With two weekend trips that involved air travel and a week in bed with a respiratory flu, I read a lot.
Here goes: Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is a seamless memoir of a young neurosurgeon’s last year. Woven into his dire situation is the story of his life: a happy, active Arizona childhood, his quenchless thirst for literature and learning, his reasons to go into medicine, a repaired marriage, the decision to father a child. We are with him as he becomes a doctor — his mistakes, his triumphs — and with him as he becomes the patient. He is so alive on the page I still can’t picture him dead. 
This is a book I will press into the hands of others. It’s perfect.
Because my father died from the long-term effect of blows to the head, I have an interest in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease to the brain found in football players, boxers, ice hockey players and others. There I was in the Phoenix airport with nothing to read, so I picked up Concussion, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. (Will Smith stars in the movie.)Â Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant, is a forensic pathologist working in a Pittsburgh morgue. He handles the 
autopsy of a troubled young Hall of Fame football player: how did he end up like that? Omalu decides to study the player’s brain, and discovers CTE. This is the story of Omalu standing up to our country’s entrenched racism and the NFL. Cheesy storytelling, fascinating tale: I couldn’t put it down.
A summer friend pressed me to read Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, saying it was the future of literature. Hmm. I will say it is a 
minutely observed story of a mostly grueling life in the Midwest. As a neglected toddler, Lila is stolen from her family and raised by a vagabond named Doll. They traipse the country, working on farms, in homes, in hotels. When Doll stabs and kills a man that may be Lila’s father, the two are separated. Lila settles in a shack outside a small town in Iowa, and wanders into a church to stay dry. From there, life changes for the better. She and the minister marry (a sweet love), but Lila is forever outside society. She’s odd; she’s always dreaming and talking of moving on. I didn’t appreciate Robinson’s layered storytelling until later, when I picked up…
Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, expecting a great read. Nope. A daughter and mother reunite in a New York City hospital room and share gossip from the rural town in Illinois from which Lucy escaped. It’s an airless read; I didn’t care about anyone back home and Lucy won’t reveal the why for the troubled marriage she’s in. She pines for her young daughters, but we don’t get a sense of how they live, the day to day life Lucy is missing. No one in this story is fleshed out. This book got (undeserved) rave reviews. Strout wrote Olive Kitteridge, the portrait of a difficult woman and the town she lives in; it’s among the best fiction I’ve ever read. Lucy Barton is a pale effort.
From there I read Chicago authors, which I study for work. Abby Geni’s The Lightkeepers is a sturdy and dark first novel, though I’m still not sure who was pulling the strings. The book is set on a group of mostly uninhabited islands off the coast of California. Its only residents are scientists studying the area’s wildlife. When a photographer arrives to live among them, menace follows: bullying, sexual assault, drowning, death by birds, slips that end in broken limbs. By accident, or by design? Geni vividly describes the islands’ landscape, its creatures, the scientists’ way of life. A rich and terrifying read.
Finally, I savored Vessels: A Love Story, Daniel Raeburn’s Chicago-based memoir about loss and love and becoming an adult. Raeburn and his wife, a potter, suffer a miscarriage and then a stillborn child, whose absence informs their lives. They go on to have two girls and struggle with how to tell those girls about their first born, whose ashes are stored in a plugged vase that is sometimes in a closet, sometimes on a shelf. Raeburn gets right both the joy and exhaustion of raising children, the messy business of marriage. My only complaint: I wanted more, especially about his friends.
And now, for all you grammar nerds, a funny Valentine’s Day infographic  from Grammerly. Enjoy!
