kidzdoc hits the reset button in 2021, Part 4

I'll continue to use this photo of Lisbon for this thread, as I plan to be there during the last week of October and the first week of November. My reading focus for the next two months will be books from this year's Booker Prize shortlist, and ones for the third quarter Reading Globally theme, The Lusophone World: Writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language.

    

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Dr Jason Karlawish
Listen: How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations by Dr Kathryn Mannix
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer

Books read in 2021:

January:
1. A Promised Land by Barack Obama
2. The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
3. Summerwater by Sarah Moss

February:
4. Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
5. Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement by Jonathan M. Berman

March:
6. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
7. Fever by John Edgar Wideman
8. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

April:
9. Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden
10. Shelter: Notes from a Detained Migrant Children's Facility by Arturo Hernandez-Sametier
11. Some Days by María Wernicke
12. The Pear Field by Nina Ekvtimshvili
13. If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani
14. Wretchedness by Andrzej Tichý
15. At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
16. The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard
17. The Society of Reluctant Dreamers by José Eduardo Agualusa
18. Candy-Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars by Inua Ellams

May:
19. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
20. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer by Vivian Maier
21. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez
22. Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

June:
23. Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley
24. Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch
25. The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto
26. Native Dance: An African Story by Gervásio Kaiser
27. The Moor of Sankoré by Gervásio Kaiser

July:
28. The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida
29. The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam
30. Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki
31. Anos Ku Ta Manda by Yasmina Nuny
32. The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans by Jonathan Scott Holloway
33. Cape Verdean Blues by Shauna Barbosa

August:
34. The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat
35. The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
36. The Promise by Damon Galgut

September:
37. A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
38. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

October:
39. An Island by Karen Jennings
40. The Visit by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
41. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
42. The Black Pages by Nnedi Okorafor
43. 2043...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be) by Nisi Shawl
44. These Alien Skies by C.T. Rwizi
45. Ennemonde by Jean Giono
46. The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
47. Clap Back by Nalo Hopkinson
48. The Greedy Barbarian by Kakwenza Rukirabashaija
49. We Travel the Spaceways by Victor LaValle
50. Bewilderment by Richard Powers

November:
51. The End of Memory: A Natural History of Aging and Alzheimer's by Jay Ingram
52. No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute by Lauren Elkin

21 Classic Works of Fiction by Authors from the African Diaspora from the Shelves to Read in 2021

Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa
American Hunger by Richard Wright
Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat ✅
Fever by John Edgar Wideman ✅
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
The Fisher King by Paule Marshall
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chestnutt
In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming
The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka
Maps by Nuruddin Farah
Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill
A State of Independence by Caryl Phillips
Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau
Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray

21 Non-Fiction Books from the African Diaspora to Read in 2021

Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. ✅
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.
Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch ✅
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson ✅
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne ✅
Frantz Fanon: A Biography by David Macey
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young
Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education by Mychal Denzel Smith
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudine Rankine
The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Of Africa by Wole Soyinka
Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America by Stacey Abrams
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis
A Promised Land by Barack Obama ✅
Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream by Mychal Denzel Smith
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis

Black Male Writers for Our Time

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: Friday Black ✅
Jeffery Renard Allen: Song of the Shank
Jamel Brinkley: A Lucky Man ✅
Jericho Brown: The Tradition ✅
Marcus Burke: Team Seven
Samuel R. Delany: Dark Reflections
Cornelius Eady: Hardheaded Weather ✅
Percival Everett: Glyph
Nelson George: City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success
James Hannaham: Delicious Foods
Terrance Hayes: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin ✅
Brian Keith Jackson: The Queen of Harlem ✅
Major Jackson: Roll Deep
Mitchell S. Jackson: Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family ✅
Yusef Komunyakaa: The Chameleon Couch
Rickey Laurentiis: Boy with Thorn
Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom
James McBride: Deacon King Kong
Shane McCrae: In the Language of My Captor ✅
Reginald McKnight: He Sleeps
Dinaw Mengestu: All Our Names ✅
Fred Moten: The Service Porch
Gregory Pardlo: Digest
Rowan Ricardo Phillips: Heaven
Darryl Pinckney: Black Deutschland ✅
Brontez Purnell: Since I Laid My Burden Down
Ishmael Reed: Juice! ✅
Roger Reeves: King Me
Maurice Carlos Ruffin: We Cast a Shadow
Danez Smith: Don't Call Us Dead
Colson Whitehead: The Nickel Boys ✅
Phillip B. Williams: Thief in the Interior
De'Shawn Charles Winslow: In West Mills
George C. Wolfe: The Colored Museum
Kevin Young: Book of Hours

Recommended Black American Women Authors

Elizabeth Alexander
Osa Atoe
Toni Cade Bambara
Gwendolyn Brooks
Octavia E. Butler
Lucille Clifton
Edwidge Danticat: Brother, I'm Dying ✅
Toi Derricotte: The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey ✅
Bridgett M. Davis
Vievee Francis
Renee Gladman
Yona Harvey
Carolivia Herron
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God ✅
N.K. Jemisin
Gayl Jones
Tayari Jones: Leaving Atlanta ✅
Adrienne Kennedy
Jamaica Kincaid: Autobiography of My Mother ✅
Ayana Mathis
Shara McCallum
Toni Morrison: Beloved ✅
Harryette Mullen
Gloria Naylor
Lynn Nottage
Morgan Parker
Tennessee Reed
Sonia Sanchez: Does Your House Have Lions? ✅
Safiya Sinclair
Tracy K. Smith
Martha Southgate
Natasha Trethewey: Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir ✅
Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing ✅
Phyllis Wheatley

Literature and nonfiction by contemporary Latinx authors, as recommended by Myriam Gurba, author of the memoir Mean:



Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera ✅
Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli ✅
Black Dove by Ana Castillo
Bless Me, Última by Rudolfo Anaya
The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez
Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester
Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga
A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande
The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli ✅

Also: Mean by Myriam Gurba ✅

2021 Booker International Prize Shortlist:

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, translated from French by Anna Mocschovakis ✅
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell ✅
The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale
The War of the Poor by Éric Vuillard, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti ✅
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated from Spanish by Adrian Nathan West



2021 Booker Prize Longlist:

*A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam ✅
Second Place, Rachel Cusk
*The Promise, Damon Galgut ✅
The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
An Island, Karen Jennings ✅
A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson
*No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood ✅
*The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed ✅
*Bewilderment, Richard Powers
China Room, Sunjeev Sahota
*Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead
Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford

*chosen for the Booker Prize shortlist

Medicine, Public Health and Science:

Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement by Jonathan M. Berman ✅
Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky
Can Medicine Be Cured? The Corruption of a Profession by Seamus O'Mahony
Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden ✅
Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer, MD
Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul by Roy Porter
How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS by David France
I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre
Love Thy Neighbor: A Muslim Doctor's Struggle for Home in Rural America by Ayaz Virji, MD
Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors & Lunatics by Roy Porter
Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky
Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing by Victoria Sweet, MD

Reading Globally 2021

Q1 — Notes from a Small Population: 40+ places with under 500,000 inhabitants
Q2 — Childhood
Q3 — The Lusophone World
Q4 — Translation Prize Winners

  

Books by Contemporary British Female Novelists:

The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
Winter by Ali Smith (I've already read Autumn)
Spring by Ali Smith
Summer by Ali Smith
Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss
Summerwater by Sarah Moss ✅
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Books to read in September (subject to change):

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History by Paul Farmer, MD
The Gurugu Pledge by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith
Rainy Season by José Eduardo Agualusa
Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto

Book #35: The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize



My rating:

The setting for this novel is Tiger Bay, a dockside neighborhood in the current Welsh capital of Cardiff that is filled with a rich blend of people from several dozen countries across the world. One of its residents was Mahmood Mattan, a man in his late 20s who was born in British Somaliland and emigrated to Cardiff after the end of World War II, in order to pursue a better life in the Mother Country whose ideals he admires and embraces. Mattan was gainfully employed as a longshoreman and a seaman upon his arrival in Cardiff, but after he suffered an injury he took on odd jobs that did not pay well. He wooed and married a young Welsh woman with whom he had three young boys, but after he became an unreliable provider and engaged in petty crime his wife divorced and left him, although she still loved Mahmood and believed in him.

Mattan was a man of few words, who was inscrutable and untrustworthy, and he had no close friends, even amongst his fellow Somali.

On 6 March 1952 a shopkeeper, Violet Volacki, was brutally murdered in her shop by a man who appeared to be Somali, according to witnesses, although no one saw the crime take place. The police engaged in a sweeping manhunt, and on the basis of a shoddy investigation, his past criminal history, and unreliable witnesses motivated by a sizable reward, Mattan was arrested and charged with the murder. He is outraged at being accused of a violent crime he did not commit, yet certain that the British justice system, which he views as fair and unbiased toward all of its citizens, will quickly exonerate him.

The case comes to trial, to Mattan’s surprise, but he remains confident that the true murderer will be found by the authorities, and that he will soon be freed, and be able to put his life back together and return to the wife and sons he cherishes.

The Fortune Men is a powerful and evocative novel, which paints a rich portrait of its characters, and of Tiger Bay, the city of Cardiff, and the failures of a British society which showed little concern or respect to the African and Caribbean immigrants whose love of the motherland was not returned to them. Nadifa Mohamed spent 20 years researching and writing this book, and its attention to detail was quite apparent to this reader. It is a deserving choice for this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, and I would not be disappointed if it won the award.

Good luck with A Passage North I had it out of the library and returned it unfinished. It felt to me like there needed to be a prequel in order to understand what was going on. Also not a fan of books that occur mostly in the head of the main character....but that's just me.

Waiting for Richard Power's book to drop into my kindle next week. I'm not sure if I'll read the Maggie Shipstead book...Seating Arrangements was a bit tedious.

Happy new thread!

>13 tangledthread: Thanks, tangledthread! I started A Passage North, and I absolutely love it so far. Even though I had read novels about Sri Lanka and its civil war written by Michael Ondaatje, Roma Tearne, Gordon Weiss and Shehan Karunatilaka, none were set after the conclusion of the civil war and the government's massacre of the Tamil people after the surrender of the Tamil Tigers in 2009. I refreshed my memory of the civil war, and watched a portion of the Channel 4 documentary Sri Lanka's Killing Fields that Anuk Arudpragasam referenced early in the book. That, and my previous reading of Sri Lanka, gave me a much better impression of what was going on in the novel. I'm nearly a quarter into the novel, and unless it goes off the rails I'll finish it in the next day or two.

I'll read A Passage North and No One Is Talking About This in September, and leave Bewilderment and Great Circle to October.

I posted my review of The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed in message >12 kidzdoc:, and I'll write a review of The Promise by Damon Galgut tomorrow.

Happy new thread!

>12 kidzdoc: Sounds like a great read.

From my last thread, avaland asked, "I love your lists posted at the beginning of the thread. But my question would be, who are your favorites from these lists?"

I thought this was a great question, so here is my reply, based on the books I've read in each list.

21 Classic Works of Fiction by Authors from the African Diaspora from the Shelves to Read in 2021
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat (I'll write a review of it no later than next week)

21 Non-Fiction Books from the African Diaspora to Read in 2021
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne
A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Black Male Writers for Our Time
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family by Mitchell Jackson
All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Recommended Black American Women Authors
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey by Toi Derricotte
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Does Your House Have Lions? by Sonia Sanchez
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Dignidad Literaria
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli
Mean by Myriam Gurba

2021 Booker International Prize Shortlist
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
The Pear Field by Nina Ekvtimshvili

2021 Booker Prize Longlist
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
The Promise by Damon Galgut

Medicine, Public Health and Science
Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden

Reading Globally
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto

Books by Contemporary British Female Novelists
Summerwater by Sarah Moss

>15 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita! Yes, The Fortune Men was a great book, and I'll be interested to see how it ranks among the other longlisted books after I finish them. The Promise by Damon Galgut was equally superb, and it's hard for me to say which book I liked better...maybe The Fortune Men by a slight nod.

I should have mentioned that The Fortune Men won't be published in the US and Canada until March 1, 2022. I purchased my hardback copy from The Book Depository on the day that the Booker Prize longlist was announced.

Happy new thread, Darryl!
And thanks for reminding me of our last get together, hoping to see you back next year.

Will enjoy your Booker reviews, Darryl. True to form it will probably be 20 years before I pick up a few of them, but I'll enjoy reading about them nonetheless.

Happy new thread Darryl!

Happy new thread, Darryl

>12 kidzdoc:
I loved this review and Fortune Men is a book I am looking forward to reading when it gets here. I am also looking forward to reading The Promise because I am curious about the author. I have two of his books on my TBR shelves but haven't read them yet. His good books are piling up and I am behind in reading them.

>18 FAMeulstee: Thanks, Anita! I had to look again, but our meet ups in Amsterdam and Utrecht did take place in 2018, and not in 2019 as I had originally thought. 2021 was supposed to be my big travel year, after only making one trip to London in 2019 (I think) and, needless to say, no travel other than trips to Philadelphia to visit and help out my parents in 2019 and 2020, as I naïvely assumed that the COVID-19 pandemic would be all but over by the summer of 2021, as Americans received one of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in droves in the winter and spring of this year. I was intending to make at least four trips this year, one of which would have been to Amsterdam, but I'll be fortunate if I can still go on my planned trip to Lisbon during the last week of October and the first week of November. Fortunately Portugal is ahead of practically all other countries in getting its citizens vaccinated, and the government is permitting vaccinated Americans to travel there without needing to quarantine in place after arrival.

My Portuguese friend Joaquim (gioacchinoponte), a retired pediatrician from Lisbon who I met in 2018, posted an article on my Facebook timeline yesterday about the country's successful vaccination campaign. I posted it to my Facebook timeline this morning, and compared how we were doing in the United States as a whole, and in the state of Georgia:

According to this article, Portugal is the country with the greatest percentage of fully vaccinated eligible citizens in the world, and it ranks second in the percentage who are partially vaccinated, behind only the United Arab Emirates.

Fully vaccinated:
Portugal 81.5%
United States 54.2%
Georgia (state) 42.8%

Partially vaccinated:
Portugal 85.9%
United States 63.4%
Georgia (state) 52.8%

Well over 95% of elderly Portuguese are fully vaccinated.

The differences are even more stark for 12-17 yo children, as nearly 53% of Portuguese kids in this age range are fully vaccinated and almost 85% have received at least one vaccine dose, versus less than 1/3 and less than 1/2 of similarly aged American children, respectively.

In the worst affected portions of the United States hospitals are near or at full capacity, and there are often no ICU beds available, unless someone dies of COVID-19. In Portugal the government will meet today to decide when all public health restrictions should be lifted, as it will soon achieve its benchmark of 85% full vaccination.

I would have been considerably safer being out and about in Lisbon that I was when I ran errands in Atlanta this morning.

SIC Notícias: COVID-19: Portugal is the country with the highest rate of vaccinated population (The article is in Portuguese, but when I open it in Google Chrome it is automatically translated into English)

>19 AlisonY: Thanks, Alison! Perhaps I can encourage you to read one of this year's Booker Prize longlisted novels before 2041, assuming that we're all still around then.

>20 Sakerfalcon:, >21 jessibud2: Thanks, Claire and Shelley!

>22 benitastrnad: Thanks, Benita. Damon Galgut meets my criteria for choosing him as a Favorite Author on LibraryThing, as he has written at least three books that I've rated 4 stars or higher: The Promise, Arctic Summer, The Impostor, and In a Strange Room; I gave 3½ stars to The Good Doctor. I hope that he gains further recognition as a result of having a novel shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize.

Very interested in reading The Fortune Men when it becomes more easily available in the US. I also loved The Farming of Bones so I'll look forward to hearing what you have to say about it. I always find interesting books on your thread!

>24 japaul22: Thanks, Jennifer!

>23 kidzdoc: That is three years ago, 2018, Darryl.
So you were correct, at least at my thread. Unless we suddenly leaped into 2022 ;-)
I am sorry your travels didn't happen this year, but there is always a next year to try. I hope you can make it to Portugal this year.

>26 FAMeulstee: I would like to leap ahead to 2022! 2020 was an annus horribilis, and I'm not sure that 2021 has been any better.

My flights to and apartment in Lisbon have been booked, and hopefully nothing will deter my trip this time.

I'm glad to hear that you have a nice long break ahead and (hopefully) a trip to Portugal at the end of it. I was less glad to hear that you were having severe a fib. I'm glad the diltiazem did the trick. One of my symptoms from long covid was prolonged bouts of PAC and PVCs. I was put on beta blockers, but after getting vaccinated, the PAC/VCs went away. Hooray! I found the arrhythmia to be extremely distracting, although not painful, and the sight of my heart ceasing to beat but instead quivering during the echocardiogram was frightening. Is a fib a similar feeling? Are they painful? Are they effected by stress? Take care and don't forget your meds!

>27 kidzdoc: Very hopeful you get to make your trip Darryl. I think you are absolutely correct that you are far safer in Lisbon than Atlanta.

>28 labfs39: Thanks, Lisa. I spent most of the past seven days catching up on sleep and running errands, which was refreshing, and I still have another 16 days off before I have to briefly return to work. I and my partners that started the year had to work many more days that we normally would based on our FTE (full time equivalent; I dropped down to 0.6 FTE, or 60% of full time, in the spring of 2019), as two of my partners abruptly resigned last autumn, in part due to the pandemic and fears of getting COVID-19, and my group didn't hire replacements for them until last month, and we've also had far more patients than we normally would this spring and summer. Next week will be the first week of vacation I've taken all year, which means even more days off for me this month and next.

The episode of atrial fibrillation (A-fib), if I didn't say so already, was entirely my fault, as I neglected to bring enough ditliazem (a calcium channel blocker that treats hypertension and A-fib) with me when I visited my parents, and neglected to put it in the medicine bottle I bring with me to work the week before last. I probably missed five or six doses in a 10 day period, so my serum diltiazem level was subtherapeutic, and this allowed the abnormal heart rhythm to return.

Ironically, September is National Atrial Fibrillation Awareness Month, and I decided to to honor it by having my first episode of atrial fibrillation in five years. Fortunately I've felt fine since the bolus of diltiazem I took Sunday night and Monday morning kicked in (I also took two extra aspirin tablets, to prevent the formation of a blood clot that could have caused a stroke, pulmonary embolus, or deep vein thrombosis.

My first episode of A-fib was in 2013, and happened on a Saturday afternoon after a tough work week. I had just finished lunch, and was about to take a nap when I suddenly felt my heart beating abnormally, which was followed by a painless dull feeling in my chest. I listened to my heart with the stethoscope I keep at home, and I could immediately hear the abnormal rhythm, although I didn't know enough to diagnose it at that time. I was sure that it wasn't V-fib, or ventricular fibrillation, which would have quickly caused cardiovascular collapse and death, and since I felt fine, other than the dull chest and a wee bit of lightheadedness I drove myself to the ED of the hospital I prefer to use (not Emory University Hospital, surprisingly, rather Piedmont Hospital in Buckhead). After I saw that the ED waiting room was full I told the intake person that I was having an abnormal heart rhythm and chest pain, in order to get seen ASAP, and I barely sat down before my name was called, to the astonishment of the other patients waiting to be seen. Within minutes an EKG was performed, which showed the abnormal heart rhythm. IIRC I was given boluses of IV verapamil, but remained in A-fib, so I was admitted and started on a verapamil drip, which didn't kick in until late that night, and after I met with the rounding cardiologist the following morning I was discharged home. I've had three episodes since then, once in 2015 that required readmission for three days and a change in medication, and subsequent episodes in 2016 and this week that were due to me missing several doses of diltiazem over a 1-2 week period.

This chart shows typical symptoms of atrial fibrillation, which is the most common cause of arrhythmia:



I'm glad that your PACs & PVCs (premature atrial contractions and premature ventricular contractions, for any interested in this decidedly non-book related but very important topic) resolved after your SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, Lisa. That's interesting; I'll have to do some research into the risk of arrythmia with COVID-19, and how vaccination can reduce or eliminate this problem. You're probably aware that PACs can be an early indicator of A-fib, so it made perfect sense for you to be started on a beta blocker. That class of medications is contraindicated for people with asthma (I have a mild intermittent form of it), which is why I'm on a calcium channel blocker instead.

I did have an echocardiogram during my second hospital admission for A-fib in 2015, but by the time it was done I had just cardioverted to a normal sinus rhythm that morning, and my atria and ventricles were synchronously contracting, with a normal ejection fraction and no evidence of intracardiac clot formation.

Stress definitely causes worsening of atrial fibrillation, but probably not as much as missing doses of anti-arrhythmic medication. I'm very fortunate that, so far, my A-fib is easily manageable with medications (calcium channel blocker plus a daily aspirin tablet) alone.

>29 Oberon: Thanks, Erik. I see no reason that I can't visit Lisbon next month, and, based on yesterday's meeting of the FDA's Vaccine and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee, there is a good chance that front line health care workers like myself who are caring for patients with acute COVID-19 will be amongst the groups who will be able to get booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine starting as early as next week, along with people ≥65 years of age and individuals who are at high risk of severe COVID-19. The committee, as you have heard, overwhelmingly rejected the routine administration of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine booster doses for fully vaccinated people ≥16 yo six months after the second dose after studying the available data, although a paper in this week's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, titled Protection of BNT162b2 Vaccine Booster against Covid-19 in Israel, suggests that everyone will need booster doses at some point.

It's time to get back to the books, and specifically this year's Booker Prize shortlist. I'll write and post my review of The Promise by Damon Galgut shortly, and then finish reading A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam by this evening.

>30 kidzdoc: I'm glad this bout of a-fib didn't require hospitalization. I'm about to start A Passage North myself.

>30 kidzdoc:, >28 labfs39: glad you are both ok.

>12 kidzdoc: encouraging review. I have my hardcover copy (although I didn't realize it was UK publication. I just blindly requested on amazon, and it came via Book Depository)

>16 kidzdoc: fun post. I was momentarily proud that I head read 3 of the 4 you listed under "Non-Fiction Books from the African Diaspora", until I remembered Jerry's list...

Hi, Darryl. I confess I haven't been following you much this year. I just can't keep up. Your books are so meaty, I always want to put all of them on my list, and I stagger under the weight and go back to my mysteries.

I didn't realize you had a-fib, glad that it's controlled. Someone else I know was diagnosed with it recently - are pacemakers ever prescribed for that?

There is a possibility that all of my face-to-face teaching has finally allowed COVID to catch up to me. I taught a 2 1/2 hour workshop on Friday afternoon to graduate students and was notified by e-mail today that the student I was sitting next to tested positive for COVID. All I can say, is that I am vaccinated, and I was fully masked the entire time. I wear a cloth mask with a liner, so I hope that I am protected. Never-the-less, I am sure that I will be told to take a COVID test and quarantine for 7 days. That isn't a bad thing. I have had a really heavy teaching load for the last month and I managed to twist my knee so have been in considerable pain at night to the point that I had trouble sleeping, so 7 days of quarantine would be welcome. But I will wait and see what happens.

>34 benitastrnad: I'm wishing you an uneventful and restful week of quarantine. My son got exposed last year and very much enjoyed ten days of playing video games and sleeping in. I'm grateful for the vaccines.

Yikes, Darryl—glad you're OK, and knew how to care for yourself. These are stressful and scattered times for sure.

Can I ask a vaccine question since you're a pediatrics expert? :-)

I am so excited that Pfizer's vaccine study for 5-11 year olds is being presented for review by the FDA soon. I have 11 and 8 year old boys and I have been anxious for them to have the protection of a the vaccine. My question, though, is about my 11 year old. He is big! 5 foot 4 inches and 110 pounds. His birthday is in late December and I'm really wondering if it's best to get him the smaller dosage that he'd get as an 11 year old if it's available in late October/early November, or if it's a better idea to wait til the end of December to get him the adult dose as a 12 year old.

I'm curious if you have an opinion on this or if it's too early in all the research to really know. I wonder if there will be some sort of sliding scale on vaccine dosage tied to weight or if that's not the way this vaccine works. I will get in touch with his pediatrician, of course, but I wondered if you had an opinion.

I hope you're feeling well and getting some recovery time!

>37 japaul22: Hi Jennifer, given the late hour I'll answer (as best I can) your excellent and important questions first, then double back and reply to previous posts tomorrow.

As you know, Pfizer submitted data to the FDA this morning from the Phase 2 & 3 trials of its SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine in children 5-11 years of age, in which recipients were administered two doses of the vaccine (10 µg (10 micrograms, or 1/100,000th of a gram)) administered 21 days apart, which is considerably lower than the 30 µg doses given to people 12 yo and older. According to today's press release, "The antibody responses in the participants given 10 µg doses were comparable to those recorded in a previous Pfizer-BioNTech study in people 16 to 25 years of age immunized with 30 µg doses. The 10 µg dose was carefully selected as the preferred dose for safety, tolerability and immunogenicity in children 5 to 11 years of age."

