Monica Dickens

A very lovely edition of an out of an print writer, Monica Dickens. It's a coming of age story of a young girl that is mostly forgettable and belongs in a certain time and place. Not bad, just filler. When I was young I had read her children's books about a hippyish family with lots of animals . I think they were called World's End. They had a monkey and the enviable absent parents that all great children's literature needs. No hippies and no monkeys in Mariana. She could have used them.

The Emperor of All Maladies

I am so impressed with myself that I actually read this. It's a lot more serious than I am used to and at times a lot more technical than I could manage. But I made it. (Words will not do justice to the joy I experienced when I realized the last 100 pages were footnotes!) 

It's described as a biography of cancer. In the beginning cancer is attributed to black bile and related to the humors, people just die. Eventually someone comes up with the idea to cut out the cancers. It evolves to the point that breast cancer was treated solely with radical mascectomies “an extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest.”. Ouch.

Sadly the more people progress in knowing about cancer the harder it was for me to follow so I can not cite any of the subsequent genetic and chemical breakthroughs that happened with much authority. Things get better though.

He is a very earnest writer, undoubtedly an excellent doctor and sounds like a very decent human being. Certain passages can bring tears to your eyes. He writes about cancer being a foreign country. “But surely,” he writes, “it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from that strange country— to see them so very close, ­clambering back.”

Barbara Vine

It is odd that I read two mysteries in a row but---there it is---it's exactly what I just did. Although come to think of it ----this was not a mystery. It was more of a psychological  thriller type of thing, although low on thrills and high on psyche. Barbara Vine is a very good writer but to me it just seems like you read it until it's over and then you read something else. It's an awful lot of writing and foreshadowing and examining of motives and thoughts and then it's over.