About 30% of people diagnosed with breast cancer at any stage will develop distal metastasis. I am one.
It’s been a year and a half since I last posted a book review on the blog because it’s been a year and a half since I last felt strongly enough about a book to write one. Julie Frayn’s Mazie Baby is the book that got me going.* Mazie Baby...
Deliverance by James Dickey My rating: 5 of 5 stars What an amazing book! It took me completely by surprise and, without belaboring the point, it can be read as an extended metaphor for the most difficult, life-changing challenges of our lives. (Yes, I’m talking about metastatic cancer.) I’ve seen...
A Painted House by John Grisham My rating: 4 of 5 stars Not a legal thriller, which I think is a departure for Grisham. The novel, reportedly inspired by his own childhood, takes place in Arkansas in 1952. (Of note, Grisham (like me) was born in 1955.) The story is...
Bathing Elephants by Leela Devi Panikar My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is Leela Devi Panikar’s second short story anthology. Her first, Floating Petals, was published by NanaDon in 2007. Leela says about that first collection: You can sit by a river all day long just to watch what...
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a sharp, snarky, funny, intelligent, philosophical coming of age story with a bitter twist. The three teenagers at its center–one who has to go everywhere with her oxygen tank in tow, one whose leg...
Silence by Shūsaku Endō My rating: 5 of 5 stars Luminous. Numinous. Set in a distant time and place, Silence reached into my bosom and held my heart, sometimes with a caress, sometimes with a cruel and brutal grip. This account of Jesuit missionaries in Japan at a time when...