I plotted your son on an online growth chart, and he is close to 95% for height and 90% for weight as compared to other US kids; he's big (but normal)! I would assume that Pfizer enrolled a large enough number of participants to account for boys and girls in the 5th to 95th percentile range, but we don't yet know if Pfizer's data will recommend a higher dose for larger and/or older children. The NYT and WP reported that it is hoped that the FDA will grant Emergency Use Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in this age group in mid to late October, and the CDC will announce distribution of it shortly afterward, similar to the process that is taking place this week with the proposal by Pfizer-BioNTech to administer booster doses of its vaccine.

A good friend and former work colleague of mine (Laura, a pediatric nurse practitioner) has a similarly aged "Mountain Man" who (I think) will turn 12 next year, and one of my closest friends from medical school (Paula) has a daughter who is 10 or 11 yo. Laura may ask me the same question on Facebook as you did in the next day or two, and since Paula is an adult physician, she may ask for my opinion as well. (ETA: I'm wrong; Jack ("Mountain Man") just turned 13, although his sister Natalie is definitely in the 5-11 year age range.)

Unfortunately the data that Pfizer-BioNTech submitted to the FDA is as yet unpublished, but hopefully it will appear in The New England Journal of Medicine as soon as this week, which would permit all of us to examine the methodology of the trial, and if greater doses were given to older children, which would allow me/us to better answer your question. I subscribe to the Journal, and will have online access to this week's edition at 5:00 pm EDT on Wednesday. If there is an article about this trial I'll let you know ASAP, or if I hear or read something earlier from my partners or former medical school classmates who have children in that age range, as they are also eagerly awaiting more information about this trial. Fortunately you'll have a good month or so to get more information before you have to make that decision. Having said that, I would lean toward getting the first dose ASAP, even if it's a lower dose, as the number of children hospitalized with acute COVID-19 continue to increase, at least here in Georgia; as of this morning there were several patients on our census who were in the 8-11 year age range, although most of the dozen or so we had were 12 yo and older, and presumably unvaccinated.

>38 kidzdoc: Darryl, thank you so much for this late night reply! That's a great point that since he is still on the growth charts as **just** normal (though I'm definitely going to start calling him Mountain Man - love that!), kids his age were likely included in this successful trial. I am SO anxious to get both of my kids vaccinated that I will get him vaccinated as soon as possible unless I hear that it's really beneficial to wait.

We are lucky in that we've had a community that has responded well (for Americans) to getting vaccinated. Our very large county (Fairfax in Northern Virginia) is 74% fully vaccinated for 18 and older. Our school district requires masks for all, vaccinated or not, our teachers are required to be vaccinated or have a weekly coronavirus test, and student athletes 12 and older must be vaccinated to participate in sports. But that of course doesn't change the fact that this virus is still prevalent and more and more kids are getting it. I'm really hopeful that mine can both have their first dose before Halloween! Fingers crossed!

I'll appreciate any additional insight you can provide over the next month as the study becomes available, but no rush! I know how busy you are!

>30 kidzdoc: Hi Daryl...
I followed your arrhythmia experience. I have had some episodes in the past that have been difficult to pin down. My cardiologist suggested a get a KardiaMobile device for less that $100. https://store.kardia.com/products/kardiamobile It does a single lead EKG that I can send the PDF to my cardiologist if I have an episode.

Of course, I've not had an episode in the 10 months that I've had it.

Just wondered if you were aware of it.

>31 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, Kay. I'm also glad that I was eventually able to stop the episode of A-fib by taking extra doses of diltiazem, especially since the Emergency Department at Piedmont Hospital was probably filled with people sickened with COVID-19.

Speaking of that, you and others may have heard that the FDA gave Emergency Use Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for "individuals 65 years of age and older; individuals 18 through 64 years of age at high risk of severe COVID-19; and individuals 18 through 64 years of age whose frequent institutional or occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2 puts them at high risk of serious complications of COVID-19 including severe COVID-19." The latter group includes "certain populations such as health care workers, teachers and day care staff, grocery workers and those in homeless shelters or prisons, among others." The booster dose can be given as early as six months after the second Pfizer-BioNTech dose. That is the first step in the process; the next step is approval by the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is currently meeting to decide which groups will be eligible to receive the booster vaccine, and when. It is currently approved only for people with compromised immune systems, so hopefully the ACIP will follow the FDA's lead and grant its approval of booster doses in these at risk populations. I jumped the gun and tried to get the booster dose this morning at my local CVS Pharmacy, but the very pleasant pharmacist said, apologetically that he couldn't give it to me just yet, as CVS was waiting on the ACIP decision before it could do so. Once that happens I'll go back there, probably tomorrow morning.

I finally finished A Passage North late Tuesday night, and so far it's my favorite novel from this year's Booker Prize shortlist, and my favorite novel of the year. Unfortunately I read No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, another shortlisted book, immediately afterward yesterday morning, which I absolutely loathed and wrote a scathing and unforgiving ½ star review of yesterday, which I'll post after I catch up on previous posts. I don't think I've ever read my favorite novel and worst novel of the year in less than 24 hours!

>32 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I'll also write reviews of The Promise by Damon Galgut, and A Passage North by Anuk Aradpragasam in the next day or two. I'll probably read Bewilderment next week, and save Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead for next month. After the intense distaste of reading No One Is Talking About This I decided that I needed a book to cleanse my palate, preferably by a non-American author, so I started An Island by Karen Jennings last night, and I'll read the classic Mexican novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo for National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15th to October 15th, afterward.

Jerry has done a better job than me of reading and posting reviews of nonfiction books from the African diaspora the past couple of years, and I'm glad that he has done so, as many of these books are ones I've either not read yet or are unfamiliar to me.

>33 ffortsa: Hi, Judy! As Claire (Sakerfalcon), Fliss (flissp), Rachael (FlossieT) and my other British past and former LT friends know, I'm absolutely incapable of reading cozy mysteries and other light hearted books, at least at this time when I and my physician colleagues are busy at work caring for COVID-19 patients and spending much of our down time keeping up with the medical literature and attending hospital committee meetings and webinars about the management COVID-19, the current bed crisis in our system and in the state of Georgia, and other salient topics. I look forward to retirement, a time when I'll have much more time to read for pleasure.

Yes, pacemakers are used for more severe cases of atrial fibrillation. My father was given one after his collapse at home in November 2017, as he was known to have A-fib and at the time it wasn't clear if the collapse was due to a seizure or to an arrhythmia, as he had both an abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG) concerning for seizure, and an abnormal electrocardiogram (EKG) with arrhythmia. One of the nurse practitioners in the hospital I work in, who is at least two decades younger than I am, has long-standing persistent atrial fibrillation, and she underwent a stepwise course to manage it, starting with anti-arrhythmic medications followed by blood thinners, cardioversion during intractable episodes (I nearly needed that in 2015, during my second hospitalization for A-fib), and cardiac ablation, but it wasn't until she was fitted with a pacemaker that her condition was under good control.

>34 benitastrnad: I'm sorry to read that, Benita. I hope that you're doing better.

Edited to correct touchstones.

>36 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. Fortunately I'm now on vacation, or, rather a staycation, so I'm definitely not stressed at the moment.

>39 japaul22: You're welcome, Jennifer! This week's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine unfortunately does not have any articles or correspondences about the Pfizer-BioNTech Phase 2 & 3 trials of its vaccines in the 5-11 yo population, and I'm not aware of it being published elsewhere, at least not yet. Yesterday Children's Healthcare of Atlanta held its biweekly COVID-19 Town Hall web meeting for the medical staff, both on staff physicians and community pediatricians and family practitioners, and, in response to a question from the audience, one of our COVID-19 experts, an infectious disease specialist, said that he had not yet seen this data, either. If and when I find out anything I'll be glad to share it with you and others.

Fairfax County, Virginia is doing far better than Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of the City of Atlanta (10% of the city is actually in neighboring DeKalb County to the east). Despite having many of the wealthiest and most highly educated neighborhoods and cities in Georgia barely 50% of its residents are fully vaccinated, which I suspect is due in large part to the very low vaccination rate amongst vaccine hesitant African Americans, who choose to listen to "Dr" Nicki Minaj and other vaccine denying celebrities rather than Dr Anthony Fauci. (If you Google Nicki Minaj and COVID-19 you'll see what I mean, although you may already be familiar with her bizarre claims about the vaccine.) The Fulton County School District has a strict mask mandate for employees, students and visitors, and seemingly most of the children hospitalized with COVID-19 in our system, at least on our campus (we have three hospitals), are coming from the exurbs of Atlanta and in rural areas where vaccination rates are considerably lower and mask mandates in school districts are spotty or nonexistent.

>40 tangledthread: Thanks for mentioning the KardiaMobile device to me, tangledthread! I hadn't heard of it, but it sounds both great and affordable. I'll do a bit more research on it, and probably order one today.

Warning: Scathing review ahead. Read at your own peril.

Book #38: No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

  

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize

My rating: (0.5 stars)

When I read the Booker Prize shortlist I generally save books written by Americans for last, and after reading and thoroughly enjoying The Fortune Men by the Somali-British author Nadifa Mohamed, The Promise by Damon Galgut from South Africa and A Passage North by the Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam, my favorite novel of 2021 to date, I picked up this nominee for this year's Most Clever American Novel, a supposed satire about social media in American culture, which was somehow attached to a tragedy involving the baby of the main character's sister, based on the author's own sister and her child, who had the same fatal condition. This unnamed character is a famous social influencer, who cares about her popularity more than her marriage, and the first half of the book is filled with overly clever comments that left me cold and reminded me of listening to a bad standup comic who relied on crude jokes to entertain her audience:

chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what

An episode of 'True Life' about a girl who liked to roll herself up, get into a pot with assorted vegetables, and pretend that cannibals were going to eat her. Sexually.

...which coffeemakers were but a shit in the mouth of the coffee christ.

“Ahahaha!” she yelled, the new and funnier way to laugh, as she watched footage of bodies being flung from a carnival ride at the Ohio State Fair. Their trajectories through the air were pure arcs of joy, T-shirts turned liquid on them, just look what the flesh could do when it gave in, right down to the surrendering snap of the...

She had become famous for a post that said simply, "Can a dog be twins?" That was it. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the state of penetration where teens posted the cry-face emoji at her. They were in high school. They were going to remember "Can a dog be twins?" instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let's face it, she didn't know either.

Imagine reading over 100 pages of similar drivel, with plenty of sophomoric butt, nipple and dildo humor mixed in. I nearly quit reading the book 50 pages in, but I read several reviews that encouraged me to continue, as the second half was said to be much better.

I held my nose and skimmed through the next 50 pages before reading the second part, in which the social influencer learns that her sister is carrying a child who appears to have a serious genetic disorder. Unfortunately Lockwood trivializes the grief that a mother and family experience when they learn that a yet to be born baby has a life altering and potentially fatal condition, the hope that the doctors were wrong and the baby will be normal, and the torturously slow process of watching the child's slow and inevitable decline towards a painful death. I occasionally care for children such as these in the hospital, and I was highly offended by Lockwood's insensitive handling of this process, especially since her own sister had a child with the same fatal genetic condition who died at six months of age. The last straw for me was the uproarious laughter by several family members just before the baby's funeral, which I found infuriating and deeply insulting:

At the funeral home, as the family sat down for a meeting with the funeral director, her brother fucked up and somehow introduced himself as the baby’s husband. Their laughter approached hysteria, tears streaked down their faces, they gripped each other’s arms and could not stop.

I would hope that Ms Lockwood obtained her sister's permission to "craft" a novel about her late child and family, but even if she did I thought that this was incredibly vulgar, cruel and distasteful, and the attempt to meld these two themes didn't work for me at all. This is a "love it or hate it" book, and I fall firmly in the latter category, as this sorry excuse for a novel is a perfect example of why I don't like modern American literature, with few exceptions.

>42 kidzdoc: the other option my cardiologist mentioned was an Apple watch...much pricier and not my "cup of tea".
Thought I would mention that, just in case you do have an Apple watch.

>43 kidzdoc: That seems like a strange read, Darryl. Even stranger that it made the short list.

Other than that read, I hope you're enjoying your staycation.

>44 tangledthread: Thanks, tangledthread. I don't have an Apple Watch, so I'll evaluate the KardiaMobile device.

>45 Familyhistorian: At the risk of being called a conspiracy theorist, I strongly suspect that the reason that the Booker Prize committee decided to allow novels written originally in English by American and non-Commonwealth authors to be eligible was pressure exerted on it by the large, powerful and overly influential American publishers and their UK partners, who wanted their writers to get more recognition abroad, especially in Europe. Since that grievous decision many of these books by American authors have been, in my opinion, of vastly lesser quality than ones written by Commonwealth authors, including The Sellout by Paul Beatty, the 2016 winner, Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris, We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (which I've named We Are All Completely Full of Ourselves), and now No One Is Talking About This is added to this list of shame; I've read all of these books, and hated each one of them. I'll have to look at the publishers for these books, but I strongly suspect that most if not all of them have been released by one of the large publishing houses, such as Penguin Random House, which put out Lockwood's "novel".

ETA: I hated this decision by the Booker Prize committee once it was announced, prior to the 2014 prize, I believe. This decision meant that far more deserving and less publicized books by Commonwealth authors outside of the UK, especially ones of color, whose books are historically promoted with less vigor or support than ones by White authors, as we all learned from the American Dirt controversy, and books published by smaller publishers, are less likely to receive consideration by the judges, as books published by companies which have a strong track record of getting their books longlisted or shortlisted can nominate more titles for the judges to read in any given year (that is in the rules, and not my personal opinion). The beauty of the pre-corrupted Booker Prize is that readers were exposed to the works of unknown but brilliant authors such as Tan Twan Eng, Andrea Levy, Aravind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh, Mohamed Hanif, Ross Raisin and Eleanor Catton, rather than overhyped, middlebrow and overly clever books by mediocre American authors.

Neither of the two major American literary awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, are open to non-Americans, so why should they be eligible for the Booker Prize?

>43 kidzdoc: Thank you for your review of No One is Talking About This. I wasn't intending to read it, and now I know why. I join you in wishing that American authors were not eligible for the Booker Prize. I'm glad you enjoyed The Passage North and look forward to your review. Having just finished a book I was not crazy about, I too am looking for a palate cleanser. I hope The Island does the trick for you. (I can't seem to find the correct touchstone. Yours goes to a different book.)

>47 labfs39: You're welcome, Lisa. The more people that I can dissuade from reading No One Is Talking About This the better, although I know that several LTers were fond of this book. A Passage North was absolutely brilliant, and I'll review it in a day or two, although a better one will undoubtedly come when I reread it. I'm still thinking about its characters, and I was sorely tempted to start reading it again immediately after I finished it, which to me speaks volumes about how much I loved it.

Thanks for noting my error in the touchstones, which was due in part to me labeling my current novel as The Island instead of An Island, which was written by the South African author Karen Jennings and was longlisted for this year's Booker Prize. Having said that, the touchstones continue to be troublesome, as LT thinks that the book I'm referring to is Victory by Joseph Conrad. and that the touchstone for Great Circle should go to the book Great Ground-Beef Recipes by Family Circle Books.

>46 kidzdoc: This decision meant that far more deserving and less publicized books by Commonwealth authors outside of the UK I very much agree with this Darryl.

I'm loving A Passage North so far. The writing is just wonderful.

>43 kidzdoc: I will admit, I chuckled a little when I read your review. It is definitely a polarising novel! But one that I absolutely loved. When I started reading it, I felt exactly like you did. I hate most social media, especially Twitter, so when I saw the format, I wasn't impressed. But as I read on and realised what she was attempting to do, I was intrigued. The reaction that you had to it is exactly what I think she intended and I reason why I was blown away by what she accomplished. This is meant to fill you with horror, all the vulgar jokes and innuendos are taken directly from social media and meant to make you recoil. This novel is about the dumbing down of society, it's about what passes for entertainment these days and about how fake & vacuous the whole thing has become.

Someone sent me a link to an article that explains all the references in the novel. She was using our own words to highlight how far we have fallen. I was getting a little exhausted by it by the end of the first part, but I think that was also by design. How exhausting is it to live in fantasy all the time?

I get where you are coming from with the second half, especially considering your job. My sister lost her son when he was a week old because of genetic issues so it's a very sensitive subject in this household as well. I think the aim of the second part is to rip you out of this fake world and bring you crashing back down to reality. To show that you can spend your life carefully instagramming your meals and photoshopping yourself into oblivion, but real life is still happening all around you and you can't escape it.

Just my two cents :) I'm sorry that you didn't enjoy it, but glad that you discovered a new favourite right before! My copy of A Passage North hasn't arrived yet but The Fortune Men finally sailed in so I will start that one shortly.

>49 SandDune: Thanks, Rhian. Based on your comment yesterday on my Facebook post about No One Is Talking About This I was sure that you would.

>50 RidgewayGirl: Great, Kay! A Passage North is gorgeously crafted and written, and at several points I was deeply moved by the characters or the narrative. It will stay with me for a long time, and I highly doubt that I'll enjoy another book from this year's Booker Prize longlist any more than it.

>51 Yells: Ha! I'm glad to read your comments about No One Is Talking About This, Danielle, and that you weren't offended by my scathing review about it, or my subsequent posts from the Soapbox of the Morally Offended that I was perched on. I knew that mine was a minority opinion about the book, and Rachael (FlossieT), whose tastes in books parallel mine as closely as any other living friend*, liked it considerably more and we had a nice discussion about it on Facebook yesterday. Lockwood definitely pushed my buttons, both during the first half, as I'm admittedly a prude and greatly dislike the gratuitous use of vulgarity or violence in the books I read, and in her handling of her niece's progressive and inevitable decline in its second half. At some point (but no time soon) I may revisit this second half and read it again, to see if I get more out of it while not being so put off by reading the first half.

*Our late and highly influential Club Read member Rebecca (rebeccanyc) is the one LTer who has had the most influence on my reading, and she'll forever be my "book sister", which I called her on several occasions.

>43 kidzdoc: Thanks for this review, Darryl. I had planned to read this, mrerely because I was looking for a 'cheerful' book and none of the other Booker nominees seemed that, but I think I won't bother now!

Happy Friday!

>43 kidzdoc: Definite pass for me.

Pedro Paramo was one of my favourite of the books I read for a Spanish Literature in Translation course at university. I hope you enjoy it!

>43 kidzdoc:, >51 Yells: Good to read both view points on this book. Although I dabble in social media (FB and IG mostly) I grow weary of the fakeness of it quickly so I don't think reading a whole book from the perspective of that crazy bubble is for me.

I follow interiors accounts on IG for eye candy and ideas, and I was utterly horrified to watch a video that one girl had posted yesterday. Known for her great interiors account, she received a breast cancer diagnosis just before Christmas last year, and although terrified at what lies ahead (she's only 32 but it's in her lymph nodes) she's used her popular forum to give an honest account of her journey and overwhelmingly tries to help others and to keep as positive a mindset as she can. In the video she spoke about how she's been trolled by a nurse (a NURSE!) who made statements on her account along the lines of 'she'll probably die of this soon as she didn't react quickly enough when she found her lump' and 'she should be spending what time she has left with her kids instead of trying to making light of having cancer'. Oh, and she was apparently 'glamorising cancer' by putting up posts of herself in wigs (which she was wearing because she's had 12 cycles of chemo).

That said it all to me about the depths of low that social media can hit. What is in the mind of someone, a nurse and mother no less, who trolls someone with cancer? Did these hideous people always exist before social media but just had no forum for their vileness, or does social media unleash some horrific beast in people?

>41 kidzdoc: Hi Darryl! Glad that episode of arrhythmia could be helped. And glad you are enjoying some time off at the moment. You deserve it.

Your thread has been interesting as always. I have put A Passage North firmly on my TBR list.

How are your plans for the visit to Portugal coming along?

>43 kidzdoc: Well, I think that's one I can safely skip because it sounds like the same things that you really dislike would grate on me as well. I am on social media (Twitter, Instagram) but I use them in very specific ways and it's not by any means a representation of my whole life, nor do I really expect it to be of the people I follow. But as with many things, I came "late" to the game in a lot of Internet things (I'm a "geriatric millennial" in my late 30s and we first got dial up and email when I was a teen, my first cell phone was a family emergency phone when I was 18) and often feel that I use such tools differently than folks my age or younger tend to.

I'll admit to being intrigued by No One is Talking About This after the two intelligent points of view presented on your thread! The quotes you posted, Darryl, completely grate on my nerves and I'm not excited to read a book that contains them, but on the other hand I'm intrigued by what the author may be trying to say about it all. Sometimes those maddening books end up being the most impactful for me in the long run. I'll likely put it on hold at the library and see how I feel when it becomes available.

>52 kidzdoc:
I enjoyed reading both of the comments about No One Is Talking About This. I didn't intend to read the book before I read your comments and don't intend to do so now. However, it was good to read both opinions about it.

I have a previous highly regarded book by Damon Galgut in my collection - Arctic Summer and I have looked at it longing for several years. It might be time for me to read something by this author. It seems that The Promise has garnered lots of attention with this short listing so I better get something written by him read before he becomes really famous.

>48 kidzdoc:, >50 RidgewayGirl: Anuk Arudpragasam is joining the Brooklyn Book Festival virtually to be part of a panel titled The Burden of Memory held on Oct. 3rd.

I had my third Phizer vac this week, and like the other two people I know who have also had theirs, the side effects ramped up a bit. For me the second shot was sore arm and fatigue. With the third I experienced sore arm, fatigue, generalized muscle aches and shaking chills - so much so that I feared my feet would never feel warm again. :) I took a long nap and felt better when I woke up about 5 hours later. By the next day, back to normal except for the sore muscles from their unexpected work out.

Darryl - I very much enjoyed your rant on the Booker Prize. I stopped following the prize in 2014 because I don't need yet another source for books from US authors. I enjoyed the Commonwealth diversity that could sometimes pop up in the prize before they opened it up.

I also enjoyed the conversation about No One Is Talking About This, which I knew first from the Women's Prize list. A few of my favourite BookTubers also gave it poor reviews. It was never on my radar, although a play on internet culture does sound potentially interesting. But not this version

Book #36: The Promise by Damon Galgut

Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize



My rating:

Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.

This multilayered, rich and insightful Booker Prize shortlisted novel of an ordinary white South African family living in a farm outside of Johannesburg begins in 1986, during the end of the apartheid regime. Rachel Swart has died after a long illness, and her grieving husband and three teenage children convene with extended family to mourn her loss. Just before she died Amor, the introspective and sensitive 13 year old youngest member of the family, overhears a conversation that her parents have in their bedroom, in which Rachel expresses one last wish to her husband:

Do you promise me, Manie?
Holding on to him, skeleton hands grabbing, like in a horror film.
Ja, I’ll do it.
Because I really want her to have something. After everything she’s done.
I understand, he says.
Promise me you’ll do it. Say the words.
I promise, Pa says, choked-sounding.

The she who Rachel is referring to is Salome, the longtime black housekeeper on the Swart farm, who is Rachel's age and one of her closest companions, although she is invisible and given little consideration by the rest of the Swart family, save for Amor. Although it is not overly mentioned Amor interprets her mother's deathbed wish as legally granting the Lombard house, a rundown shack on the edge of the farm, to Salome, a property purchased years ago by Rachel's father to prevent it from being purchased by an Indian family. This promise could not be fulfilled, as blacks were not allowed to own property, and nothing more was said or done at that time.

The novel consists of four chronologically separate parts over four decades, each part corresponding to one of four members of the Swart family: Rachel, her husband Manie, and their two oldest children, Anton and Astrid. The two characters who are constantly present are Amor and Salome, who maintain a warm friendship despite their physical distance, in a changing South Africa where blacks and whites live uncomfortably alongside each other:

But enough, we are the rainbow nation, which is to say it’s a mixed and motley and mongrel assembly in the church today, restive and ill at ease, like antagonistic elements from the periodic table.

The promise that Manie made to Rachel remains unfulfilled, which troubles only Salome and Amor, and it serves as a metaphor for the promise of true equality made to black South Africans after the end of apartheid, as whites continue to hold on to their valuable property, which they view as their birthright and something only to be shared with their descendants.

The Promise is a compelling look into the life of an ordinary white South African family during the waning years of apartheid and the years that followed, which also permits the reader with a glimpse of modern day South Africa, and relations between the two main races, which leaves out the sizable mixed race and Indian communities. I'm a fan of Damon Galgut's work, most notably his novels The Impostor, In a Strange Room, The Good Doctor and Arctic Summer, but this is his best novel yet, and one that is worthy of this year's Booker Prize.

Apologies for once again falling behind on posts! I'll tfy to finish the Booker Prize longlisted An Island by Karen Jennings tonight, and catch up here tomorrow morning, and write a review of A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam while I'm at it.

