Recent Reads

I have a total love/hate relationship with my library card. I'm still amazed that I can leave the library with a purse full of great books at absolutely zero cost to me (except when I can't finish them and end up paying overdue fees) but lately the hold system has been causing me anxiety. I get excited and start requesting a lot of books, and suddenly they all become available at the exact same time. Most of the books have been new releases or popular titles, meaning I only get them for two weeks (instead of three), with no option to renew.

I've tried to increase my reading speed and efficiency to keep up with the constant influx of new material, which is definitely a positive effect, but I've had to let a few gems pass by because I just couldn't fit them into my rotation. I'm totally the dad in About Time, who used his time traveling ability just to get in more reading time. There are so many amazing books in the world that it makes me sad to think that I will never have the time to read them all.

Here are a few recent books that made the cut, all of which have been from the library:

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

The Goldfinch is the most extreme example of my recent reading-induced anxiety: I had exactly two weeks to read all 748 pages, and I actually finished with a day to spare. And then I started a new job and didn't know when I would be able to make a library run, so I kept it a few days overdue and had to pay fines anyway :|  Oh well, it was definitely worth it — there are worse things to spend my money on than a good book. This book was on every "best of 2013" list that I saw, and deservedly so. I have been much more into non-fiction lately, and this huge, sprawling novel was a great change of pace. The New York parts were my favorite (for obvious reasons), although the MET Museum bombing hit a little too close to home — I'll never look at that building the same way again. I definitely related to Theo's obsessive love of the stolen Goldfinch painting and there were nights when I just couldn't put the book down (and not only because I was on such a strict timetable). There are portions of the middle that drag a bit, but overall it's definitely worth the time investment.

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder, by Charles Graeber

With a subtitle like that, how could I NOT love this book? The Good Nurse is the true story of Charles Cullen, a nurse that may have killed as many as 300 people while working at various hospitals and care facilities on the east coast. Charlie's story is so fascinating (and very terrifying) that there's pretty much no way this book could have been bad. Sometimes the narrative style was a little too illustrative for me (there's no need to embellish here, the truth is crazy enough), but I think I got used to it after a while. It's actually terrifying to think that he was able to kill so many people and yet it took nearly 16 years before he was finally caught — and even then it wasn't an easy conviction.

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl, by John Colapinto

The story of David Reimer, who was born a boy and after essentially losing his penis to a botched circumcision was then raised as a girl, is pretty famous but I had never heard of it before reading this book. Someone familiar with the story might find this account to be redundant, but it was all completely new to me. The subjects of gender identity, medical and psychological issues are all fascinating to me, and this book covered all three in the telling of Reimer's story. The author was very sympathetic to Reimer (and no so much his doctors), but I don't think that's a bad thing, or that there should be any doubt that it was a mistake in every way to make such a drastic decision.

Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, by Anthony Bourdain

I'm not going to make many friends reading books with titles like "Typhoid Mary" while I'm eating lunch, but I can't help that I find the creepy/gross/weird side of life to be vastly more interesting than "mainstream" subjects. I didn't have high hopes for this book since I very much judge books by their covers and this one was sort of terrible. It is a stubby little book with a weird cover, written by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, yet it was everything I could have hoped for from a book about Typhoid Mary. I didn't know too many details about her story, but Bourdain chronicled them very well, oftentimes from the point of view of a fellow chef (Mary Mallon was a cook by profession). The whole Typhoid Mary affair is a great piece of New York history that I'm glad I am now more knowledgable about, and I even learned that Mary is buried right here in New York, in St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. I immediately put it on my list of must-see places, along with North Brother Island (where she was exiled) if I can ever figure out how to actually get there without being arrested (any takers?).