Two weeks of planes, trains and automobiles gave me plenty of time to read. Here’s what I liked:
My sister Liza works in medicine and had two copies of Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm and so gave me one. Marsh is a British neurosurgeon and a very good storyteller. He brought me inside the heads and heart of his patients and himself and into the managed lunacy of England’s socialized healthcare system. There’s never enough beds, and he can’t operate on someone who doesn’t have a bed. A great read.
I’d never read Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and if you haven’t either, don’t be shy. Published in 1983, the story holds up. It’s a novel 
about a marriage falling apart, based on Ephron’s failed marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein. Set among droll New Yorkers and Washington power brokers, the book is both very very funny (‘natch) and achingly sad. A swift read. Loved it.
I was quickly hooked by the teenage character in Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, (1951) one of the oddest reads ever. Natalie Waite is 17 and on her way out of her parent’s home, to college. As her overly-intelligent parents bicker, Natalie has a different soundtrack running through her head: she’s 
being questioned by a policeman. “Confess, she thought, if I confess I might go free.†Later, she is the unwilling sex partner to a houseguest, but buries the event. “I will not think about it, it doesn’t matter…I don’t remember, nothing happened.†Life at college is similarly unsettling. Is all of this happening, or is Natalie losing her mind? I enjoyed this smart, spooky read.
Another creepy read was Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, a character 
that will live on in my head for a very long time. In a rundown house, motherless Eileen is a slovenly young adult who cares for her alcoholic father. She works in a prison for teenage boys and pines for one of the guards. When a beautiful counselor arrives at the prison, menace follows. Moshfegh unspools this uncomfortable tale slowly, brilliantly.
I’m always looking for a New York read and lapped up Kristopher 
Jansma’s Why We Came to the City, which follows five college friends as they marry, die, grieve, grow up. Nicely told.
Happy Spring! Next post: Eating our way through Austin, Houston, New Orleans.