Thanks to Danielle (Yells) and others for their excellent and thoughtful comments!

>64 kidzdoc: Oh great to hear such good reports on this latest Galgut, Darryl.

>53 CDVicarage: Hi, Kerry! I found nothing cheery about No One Is Talking About This, and Lockwood's attempt at humor was cutesy, clever and lacking in subtlety, IMO. I'm not a writer, but it seems to me that she could have created or found some genuinely humorous aspects of online culture that would have made the same point, and she did not need to beat the book's readers over the heads with 100+ pages of sophomoric drivel.

This is a great topic for a novel that was handled poorly, IMO, and I would like to see a more mature and sensitive author handle it. (Are you listening, Sarah Moss, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan and Maggie O'Farrell?)

>54 figsfromthistle: A belated thank you, Anita! I hope that you had a good weekend. I'm a bit of a sports junkie, and I spent too many hours watching American collegiate and professional football, and not enough reading or cooking.

>55 Sakerfalcon: Hi, Claire! I'm glad that you enjoyed Pedro Páramo; I'll read it later this week, after I finish An Island by Karen Jennings, which is very good so far.

>56 AlisonY: I agree, Alison, I appreciated Danielle's positive comments about No One Is Talking About This, and I'm glad that she chose to share them here, especially since I've stepped off and put the Soapbox of Moral Outrage back in the attic where it belongs. I admittedly spend way too much time on Facebook, and occasionally look at Instagram posts from my closest friends and a few favorite sites.

That said it all to me about the depths of low that social media can hit. What is in the mind of someone, a nurse and mother no less, who trolls someone with cancer? Did these hideous people always exist before social media but just had no forum for their vileness, or does social media unleash some horrific beast in people?

The comments made by that "nurse", using that word loosely, are absolutely despicable, and especially unforgivable coming from a member of one of the greatest of all healing and caring professions. Nurses, however, are human beings, and like physicians there have been far too many shameful comments and actions from my, um, colleagues. People have been mean and cruel since the beginning of time, but social media has created an online anonymity and distance that allows people to take the brake off of the normal societal filters and say whatever is on their mind, free from repercussion and retribution, as clearly cowards such as that nurse would have been far less likely to make those shameful comments to that poor woman's face or in a public setting. There has been far too much hate and demonization from people of all sides during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the nurse who laughed at and derided a teenage boy from Tennessee during a local school board meeting while he bravely stood up and asked for the institution of masks for students and staff, as his grandmother had recently died from COVID-19 and he wished that no one else suffered the same fate.

Unfortunately the United States, as you know, has become a very polarized and divisive "society", if it can still be called that, and we far too often demonize those who don't look or think like us as un-American, deplorables, socialists, racists or fascists. It was sad to recognize how far we have fallen since the 9/11 attacks that took place 20 years ago this week; at that time we were united as a country, save for a few extremist whispers that were uncommon and not widely believed. If we suffered a similar attack today I seriously doubt that we as Americans could put our social and political differences aside and come together for the common good of the country, although I would love to be proven wrong.

>57 EllaTim: Hi, Ella! Fortunately I have not had any additional arrhythmic episodes since I was able to convert back into a normal sinus rhythm two weeks ago today. Thanks for your comment, as it reminded me to order the KardiaMobile device that tangledthread told me about in >40 tangledthread:. I just placed an order from Amazon, and I should receive it this afternoon.

I'll write a review of A Passage North later today or tomorrow. I'm not good about writing reviews as promptly as I should, and it seems that I have to let the book percolate in the recesses of my brain, skim through it a second time and take notes before my thoughts come together in a (hopefully) coherent fashion.

I've made flight and apartment reservations for Lisbon. I'll leave Atlanta on the evening of 20 October, arrive in Lisbon by way of Amsterdam the following afternoon, and return to Atlanta on 4 November, also by way of Amsterdam, as Delta Air Lines does not offer direct flights between Atlanta and Lisbon outside of the peak travel months.

I was reluctant to travel until I knew that I could get a booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine before I left Atlanta, but the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overrode her advisory committee's recommendation late Thursday night and approved booster shots for people who work in professions that place them at high risk of exposure to people with active COVID-19, including health care workers. Several of my colleagues have contracted breakthrough COVID-19, most likely because of waning immunity with time (it's been 8½ months since most front line physicians, nurses and respiratory therapists completed the vaccine series in mid January), along with decreased effectiveness of the vaccine against the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2.

After that announcement was made Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, my employer, sent out an email to the medical staff with instructions on getting the vaccine doses from Employee Health at one of our three hospitals or our Support Center, and I'll get my shot on Wednesday morning. From what I've read the side effects from the third shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are similar to the second one, and I'll report on my experience after I get it. Fortunately I'm not working this week, so I'll be able to rest at home.

I'll post more about this booster dose, and the trials of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in the 5-11 yo age range, later this week, in a new segment of the COVID-19 update thread, and here for my friends who aren't members of Club Read.

>58 bell7: YMMV with No One Is Talking About This, Mary, as several people whose opinion I highly respect, including Danielle (Yells) and my longtime friend Rachael (FlossieT) both liked it. Despite my earlier negative comments I would be curious to know what others thought about it, although I can't recommend it in the way that I can other books from this year's so far superb Booker Prize shortlist.

I look at Facebook several times per week, as the vast majority of my closest friends are not members of LibraryThing, or are no longer active in this group, especially Rachael, Fliss (flissp), Paul Harris (Polaris-) and DB (deebee1). Facebook has allowed me to maintain ties with old friends from childhood to the present day, and receive and share information with them. One of my partners is also an avid (and far more talented) cook, and last night she posted an enticing short video of the soup she made for dinner, Lemon Chickpea Orzo Soup (Vegan Avgolemono), which I'll make later this week. I and my friends are good about sharing recipes we make and like with each other, and my physician friends and I also share medical articles of particular interest. I love LibraryThing, but if I was forced to give up either LT or Facebook it would be no contest to decide what to do.

I promise that I won't ever refer to you as a "geriatric millennial."

>59 japaul22: That's a great point, Jennifer. Some of the books that I value the most have been ones that have been well outside of my comfort zone, and some of them were ones that I did not appreciate on a first reading or think that I would like. That certainly holds true for my tastes in music (I did not like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy or Ornette Coleman the first time I listened to them) and, to a lesser extent, in trying new recipes. I hope that you do read No One Is Talking About This, and I look forward to your thoughts about it.

On a different note, Dr Albert Bouria, the CEO of Pfizer, announced on the ABC news program This Week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday that Pfizer will be submitting its data about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Phase 2 & 3 trials to the FDA in "days rather than weeks." Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, was interviewed on Good Morning America earlier this morning, and said that the FDA and CDC would be "urgently" reviewing this data, and hoped that a decision on emergency use authorization would be made in "weeks," which hopefully means that this vaccine will be available by Halloween.

>60 benitastrnad: I agree, Benita; it was nice and refreshing to have a spirited but civil discussion about No One Is Talking About This without personal animus.

Damon Galgut is certainly deserving of wider recognition, even if The Promise doesn't win the Booker Prize; A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam would be my favorite, but I wouldn't be the least bit perturbed if The Promise or The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed won instead. Unfortunately most American readers seem to be much more insular than those in other countries and are largely unaware of the Booker Prize, and even the best books by the most critically acclaimed foreign authors have a hard time gaining a foothold here. As long as the major literary awards are restricted to American authors I don't see this changing, unfortunately.

>61 ELiz_M: Ooh, thanks for letting me know about Anuk Arudpragasam's virtual appearance during the Brooklyn Book Festival, Liz! That's on Sunday, so I should be able to watch his talk.

>62 streamsong: Thanks for letting us know about your experience in getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine booster dose, Janet. I'm not the least bit surprised that your side effects were increased as compared to the second dose, and I'm mentally prepared to have a similar experience. I first noticed symptoms roughly 20 hours after the second jab, and they consisted of shaking chills, low grade fever, nausea, poor appetite, muscle aches, and significant swelling and redness at the vaccination site, so much so that I feared that I had a bacterial cellulitis (skin infection) or myositis (muscle infection). The symptoms resolved 8-10 hours later, IIRC.

How long did it take for you to become symptomatic after you received the booster shot? I have yet to hear from anyone else who has received it, as today is the first day that Employee Health is offering the booster shots at Children's, but I wouldn't be surprised if the typical 16-20 hour window between the shot and onset of symptoms that my physician and nurse colleagues reported after the second vaccination is significantly decreased with the third dose, given the amount of circulating anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and memory cells in our systems.

I'll certainly report on my experience with the booster shot, and I'll mention what my friends and colleagues say as well.

>63 Nickelini: Thanks, Joyce. You're probably aware that I'm not fond of or impressed by most current American literature, which I find to be vastly overrated and mediocre, and offhand I can't think of any novels by American authors I've been fond of that I would not have read save for their nomination for the Booker Prize, with the possible exception of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I miss reading more novels by authors such as Tan Twan Eng, Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga. Kamila Shamsie and Mohammed Hanif. I also miss the Man Asian Literary Prize, another great source for Commonwealth literature, and I'll have to pay more attention to the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; Anuk Arudpragasam's début novel The Story of a Brief Marriage won the 2017 DSC Prize, which I didn't know until after I read A Passage North. Maybe it's just me, but I find Asian authors vastly more interesting and talented than their overhyped US counterparts; you would have to pay me to read anything else by Jonathan Lethem, Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Franzen, Patricia Lockwood, et al.

>66 AlisonY: Thanks, Alison. Damon Galgut has now moved into the small category of writers whose books I would be willing to buy and read without knowing anything about them. Speaking of which, The Fell by Sarah Moss will be published in the UK in early November, but not in the US until the beginning of March, and I'll place an early order with The Book Depository for the UK version of it sometime next month.

>68 kidzdoc: Thanks for that vaccine update! I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed that it will be available soon for my kids.

>68 kidzdoc: Ah, I keep forgetting about Sarah Moss. Right - off to add one of her titles to my wish list.

>67 kidzdoc: ICYMI Sarah Moss's new book, The Fell, is available for pre-order. Publication date is March 2022

>69 japaul22: You're welcome, Jennifer. A large number of my partners, former medical school and residency classmates, and physician and nurse colleagues at Children's have children in this age range, and nearly all of them are keen to get their children protected ASAP, and the parents I'll encounter will undoubtedly ask me about the vaccine for their children once I'm back on clinical service. I'll gladly share anything I find out with you and everyone else here.

>70 AlisonY: As I probably mentioned before, Rachael is the person who introduced me to Sarah Moss several years ago during a trip to the UK, as she recommended that I read her novel Bodies of Light, which I absolutely loved. I've read and enjoyed three of her subsequent novels, The Tidal Zone, Ghost Wall, and Summerwater, and Bodies of Light and The Tidal Zone have been my favorites so far.

>71 tangledthread: Yes, I mentioned in >68 kidzdoc: that The Fell would be published in the UK in November, but not until March in the US. I'll almost certainly preorder a copy of it from The Book Depository. For my money she is the most insightful writer on 21st century Western life that I can think of, and her novels are compelling and imminently reasonable readable. I don't understand why she isn't better known or more widely read, although this comment does not apply to my closest LT friends, many of whom are fans of her work.

Last week marked five years since my first and so far only visit to Paris, which my Facebook Memories page reminded me of, and I posted photos that I took outside of Shakespeare and Company, the famed English language bookshop there. After a discussion with my good friend Joe (jnwelch) I came up with a list of my 10 favorite bookshops in the world, with three that I thought worthy of honorable mention:

1. City Lights, North Beach (San Francisco)
2. Daunt Books, Marylebone (London)
3. London Review Bookshop, Bloomsbury (London)
4. Book Culture, Upper West Side (NYC)
5. Strand Book Store, Greenwich Village (NYC)
6. Joseph Fox Bookshop, Center City (Philadelphia)
7. Foyles Bookshop, Soho (London)
8. The Harvard Coop, Harvard Square (Cambridge)
9. Shakespeare and Company, Latin Quarter/6th arrondissement (Paris)
10. Green Apple Books and Music, Richmond District (San Francisco)

Honorable mention:
11. Livraria Bertrand, Chiado (Lisbon) (the world's oldest continuously operating bookshop, which first opened its doors in 1732)
12. Posman Books at Ponce City Market, Old Fourth Ward (Atlanta)
13. Llibrería Anglesa, Eixample (Barcelona) (English language bookshop close to Passeig de Gràcia)

I'll definitely pay another visit to Livraria Bertrand when I return to Lisbon next month, and explore the city's other English language bookshops as well.

>68 kidzdoc: I had my Pfizer boost at about 3.30 pm. By the next morning, my arm was a bit sore and continued getting sorer during the a.m. About one pm, the chills and shivering hit - so about 22 hours. Luckily my symptoms only lasted 5 or 6 hours. I was very fatigued and decided to nap. I went to sleep wondering if my feet would ever feel warm again. It sounds silly, but a combination of multiple previous minor frostbites and diabetes make the circulation in my feet a bit iffy. The first thing I thought on awakening was "Hey! My feet are warm". And the symptoms receded rapidly from there.

>74 streamsong: Thanks, Janet. Can I assume that your symptoms were worse with the booster dose than the second one? The only person who has mentioned anything so far, one of my classmates and dearest friends from medical school, said that she had considerably fewer symptoms after the booster dose than she did after the second shot.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in today's paper that two of the three people killed in the Amtak derailment in Montana was a couple from Georgia, who took that train ride to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. The other victim was an Illinois man in his late 20s who was traveling with his wife (who was unharmed) to Portland, where they spent their wedding anniversary seven years ago.

I got my first Shingles vaccination on Friday. Had no side-effects until Saturday evening and then had a bit of fever and chills. I just went to bed and, while I was a bit more restless than normal, I slept through most of the symptoms. I figure that is a mild price to pay for not getting a disease that could make me very miserable if I ever contracted it.

I'm very excited on your behalf to your finally making it out of the country! Have the best time in Lisbon! And likewise, I'm happy about you getting your booster shot. A good friend made sure to be first in line as soon as it came available and my father is planning to go get his on Thursday.

>76 benitastrnad: Well done, Benita; I hope that you received the Shingrix vaccine. I had few if any symptoms after the first shot, but the second one kicked my tail, considerably more so than the second Pfizer-BioNTech jab in January. I and my fellow physician colleagues and friends view these side effects as indicative that the vaccines are doing what they are supposed to, inducing an intense immune response with the generation of protective memory cells that will produce a brisk production of virus specific antibodies in the face of a potential infection.

>77 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, Kay. I should be more excited about making my first trip abroad in over two years, but I'm not, at least not yet. I'll be as fully protected as I possibly can, as I also got the flu vaccine early this month, and Portugal is doing far better with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine program than we are in the US, so I'll be far safer there than here.

Speaking of vaccines, and as expected, Pfizer did submit its data on the Phase 2 & 3 trials of its SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in the 5-11 yo population to the FDA this morning:

Reuters: Pfizer submits data for COVID-19 vaccine use in younger kids

Speaking of bookshops, I just saw an article on Facebook about a new Intown bookshop, Virginia Highland Books, which is located in the Virginia-Highland neighborhood neighborhood just east of Midtown, two miles from where I live. Two of my friends who live in the neighborhood said that they love it, and I'll almost certainly stop there tomorrow afternoon, after I get my booster vaccine dose and attend my group's monthly meeting after lunch. I'll let you know how it is, Benita and Kay.

ARTS ATL: Even in its infancy, Virginia Highland Books is already building community

I hope you have a wonderful holiday in Portugal when it happens, Darryl. I think it's been a very tiring couple of years - I know I feel way overdue a proper holiday and switching off.

My sister in South Africa developed what sounds like a straightforward COVID case to me but her doctor (who is a proud anti-vaxxer) insists is a delayed (6 week?) reaction to her second COVID jab. He also prescribed her Ivermectin which I'm really annoyed about. She and her partner were already self-dosing one and off at a small level on it as a preventative measure (which I've been freaking out about), but now this guy has officially prescribed it at a higher dose. I can't figure out what's going on over there. SA usually has a pretty good reputation when it comes to medicine, so I don't know why they're so up for Ivermectin when the FDA and WHO have been emphatic that it shouldn't be used to treat COVID.

OK! I've finally landed on and caught up with your "new" thread. Carry on!

I did get my booster (third) dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine just after 10 am today. I'm just waking up from 2½ hour nap, and I'm still groggy, but otherwise I feel fine. I expect to be a bit under the weather tomorrow, but because I'm not working this week I can stay home and rest. Even if I feel like crap tomorrow that will be a tiny price to pay for not getting breakthrough COVID-19, and all the risks associated with the infection.

>79 AlisonY: Thanks, Alison! I look forward to a relaxing vacation, before I have to return to what promises to be a busy autumn and winter season on hospital service.

Excuse my language...but WTF?! What justification does Dr Antivax have to make a diagnosis for a delayed reaction to the vaccine? If it's not an infection, WTH has he prescribed ivermectin, which is supposed to only treat COVID-19 infection?! (Breaking news: ivermectin has not been proven to treat COVID-19, and Merck, its manufacturer, has specifically instructed clinicians and patients that it is not recommended for treatment of this illness; see below.) Has he tested her for COVID-19, i.e. rapid antigen test (to look for one or more proteins on the surface of the virus), polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, to look for SARS-CoV-2 DNA, or serum SARS-CoV-2 antibody test? If not, how can he say that she does not have COVID-19?! My God, that quack needs to be reported to the local medical governing board and have his license to practice medicine revoked.

More concerning to me is why your sister chooses to follow that clown's recommendation.

Here's a link to the Merck Statement on Ivermectin use During the COVID-19 Pandemic:

Merck (NYSE: MRK), known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, today affirmed its position regarding use of ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic. Company scientists continue to carefully examine the findings of all available and emerging studies of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 for evidence of efficacy and safety. It is important to note that, to-date, our analysis has identified:

— No scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies;
— No meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and;
— A concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.

We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.

You can best believe that if there was even the slightest evidence that ivermectin was effective in treating COVID-19 Merck or any other pharmaceutical company would be promoting the heck out of it to patients and physicians. Dr Antivax and "physicians" such as him are guilty of malpractice, and should have their licenses to practice medicine suspended or revoked.

In the United States we physicians apply for and, if we pass muster, are licensed to practice medicine based on the states in which we see patients; I only practice in Atlanta, so I only have a Georgia medical license, and I cannot legally treat or write prescriptions for patients in any other state. There are quite a few hoops to jump through before we can even apply for a medical license (I'm happy to share details if you or anyone else would like but I suspect that most if not all of you would find it boring), we have to renew it every two years, and it can be revoked for a number of reasons, including medical malpractice. Unfortunately the state medical boards have not been aggressive in taking action against these quacks, and most of them are allowed to prescribe ivermectin and other medications off label.

>80 rocketjk: Will do, sir!

>46 kidzdoc: ...middlebrow and overly clever books
I have been tiring of these types of works in the last few years. I know now when certain acquaintances recommend something to watch out for it- as it is likely to be exactly this!

My interest in reading Booker books has also waned- I suspected the expansion of it would water it down, and it seems it has.

>67 kidzdoc: I'll leave Atlanta on the evening of 20 October..
Congratulations! You are free again to travel! Our borders are still closed and a couple of my friends are in the tourism business, they are getting impatient to welcome our overseas visitors again.

Before we open up shop (as it were) we are looking at wanting 90% +/- of the eligible population vaccinated. So it's a no go just yet. (I have had my first Pfizer jab, and am booked for my second- and, experienced zero side effects.)

>81 kidzdoc: She did a PCR test which came back negative, Darryl, but they only swabbed her throat as her nose was really sore from the infection she's had (in the UK they're emphatic about you swabbing both when testing). So that's why he's decided it's not COVID, yet she was really unwell for 10 days, thankfully turning a corner. I agree he sounds like a total charlatan (even the Ivermectin issue aside, to be telling her that he's not been infected despite seeing over 120 infected patients despite not being vaccinated because he follows a healthy lifestyle - what utter BS to be telling people in his care), but she insists he's one of the best GPs in the city. Currently I'm more worried about what Ivermectin is doing to her insides than COVID.

>82 LovingLit: Happy Birthday, Megan! I'm sure that it's early Friday morning in Christchurch, though.

I have been tiring of these types of works in the last few years.

Agreed. I'm not completely sure why, but I have grown sour on most fiction written by authors from the United States in the past couple of decades, although I love nonfiction and poetry written in this country more than anywhere else. American 21st century fiction seems to be formulaic, and, as I said, overly clever and cutesy, as if it's written to sell the most books or appeal to a certain segment of the reading public rather than tell a compelling story with richly drawn characters. I'm far more fond of British literature and I could easily name 10-12 contemporary authors who I'm fond of, but I would have a hard time listing more than three current American novelists who I hold in equal regard.

My interest in reading Booker books has also waned- I suspected the expansion of it would water it down, and it seems it has.

I was very unhappy when I first learned that the Booker Prize would be open to authors from the United States, as I depended on it to learn about great books written by authors who I would otherwise not have heard of here. I'll have to go back through the "open era" longlists to see if there are more than one or two longlisted books by American authors that I would not have read had they not been chosen for the Booker Dozen...I probably wouldn't have read Lincoln in the Bardo, the 2017 winner, and How Much of These Hills Is Gold may have flown under my radar. In contrast, there are several American novels that I would not have read had they not been Booker listed, which I strongly disliked: We Are Completely Besides Ourselves, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, The Sellout (the worst Booker Prize winning novel I've ever read), My Name Is Lucy Barton, Eileen, and now No One Is Talking About This.

Yes, fully vaccinated Americans are now able to freely travel to most other countries, although we still to tightly restricted visitors who wish to come here. I hope that New Zealanders will be able to travel soon, although I applaud your fabulous prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, for her strong leadership and management of the pandemic there. It's astonishing and hardly believable that only 27 Kiwis have died from COVID-19 during this pandemic, versus greater than 691,000 in the United States. Accounting for the differences in population if our death toll was as low as yours less than 2,000 Americans would have perished during the pandemic so far.

Before we open up shop (as it were) we are looking at wanting 90% +/- of the eligible population vaccinated. So it's a no go just yet.

Portugal is, I think, leading the world in its vaccination campaign, as ~85% of the eligible population is currently vaccinated, which was the goal the government set to significantly relax restrictions. I've been receiving daily notices from SIC, the major Portuguese cable news channel, and it reported that tomorrow will mark the first day of the last phase of pandemic restrictions, with the lifting of capacity limits in sporting and other cultural events, restaurants, clubs and bars, and lifting of the universal requirement for wearing masks, except on public transit, and in hospitals, supermarkets and during concerts. Masks are optional in other settings.

I received my third (booster) dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yesterday morning, and so far I feel great, except for mild localized swelling and tenderness at the injection site, which I wouldn't notice except when I touch or bump my left upper arm. (Actually, the swelling has gotten much larger in the past few hours, as it's about 5 cm (2 inches) in diameter, but it's still not that tender.) At this time after my second Pfizer dose I was having significant systemic symptoms, namely low grade fevers (37.5 to 38.5 C), rigors (shaking chills), generalized muscle ache (myalgias), nausea, poor appetite and fatigue. So far I haven't had any of these or other systemic symptoms, and I suspect that I won't have any. Two of my friends, one of my former partners and a physician assistant I've known for two decades, reported that they also had fewer symptoms with the third as compared to the second dose.

>83 AlisonY: Hmph. That is not the way any respiratory viral swab test is supposed to be performed! It should be a deep nasopharyngeal swab, in which the wand is inserted into the rear of one or both nasal passages, twirled several times, and left in place for at least 15 seconds. I'm not surprised that she tested negative!

I find it hard to believe that quack is "one of the best GPs in the city." We have several South African physicians on the medical staff at Children's, all of whom are top notch, especially two of them, a neurosurgeon and an infectious disease specialist, who are amongst the most highly respected and beloved doctors in the system

Currently I'm more worried about what Ivermectin is doing to her insides than COVID.

Agreed. There have been hundreds if not thousands of calls to state poison control centers due to overdoses of ivermectin, as some people have been buying the medication from feed stores and using pills meant to deworm horses and cattle (who, needless to say, are considerably larger than humans!). Several dozen of the worst overdoses have required hospitalization, and a few people have died in hospital.

Encouraged by your review of The Promise and your comments on A Passage North. And, if I got that right, on An Island. Entertained by the discussion on No One is Talking About this. I try to read the longlist from longest to shortest book, over about a year. NOiTAT is the shortest one, so might be a bit before I get to it and see for myself. (I’m hoping to read The Fortune Men this month.)

>85 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I'll finish An Island this evening, which continues to be very good, and I'll write reviews of it and A Passage North this weekend.

I should have no problem finishing the Booker Prize shortlist by November 3rd, when the prize ceremony will take place. I would ideally like to finish the longlist by year's end, which seems doable.

