Book 76: Musicophilia

This is your brain.


This is your brain on music.



I actually had wanted to read Oliver Sacks' new book, Hallucinations, but it wasn't available, so I listened to this one, instead. It started out a little slow, but ultimately, I found it fascinating.



Sacks gives case studies about music and every kind of brain imaginable: the autistic brain, the amnesic brain, the depressed brain, the Alzheimer's brain, the Tourette's brain, the Parkinsonian brain, and so on.

Book 75: Call the Midwife

I've been watching the PBS series of the same name and enjoying it immensely, so when I realized Jennifer Worth had actually written and published her memoir upon which the series is based, I immediately requested it from the library.




Jennifer Worth was a midwife and nurse in the 1950s in the East End of London in the 1950s. In the preface, Jennifer mentions an article in Midwives Journal which said that midwives almost never appear in literature. Nurses and doctors appear, but midwives are invisible. Jennifer took this as a challenge and began writing.

What I liked best about the book is the way it shows all kinds of people in such an empathic light, even if Jenny finds them or their situations repulsive at first. As she learns more about certain characters she encounters, she unfailingly sees the good in them, and why they might behave in the ways they do.

Book 74: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, and is the first Nobel Prize-winning author to live and write in China. (A previous Chinese winner is a dissident living in France.) I knew I had to read some of his work.



This was funny, eye-opening, and occasionally disturbing, and overall a great read. It was written in a magical or hallucinatory realism style, so it was often pretty entertaining, and very strange.

While Mo Yan is not a dissident, his work does express a lot of social criticism, and some of his writing has been banned in China.

Book 73: The Nine

I got on a bit of a Supreme Court kick after reading the Sandra Day O'Connor book, and this actually fit the bill as a tell-all, insider's look.



I found myself wondering how Jeffrey Toobin knew that such-and-such justice wrote a handwritten note to a colleague, and knew its text. But wherever the information came from, it was fascinating. The book follows the decisions and composition of the court through the time that I was conscious of the SCOTUS: the nineties to 2007. I only regret that it stopped at 2007, because I would have loved to hear any insider information about Citizens United or the Affordable Care Act.

Book 72: Cloud Atlas

I initially started reading this, thinking we might go to the theater and watch the movie. Now I don't think we'll be seeing it--a bit too much dystopia for me to watch on screen.



I did really enjoy it, though it's not the type of book I would ordinarily read. I thought the construction of the stories was great.