Book Eight: Private Games James Patterson

I really like James Patterson. Every book of his is a lightning fast read. It helps that each chapter is less than five pages. Private Games was no exception.

A mad man has targeted the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. First the chairman of the committee in charge of logistics for the Games is found ruthlessly murdered and beheaded on the eve of the much -anticipated opening ceremony. Peter Knight takes a personal interest in the case when he discovers the victim to be his mother's fiance. During the spectacle of the ceremony that night, a popular track star is poisoned and dies. Thus begins a wild ride as Peter Knight, his employer Private Investigation, and a journalist, try to uncover the truth.

This is very typical Patterson. Fast-paced with more twists and than you would expect. The end is very come from left-field too. Really fun.

Books Six and Seven: "A Discovery of Witches" and "Shadow of Night"

This is a double-book post for a good reason. Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night are two-thirds of a trilogy whose final part hasn't yet been released. They are fantastic.

In A Discovery of Witches we meet Diana Bishop. She is an historian of alchemy doing research at Oxford. We soon learn that Diana is a member of a family of witches and that she is a reluctant witch. She uses her magic to fix a clogged sink or to repair a broken  washing machine periodically, but refuses to let her magic influence her work as a scholar. One day, she fills out a call slip for a manuscript that is unlike anything she's ever seen and is unwittingly thrown into an adventure that spans continents and millenium.

On the day Diana discovers the strange manuscript, she is being watched by the other player in this story.  Matthew Clairmont is an Oxford scientist studying DNA. He and Diana meet and quickly fall in love. Like Diana, there is more to Matthew than meets the eye. He is a centuries-old vampire. The facts of Diana's lineage and Matthew's status as a vampire mean their  love is forbidden by the terms of an  ancient agreement struck between the three non-human races/ As their love deepens, things start to happen. 

The story continues in Shadow of Night. After discovering that she can travel through time, Diana brings Matthew back to sixteenth-century England to try to find someone who can help her understand her growing magical talent. When they get there, Diana discovers that Matthew is harboring many secrets.

Part Harry Potter, part The Historian, these books are a fun escape. I am very excited to see how the story ends.

Book Five: Room

Imagine being five years old and never going outside. Imagine that all you know of the world comes from a television set. That is Jack's reality in Room. His mother had been kidnapped two years before his birth and imprisoned in a sound proof garden shed. Jack grows up in the shed and is comfortable there. Until the day his mother decides to show him more of the world. This is the story of what happens after a daring escape. I can't say too much without giving it away. Trust me, just read this book.

Book Four: The Spiirit Catches You and You Fall Down

This next book was fascinating. Part medical case history, part sociology text with a smattering of anthropology thrown in for good measure. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down chronicles one family's journey through America's broken healthcare, immigration and social service systems.

In Western medical parlance, 18-month old Lia Lee has severe epilepsy. Her seizures are often so severe as to require her to need ventilatory support and she often contracts aspiration pneumonia when she inhales stomach contents into her lungs. Her pediatricians in Merced California prescribe the standard anti-seizure medications. Lia continues to have several grand mal seizures a month. It is determined that the little girl's parent's are not giving the proper dose of medication, Lia is removed from their care  and made a ward of the State for almost a year. She is returned to her parents. Then a catastrophe strikes.

To Lia's Hmong parents, it's clear that one of their precious daughter's souls has gone missing. They do not speak English and have limited understanding of the doctor's direction as to how they should treat her seizures. They look on her epilepsy as a gift. In their culture, people with epilepsy are often marked as shaman as their seizures bring them closer to the Gods.

This is the story of what happens when two cultures clash in huge ways. It raises questions of cultural sensitivity in medicine, what it means to be a good doctor, a good parent, even shedding new light on the definition of disability. Simply incredible.

Book Three: Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter

I've always been interested in memoirs of the disability experience. From the time I was small, I have always felt a connection to the people who tell these stories. I know they get it. I'm more drawn to autobiographies of people living with a disabilities for obvious reasons. My next book broke that trend in a big way.

Schuyler's Monster:A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter is as the title implies,is written from a father's point of view. When his daughter Schuyler is born, he has no idea that her monster already lurks in her brain. When she is diagnosed with a brain condition at around two years old, he feels extreme guilt for not knowing that anything was wrong. The disorder, polymicrogyria effects Schuyler's oral speech most profoundly. She  has very little intelligible speech. When she is small, she uses some Signed Exact English,but because of some significant fine motor  delays signing wasn't going to be a good long term communication tool. Always resourceful, her  parents strike out to find her a voice. When she's about five, they discover Augmentative Alternate Communication (AAC) technology. The book tells the story of her parent's fight with several uncooperative schools to get Schuyler the device that she needs to be able to reach her full potential  It is by turns funny, sarcastic and heartbreaking. This father reminds me so much of my own. I even told my Dad about the book when I was finished.


Hooray for hard-working tenacious parents!

Book Two: Fed Up with Lunch

For the last year and a half, I have become very interested in food. My favorite shows and channels and shows are food-centric ones. At first I watched these shows dreaming of the day I could rejoin the eating world. Now that eating is no longer fun and I'd much rather do anything other than that, I watch these shows to satiate what seems to be a kind of psychological hunger. My brain wants me to feel hunger and is demanding I eat. Instead of listening to that ever insistent little voice, I watch food on TV.

As the flip side to  the obsession I've developed for good food, I've also become very interested in how food can go wrong. I've watched a lot of documentaries lately about the obesity problem. I'm also growing more and more interested in the politics of food. How everybody from the food manufacturers to grocery stores and marketing firms are either making us fat or are trying to stop us from eating ourselves to death. This interest is a lot more useful to me now than it was in the beginning. It helps me to validate that at least for now, it's alright not to want to eat. Food is bad for everyone in some way.

My second book of the year fed right into my "bad food" interest. Fed up with Lunch is the story of a school speech pathologist who decided to eat lunch with her students every school day for a year and then blog about the experience. What she found was very surprising. The food served at her school was far from the healthy fare you'd expect to be fed to kids trying to learn. Most of the food was processed to within an inch of it's life and served in slimy plastic packaging. Most of her students didn't have enough time to eat the entire meals because lunch lasted just 20 minutes. She explained that frozen fruit packed in sweet syrup counts as a fruit under the USDA's school lunch nutrition standards. She also explored how theco lack of good food in schools is compounded by the slow disappearance of physical activity built into the school day. Many schools have either done away with completely or drastically reduced gym classes and recess to accommodate shrinking budgets and shortened school hours.

The moral of the story? Pack your kids a good healthy lunch if you can. Most school food is bad food.

2013 Book One: Unaccountable:What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Healthcare

I want to get back into the habit of tracking what I read this year. Here's my first review of the year. As a newly minted professional patient I have become interested in healthcare policy and the way doctors think. Unaccountable was a very interesting look at the ways hospitals and doctors hide behind their professions and lack the same kinds of accountability measures seen in other businesses. As much as some deny it, medicine is a business. Paitents are the customer. This book explores some key issues in medicine's lack of transparency and offers concrete suggestions of how to rectify them.

Issues discussed include: medical mistakes, impaired or otherwise dangerous phyiscians,over-treatment and over-reliance on unproven technologies.

Thew bottom line is this is an important book  for anyone interested in finding out how healthcare could be better.