I'll be curious to get your take on No One Is Talking About This, as several people in Club Read and the 75 Books group — especially my dear friend Rachael (FlossieT) — all liked it considerably better than I did.

Congratulations to the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is high on my list of favorite African writers, and my favorite novels by him are By the Sea, Paradise, Desertion, and Admiring Silence.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2021/summary/

>87 kidzdoc: Ha! I was posting on my thread while you were posting here. I'm very excited for him. He has been a favorite, as you know. Still have the most recent here in the pile.

>88 avaland: Ha, indeed! I was just about to visit your thread to share this great news, Lois. I just ordered his newest novel, Afterlives, from The Book Depository, and I'll read Gravel Heart, the only novel of his I own that I haven't read, soon.

>87 kidzdoc: Oh, you can ignore my post on Lois' thread then about where to start with him - I've not read any of his work.

>87 kidzdoc: I just celebrated his receiving the Nobel Prize over at my place, Darryl.

I had forecast your favourite Ngugi Wa Thiongo or Nuruddin Farah and was hoping for a winner from Africa as it was long overdue. I'm pleased with the award and will read By the Sea this weekend. I have read Paradise previously.

I'm with you on the Lockwood - it is a pitiful choice. And you know I agree with you on the misstep in including American authors to the Booker.

>87 kidzdoc: Proves again that my reading of non genre literature is way too spotty. I’m not sure I had even heard of him before this morning.

>90 AlisonY: You'll have a much easier time finding his books in Ireland than we will in the US, Alison. If I would recommend one book it would be By the Sea, which earned five stars from me. Several of his books are available for purchase on Amazon Kindle in the US, but By the Sea isn't one of them.

>91 PaulCranswick: Excellent, Paul. I'm on my lunch break, and I'll pay you a return visit either this afternoon, or this evening if the Emergency Department decides to admit patients to me. I would have preferred to see Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o win this great honor, but Dr Gurnah is a very worthy laureate, and I was surprised and thrilled to see his name when I logged onto the Nobel Prize web page after I arrived at my work desk this morning.

I'm ashamed to say that I still haven't read anything by Nuruddin Farah yet. I do own three of his books, Maps, Knots and Gifts, and I'll make it my business to read at least one of those books before the end of the year.

You're right in saying that Africa was long overdue to have one of its writers chosen for the Nobel Prize. The New York Times article about Dr Gurnah's win included the following paragraph:

In the prelude to this year’s award, the literature prize was called out for lacking diversity among its winners. The journalist Greta Thurfjell, writing in Dagens Nyheter, a Swedish newspaper, noted that 95 of the 117 past Nobel laureates were from Europe or North America, and that only 16 winners had been women. “Can it really continue like that?” she asked.

I know that several people loved No One Is Talking About This, including two people whose opinions I highly respect, Danielle (Yells) here, and Ellen (EBT1002) in the 75 Books group, but it will probably end up as my worst book of 2021.

I would like to see the rules for eligibility for the Booker Prize change, with the exclusion of non-Commonwealth authors, or at least American ones, since only Americans are eligible for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction, and I would like it if all publishers had an equal chance of nominating books, not just the large publishing houses with the most popular authors, as they have too much power and influence to decide which books are chosen.

>92 AnnieMod: I'll bet dimes to dollars that one of the current or past members of Club Read introduced me to Abdulrazak Gurnah, most likely avaland, rebeccanyc, or akeela. I suspect that only a tiny minority of the members of this well read group and the 75 Books group have read anything by him, or even heard of him before today.

Gurnah was not on my radar. My very large library system has only one of his books, a single copy of By the Sea. I've put myself on the waitlist of 30 people.

Hopefully this award will put more of his books back in print in the U.S. so they become more easily accessible.

>93 kidzdoc: I am sure you are right :) But I also know my weak spots in regards to non-genre authors (where genre spans everything that is not contemporary I guess) - I sometimes stumble on some of them almost by chance but... :)

>94 japaul22: Funny that - my library is the same - single copy of that one book (and I have no open holds until Saturday when I pick up the ready ones although so far only 4 people had asked for it)

>94 japaul22: Yikes; a 30 strong waitlist?!

I'm not sure if or how many of Gurnah's books were published in the US; Lois will know better than me. I'm all but certain that I bought the books I own by him during my past trips to London, as they were readily available in bookshops there.

>95 AnnieMod: I can't fault you for not being familiar with an author from another country who is essentially unknown here, and whose books have probably not been published in the US. I may have discovered him without recommendations from Club Read friends, but probably only because of my interest in African literature, and my frequent trips to London and Edinburgh. His novel Paradise was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, but that was over a decade before I started following that award closely.

>96 kidzdoc: In 1994, the extent of my English was "This is a cat. This is a table". And I kept forgetting the "a" :) I did not even know that a Booker award existed :) And even if I had been considering going through the short lists, something keep popping up.

I tend to be better versed in European authors (or at least used to until I moved a decade ago) - a few publishers back home made a conscious effort (helped by EU and other local grants) to translate a lot of European authors and the Russians were doing even more of that. Not that I do not have gaps there as well but they are not as big. African ones, outside of the Mediterranean countries to some extent, not as much - no grants, no interest in general so... no books. When I started traveling in the mid-2000s, I would occasionally pick up a translated book while traversing Frankfurt/Munich/Heathrow but I was a lot more likely to grab a book that was written in English/German than a translation (and a lot more likely to get a thriller/SF than a serious book).

I had been making some effort to close the gap (and sometimes a gap closes on its own - I somehow ended up reading two books by Mauritian authors in the last few weeks for example - unplanned and almost by accident (working on reviews just now)). So... we will see. I still need to get back to another Nobel winner who I loved and keep keeping for rainy day (Modiano) as well...

>93 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. Noting it. Even in the UK a lot of his stuff seems to be secondhand copies only, but I'm OK with that. I expect a lot of it will suddenly go back on release now.

Congratulations on getting your booster shot, Darryl. It’s good that you are well protected, working with children at the hospital.

I’d never heard of Gurnah, but it turns out the local library (Amsterdam) has two books of him. One copy each. I guess they will be buying some more now. I can also borrow from the national system, and then a number more are available. So he has been on the radar, more or less.

>87 kidzdoc: I’ve never read anything by Abdulrazak Gurnah but we do have Paradise on the shelves. It was on the reading list for one of my O.U. courses when I was doing my degree, but it was towards the end of the course and I ran out of time so I have never actually read it as yet. I will try and get around to it sometime soon.

>97 AnnieMod: I was all but completely unaware of the Booker Prize until 2007, when I made my first trip to London, which was also my first trip to Europe, and the first time I left the United States since my mother took me to Expo 67 in Montréal four decades earlier. I don't think I read much European literature until that point, either; LibraryThing and my Club Read friends deserve the lion's share of the credit for broadening my literary horizon.

I'll visit your thread shortly to see which two books by Mauritian authors you've read recently. The two I'm most familiar with are J.M.G. Le Clézio, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Nathacha Appanah, although I've only read one of her books, The Last Brother, which was superb.

>98 AlisonY: I'm sure that Gurnah's books will be reissued in short order, Alison. I placed an order for Afterlives, his newest novel, with The Book Depository shortly after Dr Gurnah was announced as this year's Nobel Prize laureate, but I just noticed that my order was cancelled, presumably because there was a run on orders for this books at that time. Fortunately several of his more recent novels are available for purchase as e-books; I bought Dottie and Pilgrims Way on Thursday, and I purchased Gravel Heart a year or two ago.

>99 EllaTim: Thanks, Ella. We're still seeing a good number of kids that require hospitalization due to acute COVID-19 or MIS-C, multisystem inflammatory syndrome of childhood, which follows an asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic case of COVID-19 by several weeks, and not uncommonly the parents of the kids with acute COVID-19 also have it. Several recent studies have demonstrated a significant waning of immunity to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after six months, including two from Israel and Qatar that were published in this week's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, so those of us who are seeing patients sickened with COVID-19 would benefit from the extra protection. Fortunately cases of COVID-19 in the United States are significantly declining, although a winter surge of cases, probably after the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, is still very possible.

>100 SandDune: Sounds good, Rhian. Paradise is one of my favorite novels by Dr Gurnah, so that would be a good book to start with, IMO (and I think that Lois would agree).

Hi Darryl. Belated Happy New Thread!

Hi Darryl! I was excited to see an African nobel prize winner, but I am not familiar with Gurnah's work. I went to the library, and all of the books they have by him had over 100 holds for only one copy. So I am excited that my city-mates are paying attention to the prize, but unless the library buys some more copies, it will be a few years before my holds come in.

>102 connie53: Thanks, Connie!

>103 banjo123: Hi, Rhonda! Very few people, including the very well-read members of LibraryThing, are familar with Dr Gurnah's work. Very few of his novels seem to have been published in the US, although my copy of Paradise, possibly his best known work, was put out by The New Press in 1994. Several of his more recent novels are available for purchase as ebooks on Amazon Kindle here, all between eight and 10 dollars.

Yesterday CBC Radio rebroadcast an interview that Dr. Gurnah did with Eleanor Wachtel a few years ago-it was very good.

>105 torontoc: Thanks, Cyrel! I found a link to the interview, and I'll listen to it later this week.

Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah explores the pain of dislocation, from Zanzibar to England

Congratulations to Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, the Ugandan author who was chosen as this year's International Writer of Courage by Tsitsi Dangarembga, the winner of the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize, which is "awarded annually to a writer resident in Britain, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination…to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’." "The prize is shared with an international writer of courage selected by English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee in association with the winner. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs."

Mr Rukirabashaija was imprisoned and tortured after he wrote The Greedy Barbarian, a novel about high level corruption in an unnamed African country. The long time president of Uganda, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, believed that the book was a critique of his leadership, and he called for the author's arrest on trumped up charges, in an effort to silence him. He was released, but he remains under close scrutiny by the Ugandan police.

The Greedy Barbarian is available to read for free for members of Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and can be purchased for $4.00 for non-members. I bought a copy of it this morning, and I'll read it soon.

The Guardian: Kakwenza Rukirabashaija named this year’s International Writer of Courage

I was surprised and pleased to see that our library system (University of Alabama) had 9 of Gurnah's books. The most recent books are the ones that we don't have, but his earlier works are all there on our shelves.

>108 benitastrnad: That's impressive, Benita! I just checked, and the Emory University Libraries have six of Abdulrazak Gurnah's 10 novels, all but the newest four, along with a collected edition of his works which was published in 2004, and the Fulton County Library System has four of his novels. As an alumnus I'm eligible to borrow books from Emory's libraries, which I'll have to keep in mind in the future.

I now own all of his novels except his latest, Afterlives, which is out of stock on Amazon US, Amazon UK and The Book Depository. I'm sure that Bloomsbury UK is working overtime to print more copies of it, though.

Now that I'm more familiar with his life story I would love to read an autobiography about Gurnah, similar to the series of memoirs that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has written in the past few years.

Hey Darryl, noting some very average reviews on Amazon for Knausgaard's new novel. A number of people can't decide if he's trying to do SF or thriller or magical realism or what. I must admit the first and last of those aren't high up on my list of favourite genres, so now I'm dithering on this, but I'll probably give it a go nonetheless.

I didn't realise it's part of a trilogy.

>110 AlisonY: Thanks, Alison. A decidedly mixed if not mildly negative review of The Morning Star in The New York Times included this paragraph:

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new novel, “The Morning Star,” made me feel as though I were drifting through a nearby galaxy, randomly encountering and re-encountering certain celestial beings, before being released, with a disembodied whoosh, into metaphysical deep space.

I hadn't planned to buy this book yet, as I've only read six of his 12 books that I already own, namely Books Five and Six of the My Struggle series, A Time for Everything, In the Land of the Cyclops, Winter and Summer. If you and other LTers whose opinions I respect rave about it I'll add it to my list of books to read—eventually. I received all of his previous books from my subscription to Archipelago Books, but since The Morning Star was published by Penguin Press in the US I won't automatically receive it.

ETA: The author of the NYT review compared The Morning Star to No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, my least favorite book of 2021 so far, in the sense that neither book "felt like a novel."

Oof...that's the first novel in a trilogy?! Nope nope nope. I would much rather re-read the My Struggle series.

>110 AlisonY: >111 kidzdoc: The Guardian review of The morning star was emphatically negative!

>111 kidzdoc:, >112 Sakerfalcon: Yeah, I can't say the reviews to date are making me gallop towards The Morning Star. I suspect my curiosity and Knausgaard literary crush will probably tip me over into trying it, though.

>112 Sakerfalcon: Oops! Posted the link in a hurry and made a typo. It should work now!

>112 Sakerfalcon:, >114 Sakerfalcon: I had assumed that you were referring to a review of The Morning Star in The Guardian, Claire. The last paragraph of it was absolutely brutal:

It’s a cruel irony. Knausgård is known, most of all, for his willingness to bare himself. Now, just as he excises his semi-mythological persona from his work, he stands unflatteringly revealed. Once exhaustive, he is now simply exhausted. There are no quivering lattices of light here. There are not even green leaves, or a blue sky. The Morning Star is a dead planet, Knausgård its burned-out sun.

Yikes.

>113 AlisonY: As a fellow fan of Knausgaard I hope that you read and like The Morning Star, Alison. It will take glowing reviews from you and at least one other lover of his work to convince me to read it.

This summer I made an appointment for my mother at the Penn Memory Center of the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, to get a second opinion about the cause for my mother's memory loss and presumed dementia. We had a virtual appointment with one of the neurologists at Penn at that time, who recommended an MRI of her brain and lab work, and yesterday I took her and my father for an in person follow up appointment with the neurologist. Based on the (abnormal) MRI and a thorough history and physical examination, Dr O'Brien diagnosed her with logopenic primary progressive aphasia, which is usually associated with Alzheimer's dementia. Fortunately her long time neurologist has her on the right medications, but it's now good to be able to have a firm diagnosis for her condition, even if it's not the diagnosis that my father was hoping for (I'm not surprised, though).

If anyone has any recommendations for books about Alzheimer's dementia I would love to hear them.

ETA: I am very pleased and extremely impressed with Dr O'Brien and the staff at Penn Memory Center, and I would highly recommend it if anyone in the area has a loved one ≥65 years of age with memory loss, cognitive decline, or dementia.

Darryl, That’s where my mother was diagnosed. She has FTD (Frontal Temporal lobe Dimension - causes by reduced blood supply to that part of the brain). Unfortunately we also learned there is no treatment, except for the symptoms.

>116 kidzdoc: I'm so glad you got a definitive diagnosis for your mom. Even though that was not the one you were hoping for, an accurate diagnosis takes away so much uncertainty. It's as if you come face to face with your enemy instead of wondering who the enemy really is. I wish all the best for your mom and am glad for her and your dad that you recently got to visit.

Interestingly, we had a similar situation about a definitive diagnosis. My husband a couple of years ago became disabled (limping and walking with a cane). Finally, I was able to convince him and the doctor to check for gout which I suspected a few years earlier when he complained of toe pain. He would never submit to a needle aspiration, but when his knee became so swollen with fluid, he did not have a choice. Voila! After that diagnosis, we changed our diet completely to avoid trigger foods and I added ten cherries a day (which a friend who also has gout recommended). Thankfully, his symptoms of gout have disappeared completely, and he was able to make it through the pandemic without recurring joint pain.

I'm hoping research in both the fields of dementia and arthritic conditions makes it easier for people in the future.

I'm typing this now with one eye near the computer screen as I am three days post op of one of two cataract surgeries. Damn! Aging is no picnic!! :D

Stay well and happy and maybe one of these days we'll get to meet up in real life.

...before I get TOO old, that is! :D

>115 kidzdoc: Ouch! Could that quotation from the Knausgaard review be any more damning?

>116 kidzdoc: That's tough, Darryl, but I understand how having a formal diagnosis must help considerably. I haven't read any titles on Alzheimer's, but perhaps this link may be of use:

https://brightwater-living.com/blog/best-books-on-alzheimers-and-dementia/

>117 dchaikin: I'm sorry that your mother was diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia, Dan.

Given my mother's diagnosis and expected decline I'll continue to spend more time in Philadelphia than I have in the past, with visits every one to two months, especially now that I've cut my work hours and have more free time to spend with them. I've decided to cancel my trip to Lisbon next week, so that I can help my parents make additional plans for my mother's future needs.

>118 SqueakyChu: Thanks, Madeline. I find it helpful to attach a name to my mother's memory loss, as I can now research Alzheimer's more closely to help her, and determine what my brother and I can do to prevent developing it ourselves, since I'm not aware of it being diagnosed in my other relatives.

I'm glad that your husband was properly diagnosed and is now doing better. I hope that your recovery from cataract surgery continues to go well.

I haven't met up with any LTers, whether in the US or abroad, since my father nearly died early last year, as he is no longer driving and is suffering from cognitive decline after his stroke and days long seizure. To be honest I'm not all that interested in local meet ups, at least not now, but hopefully once we get my parents more help I'll feel more comfortable leaving them when I'm here in Philadelphia.

>119 AlisonY: Thanks for that link, Alison! I'll check it out now.

I'm so sorry to hear about your mom, Darryl. But it is nice to have a diagnosis.

>120 kidzdoc: I'm sorry to hear about your mom, but also that you are cancelling your trip to Lisbon. Is it your mom's diagnosis that caused you to change your plans?

Sorry to hear about your mom.

Bummer. So sorry about your Mom’s diagnosis and the further delayed plans are not fun either. These maladies which leave you alive but start stealing your memories and cognition are the worst to deal with sometimes. :(

I'm sorry to hear about your mom's diagnosis, and for your canceled plans, though it sounds like the right thing to do so that you can use this time and information well. I don't have any recommendations for material, but maybe set up a reference appointment with your local library? That's the kind of thing librarians are so good at.

>121 BLBera: Thanks, Beth. You're right, it is better to have a definitive diagnosis for my mother's memory loss and cognitive decline, for her, my father, and the rest of the family.

>122 labfs39: Thanks, Lisa. The main reason for the cancellation of this trip was a combination of my mother's formal diagnosis, and the need to make arrangements for her present and future care and provide my father with additional support. We had a very productive meeting with one of the social workers at the Penn Memory Center immediately after the appointment with Dr O'Brien, which was extremely helpful in providing us with a framework to start the process of creating a care plan for her. I'll go through the pamphlet that Leah gave me, and start the process of contacting people to help my parents tomorrow.

Along with that, my enthusiasm for traveling abroad is the lowest it's been since my first trip to London in 2007. Part of the reason is that DB (deebee1) is out of the country for the time being, and although I could meet her husband to look at retirement property it would probably only be for one or two days during that two week trip. As you've probably read, Portugal is leading the world in vaccinating its citizens, as it has exceeded its goal of an 85% vaccination rate, and it's far safer to be there, from a pandemic and a crime standpoint, than it would be in the United States, especially Atlanta and Philadelphia. There are also things I need to accomplish, both at my parents' house and back in Atlanta, and although a vacation abroad would be nice I would feel better getting things done here, and going to Lisbon when DB is back in town, and London sometime in the spring. I was thinking about not going for the past week, but our visit to the Penn Memory Center on Friday cemented my decision not to go. Fortunately I made a refundable booking for an apartment in Lisbon, and I can get a voucher for my flights that I can use for future travel. I was originally supposed to fly back to Atlanta on Tuesday, two days from now, and leave for Lisbon the following day, which wouldn't have given us much time to make these arrangements for my mother.

>123 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita.

>124 AnnieMod: These maladies which leave you alive but start stealing your memories and cognition are the worst to deal with sometimes.

Exactly, Annie. My mother recognizes that her memory isn't what it was, which she greatly regrets, along with her inability to cook, drive and perform other activities of daily living. Fortunately she is pleasant and in a good mood far more often than not, although she routinely experiences sundowning in the late afternoons before dinner, in which her memory is worse, her tremors increase, and she is much more emotionally labile.

>125 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa; that's a great idea. I need to go to my local public library after I return to Atlanta, and I can ask one of the librarians for resources while I'm there. I'll also look at the Alzheimer's Association web site and other resources for additional information and suggestions.

I’m sorry to hear about your mother’s diagnosis, Darryl.

It’s also no fun to travel when you have stresses at home that can’t be ignored or left behind, so I would have probably made the same choice.

Hang in there.

My mother's dementia isn't Alzheimer's but her personality is similar to your mom's. Pleasant, and good humoured, but she does experience periods of distress and disorientation, and her memory seems to be getting worse. Having an easy-going personality is a blessing, Darryl, because it helps make it easier for the caregivers and that, ultimately, makes it easier for her and for us. I'm not sure how I'd cope, from a distance, if she were nasty and angry all the time. Fortunately, she never has been and what dementia takes away from a human being, pares her down to her essence, which is a good person. I think you are making the right decisions now and I know that will give you peace, which is as important as anything else. I am happy to hear that you are finding the right people so far, to guide you and help you.

A book I bought when my mum was first diagnosed with dementia (but, admittedly, haven't read yet, just skimmed), sounds like it might be something you are looking for. It's called The End of Memory, written by Canadian science writer and broadcaster Jay Ingram. I have read other books by him and know him from his former radio and tv programs. He writes this as a biography of the disease but he dedicates the book to his father, who cared for his mother during her own decline through dementia.

>127 japaul22: Thanks, Jennifer.

It’s also no fun to travel when you have stresses at home that can’t be ignored or left behind, so I would have probably made the same choice.

Exactly. Lisbon and London will always be there, but I can't say the same for my mother.

>128 jessibud2: Having an easy-going personality is a blessing, Darryl, because it helps make it easier for the caregivers and that, ultimately, makes it easier for her and for us.

I couldn't agree more, Shelley. There was a period several years ago, during the onset of her dementia, in which she became very angry and irrational at my father, and said that she hated him and wanted a divorce, which is a 180º adjustment from the way that my parents usually are; they have been happily married for 61 years, and I don't know of a couple who loves each other more than they do. Fortunately my father reacted calmly and rationally, and, even better, that period didn't last for long.

The End of Memory sounds perfect, so I just ordered it from Amazon. Thanks for recommending it to me!

>124 AnnieMod: "These maladies which leave you alive but start stealing your memories and cognition are the worst to deal with sometimes."

>128 jessibud2: "My mother's dementia isn't Alzheimer's but her personality is similar to your mom's. Pleasant, and good humoured, but she does experience periods of distress and disorientation, and her memory seems to be getting worse."

This was my mother's condition, too, before she died a several years ago at age 93. A couple of years before she died, I asked my mom about one particular story she'd told me about her childhood, hoping to get some more details or just to engage her in pleasant thoughts about her youth. But I was already too late. I'll never forget what she said to me: "I don't remember any more. Somebody else lived that life."

>130 rocketjk: - That's heartbreaking. And sounds like a rather lucid and self-aware moment. My mum has those, too. Once in awhile, when she starts to say something or tries to look for something, she stalls. And just can't pick up the threads. She will look at me or, if we are on the phone, she will just say, "I think I'm losing it, aren't I?" Not really much you can do but go with the flow. Sometimes, I try to change the subject, but most of the time I try to explain what is happening, that her memory isn't as good as it once was but it's ok. I tell her she is still *her*. The only good part of this is that she doesn't seem to remember the bad things that have happened, and that can only be a good thing.

I also got her a Medic Alert bracelet and explained how she mustn't take it off. It has 3 bits of info on it: one allergy, and her 2 diagnoses of dementia and lymphoma. She likes it and is fine with wearing it but she was quite taken aback when she first saw the word dementia. I explained again and told her to not stress about it and just to keep it on. She puts another bracelet on with it so it isn't so obvious but for that one moment, she seemed to realize that she had dementia. Most of the time, she doesn't remember that. It was always her worst nightmare.

Sorry about your mother, Darryl. I understand your parents are more important than a trip to Lisbon right now.
My mother and Franks aunt both suffered from dementia in their last years. Wishing you strength, also from Frank.

Sorry to hear about your mother's diagnosis Darryl, but glad she had the best practitioners to help you all support your mum to have the best possible care going forward.

Sorry about your mother's diagnosis. I think Still Alice is very good, for a novel about AD. Otherwise, I do really recommend the Alzheimer's Association, for resources and support. Perhaps they might have a caregiver group that could be helpful for your father?

I'm sorry to hear about your mother's diagnosis, but as you say, it's not a surprise and good to have it confirmed. After what we went through with my Dad I strongly agree that you are correct to prioritise time with your mother while you can enjoy quality time together. And the staff at Penn sound terrific.

I'm sorry to hear about your mother's diagnosis, Darryl. It sounds like you have a good outline of a plan for her treatment going forward, and I'm glad you're in a position to be helping your parents as much as possible.

I don't know of any good books, but the Alzheimer's Association has a 24-hour hotline for those with Alzheimer's and their caregivers - 800-272-3900

>130 rocketjk: I'll never forget what she said to me: "I don't remember any more. Somebody else lived that life."

