first major deadlines (bill introductions), with the next one upcoming in two weeks (first house committee passage), so it's definitely going at full tilt.

One Thing:

• This probably makes me a bad American, but I love royalty...the number of books about royals on my shelves is a large one. So this piece from The Guardian, about what will happen when the Queen passes, was completely fascinating. Logistics!

Gratuitous Pug Picture:

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A Month In The Life: March 2017