That is a heartbreaking comment, Jerry. Several times a day we talk with my mother about her past life, and help her remember her childhood and young adulthood in NYC, her life as a young mother in Jersey City, and her middle years living in the Philadelphia suburbs. She has been great about collecting photos over the years, and we go through them on a regular basis with her. Doing these things has helped her to form and cement memories that she had lost, and as a result she finds it much easier to recall names, places and events than she did six or more months ago.

>131 jessibud2: "I think I'm losing it, aren't I?"

Sigh...another heartbreaking comment. My mother often says, "My memory isn't what it was," and "I can't do the things I used to do," and she feels sad about that, but for now it's fairly easy to remind her that she did have a productive and personally rewarding career when she did work, she was a great cook and a fabulous mother when my brother and I were kids, and she remains someone who people gravitate to and is loved by practically everyone, which gives her comfort and joy.

Thanks for reminding me about the Medic Alert; I need to get one for each of my parents. My mother has known for some time that she has dementia, which she calls "memory loss," and although the neurologist at Penn told all of us that she has Alzheimer's dementia during her appointment on Friday it hasn't registered with her, most likely due to her current condition and especially because I don't believe any of her close friends, and none of her family, has suffered from that condition.

>132 FAMeulstee: Thanks, Anita. Yes, my parents are far more important than a trip to Lisbon, and it is even easier to decide not to go because DB won't be there. I'll almost certainly go there in June, which is my vacation free month from work, and especially because a close friend of mine from medical school asked if I would accompany her and her family there in the middle of the month, assuming that she can get the time off from work. I haven't seen Paula since we graduated from Pitt (the University of Pittsburgh) in 1997, but, thanks to Facebook, we reestablished ties a couple of years ago and are in close touch with each other in that platform.

>133 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, Caroline.

>137 kidzdoc: I’m so sorry about our mother, Darryl. It is so sad to see it happening. My son-in-law is experiencing it with his mother now. The other day he was explaining to her that his dad had died. She must have been looking for him. It has been a gradual decline, and she still has some good days. She’s 87 or 88, and has had a good life. The older memories seem to be the ones she remembers the most.

>134 banjo123: Thanks, Rhonda. I've heard great things about Still Alice, so I'll plan to read it soon.

I realized just now that I have at least two unread books about Alzheimer's dementia on my Kindle, Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey, a novel that Rhian recommended to me several years ago, and Fighting for My Life: How to Thrive in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s by Jamie TenNapel Tyrone, a memoir written by a woman who was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's dementia in her 40s. I'll read these books soon, probably next month.

Yes, I definitely plan to look at the Alzheimer's Association booklet and contact the local Area on Aging, to see what help my father can receive in helping him care for my mother. We'll want to hire a caregiver in the home, and look into an adult day program where my mother can go during weekdays, which will provide her with more stimulatory activities and, at the same time, provide my father with free time to do things he needs to for the house and himself, including rest that he sorely needs.

>135 Sakerfalcon: Thanks, Claire. Cutting back my hours at work will afford me more time to spend with my parents, and getting a care plan set up for the two of them will it easier for me to travel abroad again, starting next year.

The staff at Penn Memory Center was top notch, and I was pleased at the care my mother received when she needed to have a tumor in one of her adrenal glands removed by a surgeon at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania two years ago. I took my father to see a hematologist this morning due to chronic anemia, and fortunately I was able to make an appointment for him with a Penn Medicine specialist whose office is a little more than a mile away from their house.

>136 bell7: Thanks, Mary. I'm hopeful that we can set up an adequate care plan, one that will allow my mother to remain at home for the next five years, at least, and permit me to remain in my current work position in Atlanta until I retire, most likely in the spring of 2027 when I turn 66.

Thanks for that link to the 24 hour hotline to the Alzheimer's Association. Hopefully we won't need to use it, but it's comforting to have that resource.

>137 kidzdoc: - Darryl, initially, I wanted to get my mum one of those necklace buttons that is a fall alert. They come as a bracelet, too but the bracelet doesn't have the alert/call feature. The guy I spoke to when asking questions about it told me something I never expected to hear. He said that they don't actually recommend the necklace button for dementia people because they often have a tendency to fiddle with something around their neck and if that button gets pressed a few too many times, a few too many *false alarms*, the responders might stop responding to it. I truly had not thought of that but it makes sense. And of course, with a person with dementia, there is no point *telling* them not to do that because they won't remember. So that's why I opted for the Medic Alert bracelet instead. The staff where she lives check on her several times a day and she has help dressing in the morning and getting ready for bed at night so hopefully, that will be enough to prevent another fall.

I did appreciate the guy mentioning that to me, though, instead of just trying to make a sale.

>138 NanaCC: Thanks, Colleen. I'm sorry that your SIL's mother is going through the same thing. My mother turned 86 earlier this month, so they are roughly the same age. Fortunately my mother has good periods every day, her bad spells don't last for long, and her decline has been slow, but I know that her condition will continue to worsen.

>140 jessibud2: Ah. That's a great point, and that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing that with me, Shelley.

>139 kidzdoc: - I read and was blown away by Still Alice and I think the movie made from the book did justice to it. I also read but did not like Elizabeth Is Missing. Not sure why but it infuriated me. I don't know the other one you mentioned so can't comment on it. But do get to the Genova one. She is a neuroscientist and writes from knowledge and she is a great writer. I have read several of her books, inlcuding ones about ALS, Huntington's and autism.

Sorry to hear about your mom's diagnosis and your decision to postpone your trip. Best wishes to you and your parents.

Sorry Darryl to hear about your mother. My grandmother had the same type of dementia, it certainly helped my parents and mother's siblings get her the right kind of help and develop a clear treatment plan.

I am sorry to hear about your mother’s diagnosis, Darryl. I think almost certainly my mother is suffering from a form of dementia as well, although she has not had a formal diagnosis as yet! I think the social isolation of our various lockdowns has been really bad for her mental capacity overall.

Every summer in high school I had a volunteer job. My first one was at HUP. I guess I was a candy stripper but the uniform was a solid bright pink color. That was 1965. That place was so huge. It was quite a trek from one end of the hospital to the other. There was a big contrast between the newer section where patients with money were and the wards. I had surgery there in 1989. I grew up in SW philly so the hospital wasn’t far.

So sorry to read of your mother's confirmed diagnosis, Darryl.

My Gran suffered with the fog of Alzheimers in the last three years of her life and it was difficult to see and heartbreaking to witness her confusion. She needs your love more than ever now my dear friend and I know that she can count unreservedly on that.

(((((HUGS)))).

My own mother will be laid to rest in a hour or so and I am so sad to be more than half a world away.

>139 kidzdoc: I am sorry to hear about your Mom, Darryl. Both my Mom and my MIL were diagnosed with dementia. Change of location is very disorienting and the constant repetition of questions is wearing. My MIL has since passed but we are working on my Dad to get some in-residence help. They already live in a retirement village, but he doesn't want to switch to the assisted living section because it involves downgrading to a smaller residence. He's hoping to get someone to visit in their independent living space. I wish you, your Mom and your Dad the very best as you navigate this.

>130 rocketjk: "I don't remember any more. Somebody else lived that life."

That's heartbreaking but sounds like she realized what was happening to her. It can be scary and I wonder if it is actually better knowing it and facing it - even if it is easier on the people around you.

(and at the risk of getting this thread even more offtrack) My paternal grandmother (in her early 70s when it started) refused to believe that something was going on with her so she invented stories and memories where she lost them and then got aggressive, paranoid and combative when someone pointed out an impossibility or tried to even hint that she has an issue - and she was not a sunshine even before that and it lasted for the better part of a decade. Losing her husband half-way through did not help much either.

My maternal grandmother kept losing her memory in the last 3 years of her life (early 90s for her) - bit by bit, with some good and bad days (some days she had perfect recall, some days she could not recognize my Mom (she thought she may be the lady bringing her food or someone from the services) and thought that I am her own sister and not her granddaughter when she knew me for someone she new). She at least realized that she has bad days and did not get all crazy and spin stories... but then she had a better disposition to start with. My Mom and Mom's brother were heartbroken when she did not recognize them (although surprisingly she always seemed to know that my sister is some kind of a relative - even if she did not always know which one). Bulgarian rural healthcare being what it is, they got diagnosed with age-related dementia and that was it.

No matter how it happens, it is a cruel fate for both the people who suffer and for everyone around them. :(

>143 jessibud2: Thanks, Shelley. I'll still read Elizabeth Is Missing, since Rhian gave it 5 stars, and I'll look for Still Alice to read in the near future.

>144 Oberon: Thanks, Erik.

>145 stretch: Thanks, Kevin. Yes, having a firm diagnosis, a variant of Alzheimer's dementia, has been helpful in current and future planning for what's to come for my mother, and it will help my father know what to expect in the future. We'll all be doing a lot of reading about this condition in the upcoming weeks and months.

>146 SandDune: Thanks, Rhian. You're absolutely right in saying that pandemic related social isolation has taken a toll on untold millions throughout the world, especially those with neurocognitive disorders and significant mental health conditions.

>147 dianeham: Unless you've been to the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in the past 2-3 years you wouldn't recognize the place. I worked as a candy striper (volunteer) at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for a few weekends one summer in the mid 1980s. CHP has changed, and there are quite a few research and clinical buildings affiliated with it. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) doesn't seem to have changed much, but a virtual city of high-rise buildings has grown around it, and even though two of my mother's specialists are Penn Medicine physicians I still get lost there. My mother had her left adrenal gland removed two years ago at HUP, and the hospital wards were ancient compared to the hospital I work at and others I've been in, although she received excellent care.

>148 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul. The only thing I am uncertain of is that my mother will continue to get the best of care from her husband, me, and their amazing and incredibly supportive neighbors.

I hope that you were able to watch your mother's funeral via a video feed yesterday. My mother's oldest sister, who was a second mother to me, died not unexpectedly earlier this year in a suburb of Houston after a long illness. We couldn't fly to Houston for the funeral, but we were able to watch the ceremony.

>149 Berly: Thanks, Kim.

>150 AnnieMod: Dementia is a cruel disease, Annie. I'm hopeful that my mother's normally sweet and kind disposition will help her cope with the changes that are happening now and will occur in the future. She does have occasional periods of anger and emotional lability, but fortunately these are infrequent and short in duration so far.

>151 kidzdoc:
There is also a very good movie version of Elizabeth is Missing. It was on PBS earlier this fall and it might be available through PBS. It stars Glenda Jackson and is was a great performance by her.

Another novel that discusses Alzheimer's which I really liked was The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean.

>152 benitastrnad: Thanks, Benita! I am a member of Public Broadcasting Atlanta and WHYY, the Delaware Valley's PBS station, so I have access to PBS Passport. I logged into my account, and I can watch the Masterpiece broadcast of Elizabeth Is Missing on my laptop. I have the book on my Kindle, so I'll probably read the book first, then watch the movie; I love Glenda Jackson!

>153 banjo123: Thanks, Rhonda! I'll look into it.

I've read an above average number of books (four books, five short stories) so far this month, so I'll catch up on reviews soon. I'm making Greek moussaka (lamb and eggplant casserole) for dinner at the moment for my parents and me (it's in the oven), so I'll start writing reviews later this week.

>153 banjo123: - Oh, that was a good one! Very sad but so well-done. I read it ages ago, when it first came out.

>151 kidzdoc: I have a grandson with cystic fibrosis and he usually has weeklong visits to Children’s 4 times a year. He’s on a new medication now and doesn’t have overnight stays anymore.

Daryl, I'm so sorry about your mother. We went through this with my mother through the 1990's. It was a challenge for all of us. I admire the way you are approaching all of this. What a great support you are for both of your parents.

>155 jessibud2: My copy of The End of Memory: A Natural History of Aging and Alzheimer's by Jay Ingram came today. I'll start reading it this weekend.

>156 dianeham: I'm glad that your grandson does not have to be hospitalized at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as often as he previously did. Cystic fibrosis is another heartbreaking condition, and I hope that gene therapy will eventually become available to cure it.

>157 tangledthread: Thanks, tangledthread. I've decided to extend my stay here once again, to help out my parents as much as I can.

Hope you are doing well, Darryl. Happy Saturday

Did you see this, Darryl? Riverhead is going to publish three titles by Abdulrazak Gurnah in the U.S.—Afterlives, By the Sea, and Desertion. Smart move on their part. That should make them a bit easier to get hold of.

>159 labfs39: Happy Saturday (what's left of it) to you, Lisa! I've been busy this week helping out my parents, especially since my father can no longer drive. I took him to see his neurologist on Wednesday, who diagnosed him with mild cognitive impairment, which correlates with his mental decline over the past year or so. That, combined with my mother's worsening dementia and their mutual physical decline, means that they are having progressively more difficulty managing affairs at home without significant help. I'm glad that I cancelled my vacation to Portugal, as we accomplished quite a lot that couldn't have been done if I wasn't here, or at least not as easily.

I'm halfway through The End of Memory: A Natural History of Aging and Alzheimer's by Jay Ingram, which Shelley recommended to me. It's superb so far.

>160 lisapeet: That's great news, Lisa! I own By the Sea and Desertion, and I ordered Afterlives from the Book Depository after it was back in stock.

>161 kidzdoc: - Good to hear that the Ingram book is hitting the spot, Darryl. Ingram is a smart guy and a great communicator. I have read 2 other books by him, Talk, Talk, Talk and Theatre of the Mind. I hope to get to this one in the new year.

>161 kidzdoc: admire your efforts for your parents and wish you and them well

>160 lisapeet: this is great news. I’ll have to keep track of that.

>161 kidzdoc: I'm glad my peregrination ended in Maine near my parents. They are still doing okay, but my mom lives alone and is starting to need more help. I'm only a mile away, so I see her almost every day, and one of the things I've noticed is that she's starting to repeat herself. Not badly enough to warrant alarm, but enough that I notice. Sometimes I find myself saying, yes, you told me, when I should just nod. My bringing it to her attention will not help matters.

I'm glad you are able to be with them during this transition time. I'm sure it must be difficult for them to realize things are amiss.

>162 jessibud2: I liked The End of Memory, Shelley, and I would highly recommend it; I'll write a review of it later today. It's a bit dated, though, as it was written in 2014, so I wanted to read something new, and preferably a book writtten by a physician who specializes in Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Fortunately Dr Emily Silverman, an internal medicine physician on the faculty at UCSF, the University of California, San Francisco, who hosts a podcast called The Nocturnists, interviewed Dr Jason Karlawish on Tuesday about his new book, The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It, which was published in late February of this year. Dr Karlawish is the director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, which is where I arranged an appointment for my mother to get a clear answer for her dementia; one of his younger partners, Dr Kyra O'Brien, saw my mother, for a virtual appointment in August and in person last month, and based on the MRI she ordered and a thorough history and physical examination Dr O'Brien diagnosed her with Alzheimer's disease, which her old neurologist did not do. Fortunately he has her on the correct medications at the proper doses for it, so he was managing her appropriately, but I find it to be extremely helpful to be able to give a name to a patient's condition, as a physician, patient, or son to a beloved parent. I ordered The Problem of Alzheimer's as soon as I read Dr Silverman's tweet on Monday about this podcast, and I'll start reading it today.

BTW, here's a link to the 45 minute podcast, which I started listening to yesterday and will finish this morning: Emily in Conversation with Dr. Jason Karlawish

>163 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I'm glad that I cancelled my vacation to Lisbon, as I was able to accomplish a lot of tasks and help out my parents over the past three weeks, which would have been very difficult to do if I was in Atlanta or Lisbon. I didn't realize how wiped out I was until yesterday, my first full day back in Atlanta, as I stayed in bed until early afternoon and slept practically the entire day away.

>164 labfs39: I'm glad that you were able to move close to your mother, Lisa; I'm now starting to wonder if I should do the same thing in the next year or two. I'm glad that I decided to cut my work hours last year, from 80% to 60% of full time, which means that I can keep my job benefits while having more time off to visit my parents every 1-2 months, which hopefully will be good enough for the immediate future.

My father has noticably declined over the past year, both mentally and physically, and last Wednesday I took him to see his neurologist, who diagnosed him with mild cognitive impairment, which can lead to Alzheimer's disease or another dementia. His ability to perform tasks and other activities of daily living is beginning to wane, at a time when my mother's needs are increasing, which is a disturbing combination. Both parents repeat themselves on a regular basis, and my mother will often do so many times in the same conversation. For years my father said that my mother suffered from CRS (Can't Remember Shit) syndrome, but it's not a joke anymore. During Sunday dinner one of her old recipe boxes was on the dining room table next to me, as I was looking for her beloved Thanksgiving stuffing recipe to be able to recreate it later this month, and she repeatedly asked "What's in the box?" After telling her what it contained at least a dozen times I had to give up, as I was getting frustrated, especially since she seemed to think the conversation was funny, and it ruined dinner for me, although I stayed calm and did not ruin it for her or my equally frustrated father. They both reminisce on a regular basis, and at least 95% of the time the stories they tell are ones that I've heard dozens of times before. I used to sigh and say "Yes, you've told me this already," but now I act as if the story is either new to me or one I'm not completely familiar with.

I found this bullet points in this image to be very helpful in my approach to both parents, and if wasn't unsightly I would plaster it on my forehead for constant reference:

Congratulations to Damon Galgut, whose novel The Promise won the Booker Prize yesterday. As Annie rightly said the third time was a charm, as two of his previous novels, The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010) were shortlisted for the Booker. I've read five of the six shortlisted novels so far, all but Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, whose length (627 pages) was off putting, especially since reviews of it were mixed and because I disliked the two shortlisted novels written by American authors, Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. I loved the other three books, though, namely The Promise, A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam, and The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, and although I wanted A Passage North to win I would have been happy if any of the three had be chosen.

I would ideally like to finish the longlist by year's end, but I may decide to pass on Great Circle, as life is too short to spend on a 600+ page mediocre novel about a topic that holds little interest to me.

Now that the Booker Prize season is over I'll dedicate most of the rest of the year to the third and fourth quarter Reading Globally themes, The Lusophone World: writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language, and Translation prize winners, starting with Sleepwalking Land by the Mozamibican author Mia Couto, and The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck.

Great Circle is just under 600 pages, and within that the chapters are quite short. I don't agree that it's a mediocre novel. I'm quite interested in reading The Promise and Damon Galgut's earlier work - have been very impressed by hearing him talk on the radio and that always makes me want to follow up even when I wasn't sure I wanted to read a book.

I've only read 3.7 of the books so far (reading The Fortune Men now, liked The Sweetness of Water, loved Great Circle and A Town Called Solace. I've now got some high priority library books which haven't been listed for the Booker or the Women's Prize for fiction, including Sarah Hall's new novel Burntcoat. I probably do want to read most of the rest of the list, own several and can borrow others at some point, but it's more likely to be next year than this now, I think.

Speaking of Sarah Moss, who you mention upthread in relation to Patricia Lockwood, I'm also hoping to get to her new novel The Fell in Netgalley soon.

>166 kidzdoc:, >167 elkiedee: I'm about halfway through Great Circle. I hope to post my review early next week (reading time allowing).

I've had 2 hits and 1 miss with Galgut's work before, but the hits were decent hits so glad to see him getting recognition yesterday. I was disappointed to have missed the TV coverage last night - I think usually it's held live in the evening, but from what I can gather it was held in the morning this time. I enjoy hearing the summaries of why the short-listed books were chosen.

>Thanks for the great info, Darryl, up in >165 kidzdoc:. And that visual is spot on. What it amounts to is: Kindness. But the specifics of it are vital.

I will listen to that podcast link soon. I am heading to Montreal to visit my mum tomorrow for a few days because she is feeling down lately and asked me to come but will be going again in mid-December to take her to an appointment with the radiation oncologist for a follow-up assessment after a few rounds of radiation (she now has a weird form of breast cancer in addition to everything else). It's the distance and the travel more than anything else that is wearing on me but it could be worse....

>166 kidzdoc: I really liked The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck I always look for newly published books by her!

>165 kidzdoc: Don't know if you'll see this in time, Daryl, but Pitt is doing a seminar on Alzheimer's research this afternoon. You were looking for recent medically based info.
https://www.alumnionline.pitt.edu/s/1729/alumni/interior.aspx?sid=1729&gid=2...

PS some of the virtual alumni events we have attended have been made available online after the event. So if you miss, you might want to see if it's available later.

>167 elkiedee: I'm glad that you liked Great Circle, Luci. I may still try to get to it this year, in an effort to read the entire Booker Prize longlist by year's end, but it will probably be the last novel I read, along with Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford. There are several longlisted books I'm far more eager to get to, particularly The Sweetness of Water, A Town Called Solace, and China Room. All in all I maintain that this was an excellent year for the Booker, as at least three of the Booker Dozen will very likely end up amongst my 10 favorite novels of the year.

I should mention that I've read one other book that wasn't chosen for the shortlist, An Island by the South African author Karen Jennings, which I thought was very well done and was a far more deserving candidate for the shortlist than Bewilderment and No One Is Talking About This.

I've now read five books by Damon Galgut, and given four of them at least four stars: The Impostor, In a Strange Room, Arctic Summer, and The Promise. The Good Doctor only earned 3½ stars from me, to my surprise, as I thought that I liked it better than that. I own but haven't yet read Small Circle of Beings and The Quarry.

I should receive the UK edition of The Fell by the week after next, hopefully before I return to Philadelphia on the 22nd, and I'll probably start reading it straight away.

>168 AlisonY: I look forward to your review of Great Circle, Alison.

The Booker Prize ceremony started at 1915 GMT yesterday, which was 1515 Eastern Daylight Time here in the US (we turn back our clocks early Sunday morning, and we're in one of the very short spells in which we are not five hours behind London time). It was a very lengthy process, lasting well over half an hour, and fortunately I was able to resume watching moments before the winning novel was announced.

You should be able to listen to the entire 42 minute ceremony on BBC Radio 4, via this link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001154k

>169 jessibud2: You're welcome, Shelley. I listened to the rest of the podcast a little while ago, and it was superb, and well worth it.

Safe travels to Montreal today, and I hope that you have a pleasant visit with your mother. I'm fortunate that I live in the city with the world's busiest airport, as I never have a problem getting direct flights to and from Philadelphia. I'm also fortunate to have TSA PreCheck, which allows me to enter special security lanes in both airports that significantly decrease the time spent there, especially in Philadelphia. I would be far happier if the US had high speed rail services as is the case throughout Western Europe, and I could avoid the hassle of using airports. I'll fly back to Philadelphia in 2½ weeks for the Thanksgiving holiday, and although I fervently hope not I realize that this may be the last year that I'll celebrate it with my parents in their home.

Just because you've been so awesome about passing along info about the pediatric covid vaccine, I wanted to let you know that my 11 and 8 year olds have appointments for their first dose next week. I also was grateful that the CDC said very clearly that dosage is based on age on the day of vaccination, not on weight, so that clarified going ahead and getting my 11 vaccinated with the child dose.

I'm feeling a lot of relief with this so close!

>170 torontoc: I'm glad that you liked The End of Days, Cyrel. It won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015, so it fits into the fourth quarter Reading Globally theme of Translation Prize Winners. I've read and enjoyed three of her other books, Visitation, The Old Child & Other Stories, and Go, Went, Gone, and I haven't yet read Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, which I'll get to soon.

>171 tangledthread:, >172 tangledthread: Thanks for letting me know about that Alzheimer's seminar at Pitt! I registered for it, and if I don't listen to it in a hour I'll do so next week, as the email I received indicated that a recording would be posted early next week.

I'm not sure why I'm not receiving these notices from the Pitt Health Sciences Alumni department. I'll have to look into that...

>173 kidzdoc: I have An Island near the top of the tbr mountain Darryl. Hope to get to it in the next week or two.

>176 Caroline_McElwee: Sounds good, Caroline. Which longlisted books have you read, and which are your favorites?

>177 kidzdoc: Hi Darryl

Read of the long list. I liked them all about the same, each had some flaw I felt:
Bewilderment
Light Perpetual
Klara and the Sun
A Town Called Solace

To read soon:
An Island
The Fortune Men

These are the one's I own. I will probably read the winner down the line too. I read one of his books years back, which I liked, but not as much as the noise about it.

>178 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, Caroline. The only book from your list I've "read" is Bewilderment, and I gave up on it after 125 pages.

>173 kidzdoc: I do totally understand the need to prioritise your TBR pile etc, I just think that it would be a shame to skip Great Circle without even trying it.

Happy reading.

>180 elkiedee: Thanks, Luci. If I don't get to Great Circle this year I'll prioritize it for the first quarter of 2022.

>179 kidzdoc: I'm noticing Bewilderment is polarising readers a bit Darryl. It's a bit love/hate. We are on opposite sides of the fence this time.

>182 Caroline_McElwee: Both Bewilderment and No One Is Talking About This seem to engender strong opinions. I strongly disliked both books, especially the Lockwood.

It's a raw, damp, cloudy and unseasonably cool day in Atlanta (it's 46º F at 1 pm, at least 20º below normal, with 88% humidity), and although I love cold weather, days like these make me want to curl up under a blanket...and have a hearty stew! After a conversation with Katie (katiekrug) on her thread not long ago I decided to have a bowl of the Lemon Chickpea Orzo Soup (Greek Vegan Avgolemono Soup) that I made last month for lunch, using a recipe from The Simple Veganista that Chelsea, one of my partners, made in September, which produced a lot of leftovers that I stored in individual Tupperware containers in my freezer. As Chelsea did, I used a generous amount of vegan sausage, which made this soup a very filling stew, which absolutely hit the spot, and tasted better than it did when I first made it:



ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil or 1/4 cup water (for water sauté)
1/2 onion, diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
7 – 8 cups vegetable broth or water (or combo)
1 cup whole wheat orzo
2 cans (15oz.) chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained and rinsed
1/3 cup tahini
1/4 – 1/2 cup lemon juice (about 2 – 4 large lemons)
a large handful fresh baby kale or spinach
chopped fresh dill, to taste
mineral salt, to taste
fresh cracked pepper or lemon-pepper, to taste

instructions:
1. Heat oil or water over medium heat, add onion and carrot, saute for about 5 – 7 minutes, add the garlic and saute for 1 minute more.

2. Add the broth or water, bring to a boil, add the orzo and chickpeas, reduce heat to medium-low and cook at a gentle boil for 8- 9 minutes, orzo should be tender.

3. Remove from heat, add tahini and lemon juice (start with the smaller amount of juice, adding more to taste), stir well. Add the baby kale or spinach, give a good stir, greens will soften and wilt within a few minutes. Add as much dill as you like, and season well with salt & pepper. Soup will thicken upon standing, add more liquids as needed.

4. Serve in individual bowl with your favorite crusty artisan bread for soaking up the wonderful juices.

Serves 4

notes:
The tahini adds a delicious buttery creaminess. If you don’t have tahini on hand, this soup will still be fantastic! Replace the tahini with 100% cashew butter, as it will be free from additives such a sugar, salt, and/or flavorings.

For the broth, I prefer to use a combo, usually half broth and half water. To keep the sodium to a minimum, source out low-sodium vegetable broth. I almost always use this organic vegetable broth concentrate – for this recipe I would add about 1 heaping teaspoon to 4 cups of water, and then use 3 – 4 cups of plain water. It works well, without losing out on too much flavor.

The herbs can be changed up to suit your taste. If you don’t care for dill, try using rosemary or oregano.

To make this soup gluten-free, replace the orzo with white rice, using the same measurements and cooking as directed, adding 10 – 15 minutes to the cooking time or until the rice is tender.
_________________________________

My only squibble with this recipe is the amount of servings that it produces; with the addition of vegan bratwurst I got 8 generous servings out of it, not 4! I used baby spinach, and, IIRC, 6 cups of low sodium vegetable broth.

I did a lot of cooking during the 2½ weeks I spent with my parents, and made several new recipes which I and they liked a lot, including ratatouille, vichyssoise, moussaka, and Cajun butter beans with Andouille sausage and shrimp. I'll post these recipes over the next few days, here and in La Cucina.

>184 kidzdoc:
Yum! That looks great. I'm currently waiting for my homemade chicken noodle soup to finish cooking. I love soup!

Sorry to hear about all your struggles with helping your parents and with their health declines.

>184 kidzdoc: That looks delicious. I love orzo... something about that combination of pasta and rice hits all my happy food checkboxes.

I'm sorry to hear about your folks, although it sounds like you're better prepared than a lot of people are when this happens. It must be hard seeing them both decline, though—many sympathies.

>185 Nickelini: Same here, Joyce! I'm a card carrying soup and stew addict, a trait I inherited from both parents, although my father was the main preparer of soups and stews until recently. I'll gladly eat it any time of the year, but especially in cold weather months. I'll make a lot more soups in the coming days, now that autumn has finally established itself in Atlanta, starting with Red Cabbage and Sausage Soup, an old favorite, this weekend.

How did your chicken noodle soup turn out?

>186 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. That may have been the first time I used orzo in a recipe, and I'll be on the lookout for more soups that contain it, although I'll also make that soup again in the near future.

>184 kidzdoc: Looks good! I am excited that it is definitely soup and stew season. While I do eat them year-round, some recipes only taste good in winter such as the mushroom-barley soup I made yesterday.

If you're interested in recipes with orzo, this is one of the best dishes I've made in the past two years (I do like fennel seed):
https://www.finecooking.com/recipe/orzo-shrimp-tomato-marinated-feta

>188 ELiz_M: Ooh, that dish sounds great, Liz; thanks for sharing! I'll buy ingredients for it when I go to Publix, my preferred local supermarket, probably on Saturday. I'll look in my cupboard now to see if I have fennel seeds...

The mushroom barley soup is also of interest. Do you have a shareable recipe for it?

ETA: I do have a jar of fennel seeds!

ETA (2): This is a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi; even better! I'll give this a try early next week.

>184 kidzdoc: That looks delicious Darryl! I make quite a lot of soups and will try out your recipe.

I made a fairly disgusting soup on Wednesday. It sounded really nice: roasted butternut squash and tomatoes with diced onion, carrot and celery, with lemon juice and (a lot of) spices as flavourings. The recipe was for 2 so I doubled it and then decided there was nowhere near enough for 3 people so added some red lentils as well. I’m usually reasonably fine with spicy food but it was so hot it was almost inedible. Goodness knows what it would have tasted like if I hadn’t added the extra stuff. I won’t be making that recipe again in a hurry.

>190 SandDune: Sounds good, Rhian! For the record, the photos of recipes I make are ones I've taken with my cell phone, as I don't always trust the shots taken with professional equipment.

I'm sorry to hear about your soup failure. Sometimes recipes which would seem to be enticing and well constructed don't work, somehow. Last month I made Cajun butter beans (the Southern term for lima beans) with Andouille sausage and shrimp, using the recipe on the Camellia Brand web site, a nearly century old New Orleans based company that produces several varieties of the best dried beans I've ever had, and the ones used in essentially all Louisiana households. The recipe was a disaster, and it took a major effort for me to salvage an edible product for dinner for parents and myself. I made this dish again a week later, but this time I made it the way I would normally cook butter beans Louisiana style, and not from a recipe, and this time they were absolutely delightful.

When I first started cooking on a regular basis about 10 years ago most of my recipe fails were due to my inexperience in the kitchen. That still happens on occasion, but far more often the problem now is with the recipe, not me. I strongly suspect the same holds true for you.

Cooking is always and adventure for me. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I will confess that I rarely have total failures now, but it does happen, and as you say, most of the time it is because of the recipe. When dealing with kitchen things, practice makes perfect, and the key to being a successful cook is to practice. Fortunately for me, I generally like the results and since I live by myself, the disasters don't effect anybody but me.

I have been trying to put more legumes into my life. That was my New Year's resolution a few years ago. For that reason I am delighted to see the use of Black Eyed Peas, Garbanzo beans, and the Lima Beans in recipes. It gives me more options because I know that others have tried it and been successful. Thanks for posting these recipes.

>192 benitastrnad: Cooking is an adventure and a challenge, but almost always a highly enjoyable and productive hobby for me. I enjoy the process of building a dish from scratch, and since I like what I make and get a lot of positive feedback from my parents, friends and workmates, including some of the nurses who send me and my partner who made the lemon chickpea orzo soup recipes that they want us to cook for them, after they tasted the food we bring to holiday parties in the hospital. A few of them jokingly said that they would divorce their husbands if I would marry and cook for them!

Practice, indeed, does make perfect, but what's even more important, IMO, is the ability and willingness to follow written instructions, which would seem to be a given, but isn't so. My mother (and, for that matter, my father) can cook, as could her older sister, who died this spring, but her youngest sister does far worse if she uses the same recipe to prepare a food, due to her impatience and probably her lack of comfort in the kitchen. I watched my parents cook as a child and a young adult, but I learned more from my great aunt who lived in Uptown New Orleans, close to Tulane's campus, as I would go to her house for Sunday dinner once or twice a month, and observed her making fantastic Creole and Cajun dishes from scratch, which were often better than anything I could order in my favorite restaurants in the city (she was unquestionably the best cook in my extended family, which was filled with folks who could throw down in the kitchen, as we say). However, what helped me more than anything else was following detailed instructions for tests, experiments and other procedures when I worked as a chemical engineering technician, and later as a biomedical research biologist after I graduated from Rutgers. That attention to detail served me well when I started cooking occasionally in medical school and residency, then on a regular basis about 10 years ago, after I was inspired to do so by the wife of my best friend from medical school, and purchased a Hamilton Beach slow cooker on her recommendation after chatting with and helping her on numerous occasions while she cooked dinner for her husband and their two kids.

I love legumes and I use them a lot when I cook, in well over a dozen recipes, I'm sure. If you use Pinterest feel free to follow me, as I have several boards, including a Favorite Recipes board with over 115 pins. My username is Darryl Morris, BTW.

Speaking of legumes, here's my recipe for the Cajun butter beans with Andouille sausage and shrimp that I made last week.



Ingredients:
- 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (EVOO)
- 1 large Vidalia onion, diced
- 1 red or green bell pepper, diced
- 2 stalks celery, diced
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 tsp fresh thyme
- 3 bay leaves
- 1 lb dried large butter beans (lima beans), preferably
Camellia Butter Beans from New Orleans
- 1 lb Andouille sausage
- 1 lb medium to large shrimp, peeled and deveined
- salt, ground pepper, cayenne pepper, Cajun or Creole seasoning to taste
- sliced green onions or finely chopped parsley

Instructions:
1. Soak beans in water overnight, drain the next day
2. Heat 2 tbsp EVOO in a medium soup pot or Dutch oven under medium heat
3. Add sliced Andouille sausage, sauté for 5 minutes until sausage has browned
4. Remove sausage from pan with a slotted spoon, place on a plate
5. Add onion, bell pepper, celery and garlic to soup pot, sauté for 7-8 minutes, until vegetables are soft
6. While cooking vegetables add 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground pepper, 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper and 1/2 tsp Cajun or Creole seasoning (I prefer Tony Chachere's Original Creole Seasoning, but you can make your own from scratch, if you prefer)
7. Add sausage, dried beans, cover with water to 1 inch above mix, add 2 tsp thyme and 3 bay leaves
8. Increase temperature to medium-high heat until pot comes to a boil, then drop to low heat to achieve a gentle simmer
9. Cook uncovered until beans are tender and mixture has become thick and creamy, roughly 1.5 to 2 hours; stir at least every 10-15 minutes
10. Add shrimp, cook for another 15 minutes or so
11. Serve over rice (I highly recommended Uncle Ben's Original Parboiled Rice), top with sliced green onions or diced parsley, add hot sauce to taste.
______________________________

Years ago I asked my great aunt Ella from New Orleans how long beans should be cooked. She said something like, "The beans will tell you when they're done." I didn't understand her reply at that time but I do now, and in this case the beans will be very tender, and the mixture will be thickened and opaque, as a good number of the beans will have broken open and dissolved. Similar to making Creole red beans & rice, you could use the back of a large metal spoon to smush about 1/4 to 1/3 of the beans against the sides of the pot to make a thicker and creamier mixture; it should not be watery!!

>165 kidzdoc: Thanks for the graphic, Darryl. I must work on developing my patience.

>193 kidzdoc: "Practice, indeed, does make perfect, but what's even more important, IMO, is the ability and willingness to follow written instructions, which would seem to be a given, but isn't so."

And that's the reason I rarely do fancy cooking (as much as I like some of the recipes - and these days anything that requires any more prep than chopping is fancy in my book). I know how. I can follow instructions if needed. But I rarely have the desire to - so I tend to just do things my way.

Soups and stews are the only bad part of living in Phoenix - while they can work year-round, they are not as nice when it is 120 outside :) I was just telling my Mom the other day that we are coming into Pork roast weather (in the slow cooker overnight). :)

>194 kidzdoc: That looks delicious :)

>195 labfs39: You're welcome, Lisa. Everyone needs more patience when a family member has dementia or cognitive impairment, and I had to bite my tongue several times every day that I was in the presence of my parents, even though I love them more than anyone else.

>196 AnnieMod: Speaking of patience...maybe I should have said "Patience makes perfect." I don't think of the recipes I make as "fancy", which I reserve for exquisite desserts that a couple of my work friends make, along with foods prepared by contestants on The Great British Baking Show. I find the process of cooking to be relaxing and enjoyable, especially after a tough work week, or if I'm making meals for someone who enjoys and looks forward to my cooking. My best friend from high school has now started helping out my parents twice a week, and it was a pleasure to make lunch for all three of them these past three weeks.

Ugh. As much as I love soups and stews I can't imagine enjoying them in 120º F weather, or much of anything else for that matter.

I have another package of Camellia butter beans in my cupboard, so I'll probably cook another batch of those Cajun butter beans next week. I'll look for more Camellia beans when I go to Publix tomorrow morning.

tried to send you another link to a Pitt event on Medical Classics from the Scaife Library, but the link didn't transfer here. Sorry

Oh...they have them on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7rtsPP1Zpj-VPdKylrUlo_W_0aka-cUg

>199 tangledthread: Thanks for that link, tangledthread! I'll take a look at it later today.

Today I'm as happy as a clam, as I made my first visit to what is now my favorite Intown bookshop, Virginia Highland Books, which is located on North Highland Avenue close to its intersection with Virginia Avenue, in the heart of the vibrant Virginia Highland neighborhood in NE Atlanta, not far from where I live. It opened in June, but I didn't know about it until September, and it came highly recommended from my friend Hillary, who lives in the neighborhood. (Kay, you probably remember Hillary, as she joined us for dinner at Truva, the Turkish restaurant which is also on North Highland Avenue.) I had four books from the top of my wish list that I wanted to buy while I was there, and to my great delight the bookshop had all of them:

  

The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (recommended by Kay)
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (it was published today, but the bookshop had plenty of copies of it this morning)
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka (the first novel by the Nobel Prize winner in nearly half a century!)
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

I also succumbed to temptation and purchased a copy of Karl Ove Knausgaard's new novel, The Morning Star. (Demonstrating restraint in bookshops is not one of my strong points.)

The staff at that time consisted of three twentysomething women, and they could not have been any more welcoming, friendly and helpful, starting from the moment I stepped in the door. Despite being a medium sized bookshop the selection was outstanding, and substantially better than the stock at Posman Books in Ponce City Market in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, which was my favorite Intown bookshop until today. I'll do my best to promote this superb bookstore, and visit it on a regular basis. Kay, we'll have to go there when you and Pattie return to Atlanta!

ETA: I spent an enjoyable late morning and early afternoon in nearby Ponce City Market after my visit to Virginia Highland Books, as I had coffee, an early lunch, and sat outside reading on an absolutely perfect and comfortably warm autumn day. Despite my book haul I chose to read Afterlives, the new novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, along with No 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute by Lauren Elkin, an American who lives in Paris and chronicles her observations on life in the City of Lights as she commutes to and from her university teaching position on two of the RATP buses. This book appealed to me after I first read about it on the Facebook page of the London Review Bookshop, as I also enjoy people watching from a distance while riding buses and trams during past visits to London, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Barcelona, in particular.

>210 kidzdoc: Sounds like an idyllic day, Darryl.

>201 kidzdoc: Oh, how fun to have a new bookstore to visit in Atlanta. I'll look forward to buying books there. Ponce City Market is definitely set up as a place one can just enjoy an afternoon at. Pattie and I both liked it a lot.

I'm reading a book by Gurnah now called Gravel Heart.

>201 kidzdoc: Ooh how wonderful to find a new bookstore that you know you will visit frequently. Great book haul.

>197 kidzdoc: It has more than 6 ingredients, it is fancy :)
I grew up with a pastry chef (Mom) - who was so tired of making stuff at work (first the best restaurant in town, then her own business supplying anyone needing fancy pastry and sweets in the region) that she made desserts at home by sitting in the kitchen and directing me or my sister :) So I can spend an afternoon doing something elaborate... but I tend to prefer the "chop everything together" kind of cooking when I am on my own.

Plus I did not even realize there were so many types of beans (or potatoes (yellow or red-skinned were the options) or rice (we had two types - regular and long)) until I was in my mid-20s. And don't get me started on onions, tomatoes and peppers. That may have just been the way my family cooks (and what my grandparents grew) but... :)

>201 kidzdoc: What a nice day! :) I miss bookstores (my wallet does not - I am very good at online shopping for books). :)

>202 labfs39: Yesterday was definitely a Chamber of Commerce day in Atlanta, as it reached 78ºF, which was two degrees lower than the previous high temperature for the day. It will be nearly as nice today, with a projected high temp of 76ºF, but a cold front will pass through tomorrow, and by Saturday the high temp will only be 54ºF with a low just above freezing. I should be off from work today, as long as none of my partners call out sick, so I'll spend the day outdoors again, and probably have lunch at Gu's Dumplings in Krog Street Market, which is also located in the Old Fourth Ward not far from the MLK, Jr National Historical Park.

>203 RidgewayGirl: I think you'll love Virginia Highland Books, Kay, both the bookshop itself and its location. I would suggest a midday or early evening visit, as there are several good restaurants within easy walking distance from there. Hillary lives literally just around the corner, but we weren't able to meet up yesterday, as she wasn't feeling well.

I didn't realize until after I returned home that this was the first time I had been inside of a proper bookshop since well before the pandemic began, and likely in over two years, since I went to the Piccadilly branch of Waterstones in London with my good friend Claire in September of 2019.

I like Ponce City Market much better on weekday mornings and afternoons; it gets very crowded and loud on weeknights and weekends, especially when the weather is as nice as it was yesterday.

I'll have to take you and Pattie to Krog Street Market, which has even better places to eat than Ponce City Market does. I'm off Monday through Friday next week, so I'll make my first visit to Politan Row, the new upscale food court in Colony Square on Peachtree and 14th Streets, which is a short walk from where I live.

I look forward to your thoughts on Gravel Heart; I have the Kindle version of it. BTW, Afterlives, Gurnah's latest novel, is absolutely superb so far.

>204 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita!

>205 AnnieMod: It has more than 6 ingredients, it is fancy :)

Ha! You sound like one of my classmates from residency, and one of my partners, who was two years behind me in residency, although they are both far worse despite being two of the smartest people I've ever known. Tracy (my partner) and her three children live on a farm in rural North Georgia, where she raises chicken, and earlier this year she and her mother built a goat barn from the ground up, using a backhoe and other professional equipment, but she struggles to cook eggs that her hens lay, so she gifts them to me and others: unbelievable!! Joe (my classmate) has been all but barred from the kitchen by his wife and teenage daughters after several near disasters involving a microwave and a George Foreman grill that were nothing short of astonishing. (It didn't help that he regularly publicizes his exploits on his Facebook timeline.) If I didn't have several very smart friends who are excellent cooks, including Caroline (cameling) from the 75 Books group, I might think that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and cooking ability...

Did you move from Bulgaria to Arizona when you were in your twenties? If so, is the variety of widely available beans, potatoes and onions considerably greater here than there? (I suspect not.) I have all kinds of dried and canned beans in my pantry, and it isn't unusual that I'll have several types of onions, peppers, and canned and fresh tomatoes in my kitchen, although I suspect this isn't unusual for others who cook on a regular basis.

My parents' failing health and increased needs, along with my father's inability to drive for over a year, has greatly decreased my ability and willingness to go to bookshops and visit friends in NYC and Philadelphia, along with the pandemic, needless to say. The day that I spent with Claire in London 26 months ago was the last time I saw any LTers in person, or traveled anywhere other than Philadelphia. I thought that 2021 would be the year that I resumed my domestic and European travels, but that didn't happen; hopefully 2022 will be a better year in that regard.

New bookstore, hooray! I am waiting on The sentence as I haven't yet read The night watchman. Must ... be .. good!!

(You may notice that a copy of The morning star recently appeared in my library. I was in the Bloomsbury Oxfam shop and they had an ARC for £3. How could I resist?!)

>206 kidzdoc: That was a great day we spent together. Can't wait until we can do it again. But you are right to put time with your parents first.

>207 Sakerfalcon: Hooray indeed, Claire! One of Intown Atlanta's chronic weak points is its relative lack of good bookshops, especially given its highly educated population (more than half of Atlantans have at least an associate's degree, and over 20% have at least a master's degree), along with the large number of quality universities in the city and immediate suburbs, and the influx of well educated young professionals over the past decade. The educational attainment of Atlantans is even more pronounced if you consider that there is, in general, a huge socioeconomic difference between the north and south sides of the city, with a large amount of impoverished and uneducated residents south of Interstate 20, which cuts through the heart of the city in an east-west direction, so the percentage of folks like myself who live north of I-20 and have advanced degrees is likely 35% or higher. Fortunately indie bookshops are slowly starting to increase here, although it's still quite surprising that Midtown Atlanta, which includes Georgia Tech's campus, still does not have a single notable bookshop despite having one of the largest populations (over 41,000) in the city.

Wow, you bought a copy of The Morning Star for only £3? Well done!

I'm very eager to return to London, and to see you and my other UK friends again, hopefully sometime in the spring, especially since I've now had three doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. I'll be interested to see if the FDA and CDC will recommended a fourth dose for front line health care workers and others at high risk of acquiring COVID-19 due to their employment status six months after the booster dose; if so that may well affect when I make my first trip to Europe next year, along with my parents' health, of course. What's been especially worrisome is my father's mental decline over the past year, and his increasing inability to have difficulty with tasks that he could have done blindfolded before he nearly died early last year. I took him to see his neurologist two weeks ago, and she was also dismayed by his decline. She diagnosed him with mild cognitive impairment (mild being, perhaps, a bit generous), and started him on a medication to improve his memory that my mother is also taking. She wants to see him every three months instead of every six months, so I'll take him back to Temple in January after my group's schedule is released and I can plan a trip there.

>116 kidzdoc: I'm sorry to year your mother has 'Alzheimers'. My mother suffered from this also. I think you are wise to look into facilities at this time.

>209 avaland: Thanks, Lois. We are in the process of exploring options, especially given my father's cognitive decline. Fortunately the Penn Memory Center has a superb social worker, who met with my parents and I for an hour after the neurologist formally diagnosed my mother with Alzheimer's disease, and she provided my father and I with a thick packet of useful information. They have an eldercare lawyer, and we met with her three times this year to get this process started.

What a nice bookstore interlude! Good haul, too, though I've personally never been very tempted by Knausgaard. I'm sorry to hear about your parents' cognitive decline... it's always hard, no matter how well prepared you are. I'm glad you have a good neurologist.

As far as cooking from recipes goes, I tend to play a bit fast and loose with savory recipes but not so much with baking, since a lot of that is straight-up chemistry. I pastry cheffed professionally for a little while and feel pretty confident making some substitutions or (heh) fudging with a recipe a little, but I generally stick to what's tried and true in a cake or cookie recipe, especially if I trust the source. BTW I just made the Smitten Kitchen Big Apple Crumb Cake over the weekend and it was (still is in existence, but just barely) excellent—highly recommended.

Can I kvell for just a minute? My son got 12 residency interviews—a very good number—and a couple of them are, so far, places he's really interested in. Including a hospital he worked in during his recent rotations here in the Bronx, which he really liked. I'm keeping my thoughts to myself about hoping he ends up someplace close, because he should go wherever he wants (and wants him), but I would love it for my own very selfish reasons if he stayed in the area. Then again, the farthest of the 12 are in Florida and Ohio—no west coast or mountain region, no Alaska—so I'll count my blessings right there. Anyway, I'm super proud of him. He's had an outstanding time in med school, and it's hard to believe he's already deep into his fourth year.

Can't wait to read your review on the Knausgaard book.

>202 labfs39: I really enjoyed Elkin's book Darryl. I also read her translation of the previously unpublished Simone de Beauvoir novel The Inseparables, which was better than I expected of an unpublished novel in a writer's lifetime.

Good haul. I'm waiting for The Code Breaker in paperback next year, to save my wrists.

>201 kidzdoc:
Well - That's a BB for No 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus by Lauren Elkin. I love reading about places and this sounds like my cup of tea.

We had a lovely day over here in Tuscaloosa as well. Today is just as good. Tomorrow will not be. But it is November and time for gloom and mist. I have not been able to read much this last week as work has me spending too many hours there. I did finish Last Chicken in America by Ellen Litman. It was set in Pittsburgh among the Russian émigré community. Squirrel Hill and the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning all figured prominently in the stories. As I was reading it I thought of you, but decided that you probably didn't spend time at the Cathedral of Learning because you would have been at the hospital. There was lots of references to the Giant Eagle supermarkets.

>206 kidzdoc: Did you move from Bulgaria to Arizona when you were in your twenties? If so, is the variety of widely available beans, potatoes and onions considerably greater here than there? (I suspect not.)

I did move in my very very late twenties but I was already introduced to most of the variety with my international travels the half a decade or so before that plus the changing Bulgaria - things were changing very rapidly once we came out from the hyperinflation of the 90s.

As for wide availability - depends on when and in which Bulgaria. That will be a bit long (sorry about it - cannot explain it in a shorter way). That's a regional story - because each region had its own... specifics let's call them.

I was born in a relatively big town (pop. 50,000) but it is in a rural and agricultural area - there are a few other towns nearby, most of them smaller than mine. My parents were born in a village 15 miles or so away from the town. So were the parents of 95% of my generation in this part of the country - they were part of the planned economy of the 70s that moved people from villages to towns in this area. What that meant though is that we all had 4 grandparents (or as many of them were still alive) in the villages - growing food in gardens and small plots (collectivization got the big pieces of land but there are places where you either let the land go or you allow people to cultivate on their own and as much as things could be weird, noone was stupid). The only reason I knew you can buy potatoes, tomatoes or onions in a store was because my father was in the groceries business (first in the state run one, then private - warehouse and later a grocery store). The village store did not sell any of those things and I rarely got to go to a grocery store in town. I probably spent more of my childhood in the village than in town - vacations and weekends were always there.

Everything that could came either from the garden or from the animal sheds or from the basement - canned through the season and used off-season. And at the end of each weekend, you were sent home with eggs, cheese, milk, produce, canned stuff (and meat often). So how do you grow beans/tomatoes and so on? You need seeds (or a nursery for tomatoes if you do not want to go from seeds). The only place selling seeds for tomatoes in the 80s was the state run store. So you buy there or you dry some from your own ones (which came from the same place to start with) or barter with neighbors (which again came from the same place). There were two types of tomatoes when I was growing up: red ones (which grew both in a hot house and outside and could be used for anything including canning) and pink ones (heirloom in the States or close to it...) which were great for salads and a lot more delicious but could not be canned or cooked properly (don't know why - something about acidity levels and flesh structure). That's it. Same for most other crops - potatoes you rarely bought for seed because you kept from last year; seeds for anything else came from the same places.

Then the 90s crashed in and things got worse. People in my region were the lucky ones - we never had food shortages when the stores emptied out; the people whose parents were from the towns and the huge cities to start with? Between hyperinflation, the lost Eastern markets, the loss of imports from Russia and the rest of the ex-Warsaw pact countries (because they were also struggling) and the Yugoslavian embargo (our main supply route from the West is the Danube and we sit behind ex-Yugoslavia on the route so when the embargo was set, all that had to go overland and that's expensive), noone had money or desire for fancy varietals; most people did not have enough money to survive. There were a few months in 1997 where your salary at the start of the month would be enough for rent and food but when you get paid at the end of the month, the money were barely enough for one of the two (and salaries were delayed so when you get paid 4 months later, the money were enough for a loaf of bread). Noone imported new stuff into my town and region - people did not have money for it. The big cities were a different thing apparently but... that was not my reality.

I left for the country capital in 1999 for uni - 2 months after the currency was denominated by dropping 3 zeroes (we were tied to the DM already at that point so the hyperinflation did not balloon in a worse way). Supermarkets finally made it in (killing local groceries :( ) and they were the ones that started risking to import the new stuff; new varietals did show up even in the villages shortly.

These days? You will find a lot more variety in stores - some imported, some local - in the big cities. In my village? You can buy potatoes now but they are called potatoes. In my town? There is some variety but only a few of the big chains risk with the more exotic stuff (Roma tomatoes would be considered exotic in this context) and even they tend to mainly deal with the few local types. A lot less people grow food as well (although this seems to be changing again back home - people are tending gardens again in the villages - especially now when 15 miles takes a few minutes in a normal car, it is feasible to be there even most evenings).

I moved to the States in late 2010 - when things were already available and they had gotten even more so. And still, the first time I went to a store here in Arizona to buy tomatoes, I was faced with 6-8 types of them and no earthy idea what is what (for comparison, I came back from the store this last Saturday with 4 types of tomatoes - one type for cooking, another for a salad, a third for some egg dish I was planning on making and the fourth are some small organic ones that I really like munching on). I probably have 5 types of cans of beans in my cupboard.

So back to the original question - yes, the number of widely available types of almost anything is bigger here than it is back home even of the number of available types get closer every day and there are also types that just do not grow here of course. The first time I looked at the shelf with dried lentils in Safeway, I probably looked like an idiot - the choice I always had had was "big or small"; Safeway had a few feet of different types on the shelf. And beans? The first few months I was here I would buy a random can of beans (black, pinto, navy, Great Northern, Red Kidney, Cannellini) every week or so just to see what I actually like. Rinse and repeat for the dry stuff and the produce isle - lentils, rice, potatoes, tomatoes, onions (Vidalia are my main go to now - I'd buy red if I need it for something but I had not bought normal yellow onions in years; my Mom has never seen sweet onions in her supermarket) :)

Sorry for the long post.

>211 lisapeet: YaY! kvell away! good luck to him

Hi Darryl. I'm sorry to hear about the difficult situation your parents are in. You choosing to help them now is the best thing you can do, be there for them when possible.
You really are a good cook, and those recipes sound really good. But I'd have to improvise for most of them, as some of the ingredients are unfamiliar. I'd had to look up orzo, for instance. But I love to improvise, definitely not good at following cook book recipes.
I hope visiting the U.K in spring will be possible for you!

>211 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. I'm thrilled to finally have a bookshop in Atlanta that I'm very fond of, although I don't think it would make my top 10 list at this early stage, at least not yet. Let's see...

1. City Lights (San Francisco)
2. London Review Bookshop.
3. Daunt Books (flagship branch in Marylebone, London)
4. Book Culture (NYC)
5. Strand Bookstore (NYC)
6. Foyles (flagship branch on Charing Cross Road, London)
7. Shakespeare and Company (Paris)
8. Joseph Fox Bookshop (Philadelphia)
9. Green Apple Books (San Francisco)
10. The COOP (Harvard Square, Cambridge)
11. Topping & Company Booksellers (Ely, UK)
12. Word Power (Edinburgh)
13. Livraria Bertrand (Lisbon)
14. Llibreria Anglesa (Barcelona)
15. Boekhandel Dominicanen (Maastricht, NL)
16. University Press Books (Berkeley, CA)

This isn't a numerically correct rank list, but the first six bookshops, all of which I've been to numerous times, are correct. Daunt Books and the London Review Bookshop are essentially equal, but the lovely London Review Cake Shop, within the Bookshop, and its indoor and outdoor seating, nudges it to second place.

Nope, Virginia Highland Books is definitely not a top 10 bookshop, at least not yet, but it's probably in my top 20.

My Struggle, Book One got me utterly hooked on Knausgaard. It helped that I received it, and all six of the books in this series, as part of my subscription to Archipelago Books. I had intended to wait to buy The Morning Star, as I wanted to finish the My Struggle series (four down, two to go), along with two or three other books I own by him, but seeing it prominently displayed in Virginia Highland Books yesterday was simply too tempting for me.

I'm very pleased with the new neurologists I've arranged for my parents, Dr Kyra O'Brien at the Penn Memory Center for my mother, and Dr Carla LoPinto-Khoury at Temple University for my father (one of her partners was a classmate of mine at Pitt, which is how I became connected to her).

Your Big Apple Crumb Cake sounds delightful! I've saved it to my Interesting Recipes board on Pinterest, and I may consider trying it during Thanksgiving Week.

Congratulations to your son; kvelling is not only appropriate, it's all but required as a mother of a talented medical student! If 12 residency programs wanted to interview him then that means he is a very attractive candidate, and hopefully he'll match to his highest ranked spot.

I'm falling asleep as I'm typing this, so I'll catch up later tonight, or more likely sometime tomorrow.

>215 AnnieMod: what an answer. I really enjoyed reading all that, A-mod

Darryl - wish you rest : )

>218 kidzdoc: Jacob feels that his girlfriend didn’t spend enough time growing up seeing the sights of London (especially given that we are so close). One of his main concerns is that she has never been to Foyles on Charing Cross Road …

Hopefully I can finish catching up here before my 8 pm appointment with my barber. If not I'll do so later today.

>212 AlisonY: I'm not sure when I'll get to The Morning Star, Alison. I strongly suspect that it won't be before next spring.

>213 Caroline_McElwee: I finished No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute just now, Caroline, and I enjoyed it as well. I'll try to review it later today, as I go back to work on Friday.

>214 benitastrnad: No. 91/92 was a compelling and quick read, Benita. It consists of observations from a daily commuter in Paris, which are sometimes unique to the city and the culture and behaviors of Parisians, but otherwise are common to those who live and work in a large city and regularly take public transportation, something I used to do but stopped doing just before the pandemic struck, as I could take the MARTA Red Line from Arts Center station to Medical Center station, followed by a Children's shuttle to the hospital, and back. I've not ridden MARTA for nearly two years, whether to work or to the airport, and I'm not sure if or when I'll use it again.

>215 AnnieMod: Thank you for that very interesting and educational post, Annie!! It was a pleasure to read it, it wasn't too long at all, if anything just the opposite, and I'm sorry that I was too tired last night to comment on it then. I'm always curious to learn more about countries and regions I've not visited and know nothing about, so I appreciate you sharing that with me, and us.

>216 cindydavid4: Absolutely!

Back to >214 benitastrnad: Yes, it will be a cool and rainy day in Atlanta as well, as I assume that a cold front will pass through today that will mark at least a temporary end to our lovely Indian summer stretch. I haven't yet decided what to do today after my haircut appointment. It would be a great day to spend reading in a café, but I also want to stop at Publix to buy a few things, and make Liz's Orzo with Shrimp, Tomato, and Marinated Feta. Maybe I'll do that for lunch, and then go back out to a café, or Ponce City Market, to read for the rest of the afternoon and early evening.

Last Chicken in America sounds interesting, given its setting in Pittsburgh, and especially in Squirrel Hill, a neighborhood that I spent a lot of time in, as my best friend from medical school lived there. We met there most Sunday mornings during our first two years at Pitt, as I had a car and he didn't, and we usually had breakfast in a lovely Jewish appetizing shop on Murray Avenue that isn't there anymore, read the Sunday papers, and reluctantly started studying by early afternoon.

You're right in saying that I didn't go to the Cathedral of Learning, the tallest educational building in the Western hemisphere, often. I occasionally walked from Scaife Hall, the medical school building, the reddish brown building just to the left of the Cathedral, in order to take a university bus back to my neighborhood in Shadyside, but it was just as easy and convenient to take a city bus, which Pitt students could ride for free with their university IDs. (IIRC that perk was stopped at some point, which is probably why I switched to taking Pitt buses to and from home.) I only went inside two or three times, as I usually studied and had dinner with my closest friends, especially my girlfriend at the time.



The interior of the Cathedral is spectacular!



I'll see if I can borrow Last Chicken in America from my local public library.

Back later...

>217 EllaTim: Thanks, Ella. I couldn't, in good conscience, have left them to fend for themselves in mid-October to take a vacation abroad, and I have absolutely no regrets in cancelling my domestic and international trips this year to help them out. They are very appreciative of the support, hard work and care I give to them, but to me it's what I expect from myself, and it isn't a burden at all, as they have been incredibly supportive and loving to me throughout my entire life. (My father still routinely asks if I need anything financially, despite my very generous physician's salary!)

Thanks again for that compliment, but to me cooking is essentially little more than finding good recipes that I think I and others who I cook for would like, following written instructions (which apparently is easier said than done), and modifying recipes based on how well they are written (not always a given) and what I want to add to or subtract from them.

I haven't cooked with orzo until recently, although I must have used the jar of whole wheat orzo I have in an earlier recipe, since it was already open. Orzo is easily found in American supermarkets (Publix, my preferred supermarket in Atlanta, had at least three types of it for purchase when I stopped there earlier this morning), but I'm not sure if that's true in other countries, or what it's called there.



I'm not surprised that some of the ingredients in the foods I cook would be difficult or impossible to find abroad, especially authentic Cajun andouille sausage* (which I'm told is very different from the French andouille), crawfish tails, and alligator tail meat, which are routinely available in my preferred Publix supermarket (not the one I went to today).

*Authentic Cajun andouille sausage is almost always made in Cajun country in South Louisiana, and is much more available here in the Deep South than in the Northeast, where it generally comes from Thomasville, a company in Wisconsin, which is probably culturally as far away from South Louisiana as is humanly possible. There is a spot just outside of the city of Atlanta, Cajun Meat Company, where the owners are from Louisiana and they prepare their meats (andouille, boudin, tasso ham, etc.) from scratch. I'll probably go there for the first time next week, and I will do a New Orleans second line dance if they have alligator and snapping turtle meat, both of which are fabulous in Cajun sauce piquante recipes.

The ability to improvise while cooking is a valuable skill, and one that is slow in coming to me, especially compared to my father.

>219 dchaikin: I completely agree, Dan; I loved Annie's post!

>220 SandDune: The same, I think, can be said for my old high school friends, in terms of their willingness to venture into Center City Philadelphia, which is less than 25 miles from where we live and is easily accessible by car or commuter train. Whenever I told them that I was going to Center City they usually looked at me as if I was going to Mars, and going to NYC, also a relatively short (70 mile) trip by train, was an even more special trip. Has Jacob's girlfriend, assuming that she is also a bibliophile, been to other bookshops in London? Is she comfortable in large cities?

>222 kidzdoc:
I am not sure what I think of Last Chicken in America. In may ways it reminded me of older (published in the 60's) immigrant literature. The work of Bernard Malamud comes to mind. The author was a student of George Saunders and it shows in the writing style. I wasn't a fan of Lincoln in the Bardo and this novel has the same sort of feel to it.

I have been trying to do some reading about the immigrant experience and had this novel in my collection. I pulled it and started reading, but it definitely isn't the kind of immigrant experience that is au currant, even though this takes place in the present day. (the book was published in 2007) I think it speaks to the universality of immigration and what that means, especially for the children of immigrants. Sometimes I cringe when I read what new immigrants think is the ideal life in the U.S., but I have to keep reminding myself that most of what they know when the come here is what they see in the media and what experiences they had in their home countries that lead them to immigrate. There was an interesting segment on "The Daily" last night. It was about North African immigrants trying to get into Spain - legally and illegally and what everyday Spaniards think about it. And of course there is that fiasco going on at the borders of Poland and Belarus. Of course, there has always been immigration. I remember reading in Colleen McCoullough's book First Man in Rome book that Gauis Marius became First Man because he had defeated the Gauls who were moving into Southern France from the barbarian areas east of the Rhine. I guess technically that is migration not immigration, but in the end it is the same thing. People move all the time.

>223 kidzdoc: Whenever I told them that I was going to Center City they usually looked at me as if I was going to Mars, and going to NYC, also a relatively short (70 mile) trip by train, was an even more special trip. It isn’t really like that - it’s more her parents were interested in other things (they are pretty outdoorsy people). So she didn’t do anything like the amount of museums, sightseeing or theatre trips that Jacob did when he was growing up. But going into London is pretty normal for people here (barring reluctance over the pandemic now, and prior to that in the immediate aftermath of anything having been blown up). When Jacob was little taking him into London was a really cheap day out as I had a season ticket, and he was never any bother to take anywhere.

>220 SandDune: Has Jacob's girlfriend, assuming that she is also a bibliophile, been to other bookshops in London? She does read quite a bit, but I don’t think she’s got the same conviction that a bookshop makes a pleasant addition to a day out that we all have! Jacob is trying very hard to convert her to that idea!

I just made Yotam Ottolenghi's Orzo with Shrimp, Tomato, and Marinated Feta, which Liz (Eliz_M) touted as her favorite recent orzo recipe. I completely agree with her; this tastes fabulous!!



Ingredients:
7 oz. feta, broken into 1/2- to 3/4-inch pieces
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
4 tsp. fennel seeds, toasted and lightly crushed
5 Tbs. olive oil
1-1/3 cups orzo
Salt and black pepper
3 garlic cloves, crushed
3 strips of finely shaved orange peel
1 (14.5 oz.) can chopped tomatoes
2 cups vegetable stock
3/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp water
14 oz. raw peeled shrimp
1-1/2 cups basil leaves, roughly shredded

Preparation:
1. In a medium bowl, mix the feta with 1/4 tsp. of the chile flakes, 2 tsp. of the fennel seeds, and 1 Tbs. of the oil. Set aside while you cook the orzo.

2. Place a large sauté pan with a lid over medium-high heat. Add 2 Tbs. of the oil, the orzo, 1/8 tsp. salt, and a good grind of pepper. Fry for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring frequently, until golden-brown, then remove from the pan and set aside.

3. Return the pan to the same heat and add the remaining 2 Tbs. of oil, 1/4 tsp. of pepper flakes, 2 tsp. fennel seeds, the garlic, and the orange peel. Fry for 1 minute, until the garlic starts to lightly brown, then add the tomatoes and their juice, stock, water, 3/4 tsp. salt, and plenty of pepper. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, or until boiling, then stir in the fried orzo. Cover, then decrease the heat to medium-low and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring once or twice throughout so the orzo cooks evenly. Remove the lid and cook for 1 to 2 minutes, until the consistency is like risotto. Stir in the shrimp and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until they are pink. Stir in the basil and serve at once, with the marinated feta sprinkled on top.
____________________________________________

As the instructions suggest this is cooked in a similar manner to risotto, without the white wine. (Hmm...) I used whole wheat orzo in place of regular orzo, and half the amount of fennel seeds, to play it safe; otherwise I followed the recipe exactly. This orzo won't last long in my kitchen (I'm fighting the temptation to go back for seconds), and it's entirely possible that I'll make it again next week, using the full amount of fennel seeds.

Thanks again, Liz!!

>218 kidzdoc: If 12 residency programs wanted to interview him then that means he is a very attractive candidate, and hopefully he'll match to his highest ranked spot.
Thanks for the extra cheering section, Darryl. He's an older med student—turned 34 this fall—and aside from being super smart and even-keeled, I think he definitely projects a confidence-inspiring persona. I've got my fingers crossed for him.

That orzo with shrimp and tomato looks great. I'm not a big feta person, but I could see it with a little goat cheese or even burrata. I bet the orange peel in there really makes it pop—recipe noted.

And speaking of which, this awkwardly-named but delicious-looking orzo recipe just popped up in my inbox this week: Mushroom Risionotto. It's from the Washington Post so may be behind a paywall—if you can't see it let me know and I can either gift the recipe in link format or just write it out in my thread. Just looking at that photo gets me hungry.

>221 kidzdoc:

I tried to keep it short :) Keep in mind that this is only valid for my part of Bulgaria - due to the climate, terrain and soil combination in that part of the country, some things were probably very different from elsewhere (that's why I have some issues with people generalizing for whole countries based on single experiences). Why climate is important in a country the size of a postmark (the country is roughly the size of Tennessee)? We have a mountain going West to East through the whole middle of the country - high enough to become a water barrier - only a single river crosses it; all other rivers flow away from it. That makes South Bulgaria a lot milder (not as mild as Greece but close enough) - except in the high mountains in there. But that also makes North Bulgaria where I am born part of the great plains between the Carpathians and our mountain (with a few extra mountains on the West to close the bowl. My region is where the mountain meets the plains so it is hilly but with enough leveled out space to make it agricultural; if you go to the East of where I am born, you get into Bulgaria's bread basket - the never ending plains of North-Eastern Bulgaria which had produced most of Bulgaria's grain for ages (not that other regions did not grow wheat and the rest of the grains but we are talking about difference in scale here. Of course, these days the climates on both sides of the mountain are much closer but they still differ. And they did differ a LOT 30 years ago. If you ever wondered where the name of the peninsula came from - Balkan is the name of that mountain (although in Bulgaria we call it Stara planina (meaning Old Mountain); "The Balkan" (always with the definitive article) is used as a synonym often).

>219 dchaikin: >223 kidzdoc: *blushes*.

>226 kidzdoc:

My previous post made me think on the topic and this one made me want to add a few things so here is "Why Annie calls things fancy".

I learned to cook at my Grandmother's side. She was a wonderful cook but she did not do anything even remotely fancy. I know she had eaten peas and lentils because we had brought cold salads containing them occasionally on visits but she never cooked them - cabbage, potatoes, beans and rice were what she cooked - usually with pork or chicken or meat directly - grounded (in meatballs, meatball soup, stuffed peppers and cabbage and in moussaka) or not. Plus a summer fried tomato-onions-peppers stew - which could also have feta cheese and/or eggs added and a variety of soups (chicken, nettles, offal and rice, bitter dock (or a varietal of it anyway), beans (not to be mistaken for the beans stew)). I know that people used a lot of spices in a lot of ways in Bulgaria even back then but in my household (and in most of my friends' households), there had always been just a few spices in savory dishes: sweet paprika (used in everything that does not require to keep its color and that is not soups), savory (literally used on everything), parsley (only if available fresh and in most stews used as a garnish and not as an ingredient (or as both)), a local varietal of Moroccan mint (for beans and for lamb), bay leaf (always dried - for pork and for the chicken-onion stew), garlic cloves (for lentils and for the same onion stew (you actually put full heads of garlic in that)) and black pepper (and hot paprika if you want things hot). Plus salt and sunflower oil (the only cooking oil used traditionally). Curiously enough, I also did not know a kitchen without allspice - used exclusively for meat dishes and not all of them (you just knew which ones can take it) and mostly used in sausage making.

I don't know why noone around me used more spices - I suspect it had to do with our parents learning to cook from their parents. Mom could use other spices (part of her pastry chef training (which was her high school education - a professional school was the usual way for the movement from villages to towns) trained her to be a cook as well) but she rarely did - we just liked the things the way they were cooked (she cooked lentils and peas often though). I still tend to cook this way - sweet paprika, savory, salt, black pepper, sunflower oil is what I use in most of my stews - plus chopped Italian parsley as garnish when you put the thing in your bowl. (I would follow a recipe if it calls for something else but I am very very likely to just default back on these when I cook it again). I can taste the difference when I add other spices but... they are just differences, not something that makes me go and say "wow, I need to use that again"). Of course, neither sweet paprika, nor savory are really popular in Arizona (neither is Sunflower oil) so I was very very baffled in the spices isle of the supermarket for awhile - back home you buy these in 250 gr (or bigger) quantities and they are cheap; here they are considered gourmet or something... Yes - American supermarkets are baffling if you are coming from a different culture. Since then I had found where to buy most of the stuff I need (Russian, Bulgarian, Persian and Arabian stores exist and a lot of the stuff are foundable online) but these first weeks were disorienting.

So yes, what you cook IS fancy - even if it does not appear to be to someone who cooks with these ingredients often. That one looks interesting:)

Hey Darryl, glad you got in some quality time in a great new bookstore. Back here in and around your hometown of Jersey City, I have been to one bookstore in JC, two in Hoboken, and, today, a small but beautiful bookstore in Bayonne in which my wife and I had a lovely chat with the owner. Bayonne, as you may or may not recall, is where my maternal grandparents lived all their lives and where my mother grew up. Today my wife and I walked the streets of the town and I found the apartment building my grandparents lived for the last 15 or so years of their lives.

>224 benitastrnad: The Fulton County Library System does have The Last Chicken in America, so I'll add it to my list of books to borrow from there next year. Ellen Litman emigrated to Pittsburgh from Moscow as a child and received her bachelor's degree from Pitt, so she must know the city, and the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, well. (BTW, we all shopped at Giant Eagle ("John Iggle" in Pittsburghese) supermarkets, which are ubiquitous in Western Pennsylvania.) I was a fan of Lincoln in the Bardo, so those are more than enough reasons for me to read this book.

Thanks for mentioning 'How Did We Let People Die This Way?', The Daily's podcast about emigrants from North Africa to Spain. I'll listen to it early next week, after my upcoming three day weekend shift is over. That topic is of great interest to me, given my frequent travels to Spain, and my very interesting but less than completely comfortable experiences as a person of African descent in that country.

>225 SandDune: That's interesting about Jacob's girlfriend's outdoorsy upbringing, Rhian; I suppose that this would make her less likely to be enticed by what London has to offer, despite its proximity to where you live (I assume that she lives nearby as well). I grew up in a large city (Jersey City, as you may have seen from the posts of Jerry (rocketjk)), which is only separated from New York City by the Hudson River, and is about as close to Lower Manhattan as South London "suburbs" such as East Dulwich and Croydon would be to North London. Actually, Jersey City is probably closer than that, as we lived three miles from Manhattan, and Downtown Jersey City is even closer to NYC, as you can see from this photo; Jersey City is in the bottom half of it:



Even though it's been 20 years since 9/11, it's still odd to not see the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in photos of Lower Manhattan, which were easily seen throughout much of Jersey City and seemed to belong to us as well.



My mother grew up in NYC for most of her life before she met and married my father, and her parents lived in the Bronx, one of NYC's five boroughs (one of Jersey City's nicknames is "New York's sixth borough"), and since it was easy for us to travel from Jersey City to NYC by subway, bus or car we were frequently in The City, and my mother often took me to museums, children's plays and book readings, and shopping in Manhattan when I was small, along with frequent visits to my grandparents' house in the North Bronx, and we would travel by car to the Lower East Side of Manhattan once or twice a month to go shopping, especially on Saturdays. My father and I were very bookish, and my mother to a slightly lesser degree, so we frequented libraries in Jersey City and secondhand bookshops in NYC when I was small. My father was born and grew up in Jersey City, and he practically lived in the local branch of his public library when he was a child! I took after him, unlike my younger brother, who is essentially a non-reader, and I spent many pleasurable days in that same library branch as well when we lived there.

Hopefully Jacob can entice his girlfriend to visit London, and its fabulous bookshops and other attractions.

>227 lisapeet: Thanks for the extra cheering section, Darryl. He's an older med student—turned 34 this fall—and aside from being super smart and even-keeled, I think he definitely projects a confidence-inspiring persona. I've got my fingers crossed for him.

My pleasure, Lisa. I was also a non-traditional medical student, as I was slightly older than your son (35) when I was in the autumn of my fourth year of medical school, and I think it's fair to say that we older students in my class at Pitt were afforded more respect and viewed as elder statesmen and stateswomen by our classmates, and by the residents and professors who taught us, as we had all worked for years before we started medical school and brought a different perspective to our studies, and the practice of medicine, and were calming influences to our younger classmates, who we called "fresh outs", as they had never worked full time and came to medical school directly after they earned their bachelor's degrees.

I do like feta, but I agree that goat's cheese or burrata might be even better in that superb recipe. I'll probably make it again next week, and I'll consider using one of those cheeses at that time. I do love goat's cheese that is available here, but it pales in comparison to the fabulous goat's cheeses that I've had in Europe, especially in Catalunya and Andalucía in Spain.

That orzo, similar to many of Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes, pops with different flavors, which are a treat to the tongue. I'll probably make his Sumac Sweet Potato Fries again for Thanksgiving, which were a huge hit with my family when I made them several years ago.

Thanks for posting the link to that Mushroom Risionotto recipe!! I have a digital subscription to The Washington Post, so I can access that article. I'm off from Monday through Friday next week, and I'll almost certainly make it then, as I love mushrooms.

>228 AnnieMod: Thanks for another very interesting and educational post, Annie! You're absolutely right in saying that what I cook is considered to be "fancy" by my parents, my/our local friends and neighbors, and many of the people I work with. The Cajun and Creole cuisine of South Louisiana is foreign and essentially "exotic" to much of the United States, especially outside of the Deep South, as are essentially all of the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and North African recipes I make.

>229 rocketjk: Your trip back hone to North Jersey should delghtful, Jerrry! I'm glad that you're enjoying it.

>232 kidzdoc: I like Cajun and Creole cuisine but I rarely eat it - I don't tolerate heat coming from spices very well and they tend to be on the spicier side... I do risk it with jambalaya now and then, usually in places where I know the sauces are not too spicy. Cooking it is a different matter - maybe one day. :)

Bulgarian cuisine has native elements but we also stole/borrowed a lot from the neighbors - Greece and Turkey mainly (and Byzantium/Ottoman Empire before that) - both geography and politics made it inevitable. So some of our dishes are Mediterranean, some you will find in the Middle East and some are... mixed and matched to what was available locally while starting as one of the two. And both empires had been the great equalizer in cuisine in the area for a long time so some things are available from Gibraltar to the Middle East in some form or shape (while some dishes remained strictly local). So I would often smile at recipes you and the rest of the group post - shift them a bit, remove a thing or two, add paprika and savory and you are in my Mom's kitchen (or a more adventurous aunt maybe).

Now you made me want to cook this weekend. :)

Just slipping a little note in here to see if your caught the USMNT vrs. Mexico game last night! :D

>234 SqueakyChu: I worked until 9:30 pm, didn't get home until 10 pm, and went to bed shortly afterward. Today was slightly better, as I'll leave just before 9 pm.

>235 kidzdoc: I just want to say that those USMNT guys played a fantastic game, fought hard for their win, and came through the competition valiantly. Get some rest after your work days. You'll get more chances to see them play. Perhaps, just watch two quick clips--Pulisic's goal and McKennie's goal. They were both beautiful! :D

>233 AnnieMod: I like Cajun and Creole cuisine but I rarely eat it - I don't tolerate heat coming from spices very well and they tend to be on the spicier side... I do risk it with jambalaya now and then, usually in places where I know the sauces are not too spicy. Cooking it is a different matter - maybe one day. :)

You can make Cajun or Creole cuisine as mild or as spicy as you like, Annie. The basis of nearly all savory Louisiana cuisine is the Holy trinity, onion, bell pepper and celery, and often times garlic ("the pope") is added to it. Cayenne pepper, hot sauce, and Cajun/Creole seasoning, whether store bought or made from scratch, are optional.

My preferred recipe for Creole andouille sausage and chicken jambalaya came from the former business operations coordinator of my work group, who is from New Orleans; the cafeteria of the elementary school she attended used it for lunch for the students. She shared it with me, I subsequently shared it with the rest of my group, and it went viral afterward, as at least four of my partners made it the weekend after I did.



Chicken & Andouille Sausage Creole Jambalaya

Ingredients:
2 bunches chopped green onion (or equivalent amount of shallots)
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 cups UNCOOKED rice (I use Uncle Ben's parboiled...I think the brand makes all the difference)
1 can Campbell's beef broth
1 can Campbell's French onion soup
1 can tomato soup or sauce (depending on which flavoring you like better)
3/4 stick butter
2 lbs chopped smoked Andouille sausage
2 lbs chopped cooked chicken
parsley

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Spray Pam or olive oil on a 9x13 glass baking dish.
3. Combine all ingredients in the dish and cover with foil.
4. Bake for 1½ hours at 350 degrees stirring at midpoint (45 minute mark).
5. Add Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning and salt and pepper to taste.

Ingredient Notes:
* Chicken can be canned, baked, grilled, rotisserie, etc.
* Can add raw shrimp too or sub shrimp for sausage or chicken (if using shrimp, peel them and don't put them in until the last 45 minutes so they do not overcook).
* All canned ingredients are regular size (Campbell's brand) soup cans.
* When placing the butter in the dish I cut it into tablespoons and strategically place around the dish so it does not all land in one spot.
____________________________________

This recipe is much easier than a more traditional jambalaya recipe, as you simply combine the ingredients and pop it in the oven, instead of cooking it on the stove top. I did make it with chicken and shrimp one year, and I didn't like it at all; if I really wanted a seafood jambalaya I would probably use shrimp and scallops instead of mixing it with either chicken or andouille sausage.

I cannot emphasize enough, do not use anything other than Uncle Ben's Original parboiled rice in this recipe! My brother made it with Carolina Rice several years ago, but the rice wasn't cooked in the middle, and after my mother and I made several attempts to salvage it we ended up throwing it away.

I made it for my best friend from high school and my parents a couple of years ago and didn't add Tony Chachere's Creole seasoning, as I forgot to pick up a jar from their local supermarket, and I noticed its absence, although Cheryl and my parents enjoyed it.

I'll talk with my family, as I may make it for Thanksgiving dinner next week, alongside the turkey and stuffing, as I know that everyone loves it.

Thanks for that interesting information about Bulgarian cuisine! I know absolutely nothing about it, as I've never dined in a Bulgarian restaurant, or cooked anything that was labeled as "Bulgarian". I'm very fond of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine, so I would be very willing to try Bulgarian food.

>236 SqueakyChu: I finished a grueling three day weekend at work late Sunday night, and I slept for at least 16 hours yesterday (Monday). I did watch highlights of the United States vs México match, including the goals scored by Christian Pulisic and Weston McKinnie. If I can I'll see if I can watch the entire match on YouTube TV, to get a better feel of how well our boys performed.

I'm now off from work until Saturday, so hopefully I'll finish at least two books between now and then.

Darryl, I thought you may be interested that I shall be doing an ASIA BOOK CHALLENGE next year and I would like your well travelled opinions where you can.

This is the plan

JANUARY - Europe of Asia - Turkish Authors
FEBRUARY - The Holy Land - Israeli & Palestinian Authors
MARCH - The Arab World - Writers from the Arab world
APRIL - Persia - Iranian writers
MAY - The Stans - There are 7 states all in the same region all ending in "Stan"
JUNE - The Indian Sub-Continent - Essentially authors from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh
JULY - The Asian Superpower - Chinese Authors
AUGUST - Nippon - Japanese Authors
SEPTEMBER - Kimchi - Korean Authors
OCTOBER - INDO CHINE - Authors from Indo-China
NOVEMBER - The Malay Archipelago - Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian Authors
DECEMBER - The Asian Diaspora - Ethnic Asian writers from elsewhere

I was able just about to cover the whole of the continent and I didn't include one for Russia as most of the authors are decidedly European in their ethnicity and leaning.

>238 PaulCranswick: That's a great challenge, Paul! I would be happy to contribute and participate, especially since it would allow me to get to some highly regarded books that I've been wanting to read. Count me in!

I've read at least two books by Turkish authors that I liked and would recommend, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak, and Memed, My Hawk by Yasar Kemal. I have five books in my library by Orhan Pamuk, none of which I've read yet: Snow, My Name Is Red, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, The Museum of Innocence, and A Strangeness in My Mind, so I would like to read one of those in January, along with A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar.

Let's see...I also own They Burn the Thistles by Yasar Kemal, and A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Faik Abasiyanik, but I haven't read them, either.

>239 kidzdoc: That's great Darryl, I look forward to your virtual company......and I know February has favourites of yours too!

>240 PaulCranswick: Definitely, Paul. I own several enticing books by Israeli authors that I haven't gotten to yet, namely ones by Amos Oz and David Grossman, and I'd definitely like to read Edward Said's autobiography, Out of Place, and possibly re-read Once Upon a Country by Sari Nusseibeh and A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, two of the best autobiographies I've ever read. I'll have to do a deeper dive in my library to discover which other books by Israeli and Palestinian authors I own, including ones by Elias Khoury and Mahmoud Darwish.

>238 PaulCranswick: I will happily follow along as well. For January, I could read The Bastard of Istanbul by Shafak and Snow by Pamuk, two books I have on my shelves currently. I read My Name is Red by Pamuk and absolutely loved it. And if you include the Ottoman Empire, I have a slew of books about the Armenian genocide that I've been wanting to get to.

>238 PaulCranswick: This looks like a great challenge! I have more than a few unread books on my shelves that would fit most of the categories.

>238 PaulCranswick: That looks intriguing. Will you post the link to the challenge when you get it set up?

>242 labfs39: I'm glad that you liked My Name Is Red, Lisa, as I own a copy of it. I think I'll read Other Colors: Essays and a Story by Orhan Pamuk in January, but I'll certainly consider reading My Name Is Red as well.

>243 Sakerfalcon: I'm glad that you'll likely participate with us, Claire! This is a great challenge, as I own at least two dozen books I've been meaning to read that would fit it.

>244 RidgewayGirl: Here's a link to Paul's ASIA READING CHALLENGE 2022. Once he puts up the actual challenge thread in January I'll post a link to it on my thread, and make it one of my categories in my first Club Read 2022 thread.

I have read 2 of Orhan Pamuk's books and liked them both - for different reasons. I read Istanbul: Memories and the City and this book is a memoir. I enjoyed this one and thought that someday I should visit Istanbul. It lead me to believe that the city is quite exciting and not at all friendly to the current conservative leaning of the rest of Turkey. I also read Snow and this is a political novel in which Pamuk tackles the issue of dress for good Muslim women. Specifically he deals with the issue of head covering. This book is set on a city in the north part of Turkey - Kars. This book is set in an obscure part of Turkey and the area is known for dissident thinking and is quite volatile due to a mixed ethnic population that is heavy with Kurds and Armenians.

Hi, Darryl,

I think I'm back for a while. I went quickly through your last months' reading to put me back in the present here. See you again soon.

>246 benitastrnad: Istanbul: Memories and the City sounds good, Benita. I would also like to visit that ancient city one day. I hope to read Snow soon, but I don't think I'll get to it next year.

>247 sallypursell: Hi, Sally! It's good to see you here.

>238 PaulCranswick: Oooh, Paul! That sounds very cool. Even I might join just joined that challenge. :D

>250 SqueakyChu: I'm glad that you'll be joining us, Madeline!

>245 kidzdoc: The link took me to post #28 in the topic, a little disorienting, and it only took me an embarrassing three tries to figure out what happened. :)

>252 ELiz_M: Oops. Thanks for noticing that, Liz! It should be fixed now.

Just chiming in as another fan of My Name Is Red. That's one I'd like to reread at some point... I feel like I was a lot younger, with a slightly more circumscribed POV, at the time.

>254 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. Hopefully I can make room for My Name Is Red alongside A Mind at Peace and Other Colors.

I will be making my first trip through and airport in a few days and wonder if you have any advice. I am fully vaccinated and plan on wearing a mask in the airport even though it is not required at my local airport. (or at least I can't find anything that says it is required on a website.) I am no stranger to flying and I have traveled this last year, but all of those trips were by car and I did only drive throughs for food. Somehow this feels really different and a bit dangerous.

>256 benitastrnad: I made three short flights this year to visit family, and I think mental preparedness is the most helpful, whether you do that by planning, imagining scenarios, or meditation.

I fly out of Atlanta, and there is no distancing yourself in screening lines or on the airplane. Like you, I am vaccinated and wear a mask, except when drinking (water, coffee.) Because my flights are relatively short (2 hours or so in the air) I have not been eating in the airport. If you need to eat, might I suggest taking some fresh fruit and a nut/seed mixture to knosh on?

I also change my clothes & mask after I get there if I'm going to visit my Dad. I know the virus doesn't survive on things, but as he has respiratory issues I want to take the best care not to bring him anything unwanted.

I don't worry too much, as I've done the best I can to take care of myself and not spread anything to others.

Hope your trip is pleasant and uneventful.

>245 kidzdoc: Daryl, thanks for linking to Paul's thread. While I know I won't participate every month, I hope to dip in and out, so i've starred his thread.

>257 markon:
Thanks for the advise. I am usually fairly nonchalant about flying and certainly didn't feel this way about driving. I find myself a bit anxious about this and keep thinking I am going to forget something important and get left at the gate. Whenever I start thinking that I have been doing my breathing exercises and it does help. I think I am much more anxious because it has been 2 years since I have seen this sister and that isn't normal for either of us. I really really want to see her.

I made my first gingerbread bundt cake of the season yesterday and it just didn't go well. The cake stuck in the pan and that is the first time that has happened. I will have plenty of cake crumble to eat when I have tea for the next three days. I also baked a batch of Oatmeal Dinner Rolls and they turned out perfect. I have a second batch of them to do today and will redo the Gingerbread cake as well. But I did discover that, once again, there is a shortage of molasses. I had a new bottle and that will make several batches of the Oatmeal rolls but I will need to find a supplier of molasses as Publix was out for the second week in a row.

Unfortunately my father had another bad seizure this past Saturday. He is now in the ICU of their local hospital, on a mechanical ventilator (i.e., life support), as he is still having subclinical seizure activity. His prognosis is guarded, and uncertain.

I'll be staying with my mother for the immediate future, until things are more stable. I'll be busy making short and long term arrangements for them, so I'll have to restrict my participation in social media, including LibraryThing, for the time being.

I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope to check in before the end of the year.

Sorry to hear this, Darryl but thankful that you can be there for them. No one better, for sure.

Keeping you all in my thoughts.

I'll keep you and your parents in my thoughts, Darryl. I'm glad they have you there.

Sorry to hear about your father, Keeping in you and your parents in my thoughts.

Oh Darryl - so sorry to hear -this is such a difficult time for you. I'm thinking of you and hope all goes as well as it can.

Thinking of you and your parents, Darryl. I'm glad you can be there for them. Take care!

I'm so sorry to hear this news Darryl. I will keep you and your parents in my prayers.

Very sorry to hear about your father Darryl. Best wishes for all of you.

Oh, no. I hope things get better somehow. Best wishes to you and your family.

So sorry to hear this Darryl. As you're taking care of your parents, take some time to take care of yourself as well. You will all be in my thoughts and prayers over the holdiay.

Ah Darryl, I'm sorry to hear that. Glad you can be with your parents, of course, but I wish you lived within casserole-bringing distance. Take care.

Sorry to hear this news and hope that the outcome is as good as it could be.

I'm so sorry to hear about your father, Darryl. I'll be praying.

>260 kidzdoc: so sorry to hear that Darryl. Im glad you can be there for them. Ill keep you and your parents in my thoughts

Sorry to hear this Darryl. Wishing your father the very best.

Keeping you and your family in my thoughts Darryl.

What devastating news, Darryl. I'm so sorry to hear this. You and your family remain in my prayers. Hugs to all of you. If we can be of any further support, please stop by to let us know how.

Very sorry about your father. Your family will be in my thoughts.

Oh Darryl, I am sorry to hear this. It's good that you can be with your mom during this time. I'm wishing for the best possible outcome for you and your family given the circumstances.

So sorry to read about your father, Darryl.
Thinking of you and your family, so good you are there for your parents.

Very sorry to hear about your father. Your family are in my thoughts and prayers.

Thoughts are with you, Darryl. I'm glad you are able to be there.

Your CR spot will be kept warm waiting for your return.

Take care, Darryl. We'll all be thinking of you and your parents.

Adding my thoughts of concern and support to the rest, Darryl.

Darryl--I am so sorry to hear about your Dad. Sending best wishes to you and your parents as you struggle through this.

>260 kidzdoc: I am so sorry to hear about your dad. Sending * hugs* your way.

I am sorry to hear your news-I am thinking about you and your dad.

Thank you, everyone; I appreciate your prayers and kind thoughts. Unfortunately my father is not doing well; he has stopped seizing, and he is off of sedation, but he hasn't awakened and is still on a ventilator. If his mental status doesn't improve by next week, and if he isn't expected to have a significant quality of life, we'll likely ask for the team to withdraw care, based on his documented wishes. I'm certainly glad that we did that for both parents with their eldercare lawyer earlier this year, although I had hoped that it would be several more years before we had to make those decisions for either one.

I've taken an indefinite leave of absence from work, and told my team that I'm not sure when, or if, I will return.

That's rough, Darryl. Sending you strength from down south. I'm thankful that you introduced me to Being Mortal so that I could have those conversations with my parents ahead of time. I hope that knowing your father's wishes helps you through this time. Sending love to your mom.

Sad to hear this Darryl. I'm glad you were able to have conversations with your parents and document your dad's wishes. Take care.

Reaching out to you with so much concern for you and your mom and dad. If there is any other way I can be of support to you now, please let me know. In the meantime, I understand your need to be with your family at this time.

Fortunately my daughter is an eldercare lawyer, and she forced us a few years ago to do the same papers you just did. I had them in hand for a recent terrifying hospitalization of my husband (whose situation is now stable). It's tough to face these questions at any time.

Hugs to you and wishes of comfort for your entire family in this difficult situation.

>287 kidzdoc: Sorry to hear your dad is not doing so well Darryl. It is a hard time for you and your family. My thoughts continue with you.

Sending you strength, Darryl, as you navigate this difficult time. We will all walk this road at some point...

{{hugs}}

Sorry to read the latest update about your father, Darryl.
Sending good and comforting thoughts to you and your family from both of us, take care.
(((hugs)))

Darryl, I'm so sorry. Wishing you whatever measure of peace you can gather.

Darryl, I am very sorry that your dad is not improving more. Wishing you peace as you face these tough decisions.

>287 kidzdoc: So sorry to hear that Darryl. Sending my best wishes to you and all your family.

Sorry about what you are going through. Hoping for the best and thinking about you.

Wishing you strength to make the best decisions for you and your mum.

Thinking of you and yours. Hoping for the best

I remember my siblings, in laws and I struggling towards the end of ma's life. We were very fortunate that we were all on the same page. I hope that you have some support from family and friends, and you are not alone in this.

So sorry to hear this, Darryl. Thinking of you and your mom and your brother.

So sorry about that happening to you. Losing parents is never easy. Hugs.

I wish you strength in dealing with this very sad situation.

Holding you and your family in my thoughts and prayers. How’s your mom doing?

So sorry to hear about your father Darryl. Thinking of you and your family.

>287 kidzdoc: I'm so sorry to hear this Darryl. You and your family are in my prayers at this difficult time.

I'm so sorry to hear about your family troubles, Darryl. It must be immensely exhausting and worrying, taking care of your mother and facing decisions about your father. My thoughts are with you in this difficult time.

Thanks again for your thoughts and prayers, everyone. My father continues to do poorly, with no meaningful neurological activity 10 days after his seizure. Unless a miracle happens in the next 48 hours I'll ask the team to withdraw care on Thursday. My brother, dear cousin from Michigan (who has become the daughter my parents never had), and I will break the news to my mother tomorrow, and we'll return to the hospital on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning so that we can say our last goodbyes to him.

I've probably mentioned that my mother has moderate Alzheimer's disease and requires 24 hour care. I will request unpaid time off from work via the Family Medical Leave Act, and stay with her until she can be admitted to a memory care unit, which probably won't happen before next year. My biggest decision will be whether to return to my job in Atlanta after this happens, or to stay in the Philadelphia area and seek employment here. Fortunately I have several weeks, if not months, to make that decision.

Continued prayers for you, Darryl, as you make all sorts of difficult decisions regarding your parents and yourself.

{{Darryl}}. All things considered, you are doing all the right things and are using your time wisely. Glad that you have this time to make the decisions that are right for you and your family. Glad too, that your brother and cousin and there so you aren't walking this road alone.

Take care of yourself, too, don't forget.

>307 kidzdoc: Thinking of you, Darryl, both Frank and me.
Take care.

Keeping you in my thoughts, Darryl. And your mother.

>309 jessibud2: What Shelley said. It's such an emotionally complex time for you Darryl. Keeping you in my thoughts.

Wishing you and yours the best as you make these difficult decisions. Take care.

Wishing you strength to deal with this difficult time Darryl. {{hugs}} Take good care of yourself.

Thinking of you during this difficult time.

{{{{{darryl}}}}}

This is a tough road to walk. Know that so many of us here care not only about you, but have grown to care about your family, too, even if only virtually. It's good that you are in Phildelphia with your mom and dad at this difficult time. I'm glad you have your brother and cousin for support. Take care of each other. Hugs to you, Darryl.

I am so sorry to hear your news. Thinking of you and your family.

Thanks, everyone. Ironically, I just found out that the mother of one of my partners aspirated and died at 8 pm this evening. She had sent me a text message of consolation late this afternoon, after reading the email message I posted to my group about my father's impending death, and not two hours later her mother died.

I'm so sorry to hear, Darryl. End of life is just as difficult as it is inevitable. My sympathies to you and your family.

>319 kidzdoc: Life is so fragile. This is such a sad addition to your whole situation. Hugs.

I’m so sorry Darryl. You and your family are in our thoughts, and we send all our love.

I'm so sorry to hear this news Darryl. I'm keeping you and your family in my thoughts and prayers.

Thinking of you and your family Darryl.

I only just saw you fb post, I had no idea you were going through such a troubled time right now. I am sending my love to you from afar, and hoping you can give and receive comfort to those around you.

Love and support, Darryl.

Sending big hugs, Darryl

I am sorry to hear about this. I do admire you for making some decision prior to these latest events, but it portents big changes for you and your mother. Many of us here on LT are dealing with eldercare in many different ways and making all those decision are a hard thing to do. You have our support while you make these difficult decisions regarding your parents, but also in your own life. The impact of these events is not just about them and so, while it isn't much, you can move forward knowing that there are people who understand the impact of all of these events on you and understand.

Sorry to learn of your sad news.

Thanks for your continued thoughts, prayers and kind words, everyone. My father was taken off of life support on Thursday, per his stated wishes in his advanced care directive. He is still alive, though, and is resting comfortably, although he has not yet shown any meaningful neurological activity and remains in a coma.

>328 benitastrnad: Thanks for your kind and wise words, Benita. You're absolutely right, big changes are ahead for my mother and myself. I've requested three months of unpaid leave from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to care for her; as I've probably mentioned she has moderate Alzheimer's disease, is unable to perform many activities of daily living, and requires 24/7 care for her own safety and comfort. We've begin to have conversations about her care, which she has initiated, as I don't want to add to her anxiety, stress and grief. One one hand she wants me to keep my job and return to Atlanta, but she is, understandably, not ready to have a 24/7 live in caregiver who she doesn't know, and, also understandably, she doesn't want to move into a local assisted living facility or memory care center. Assuming that she lives long enough (she turned 86 yo two months ago) there will come a point that she will need to be moved into a nursing home, as her Alzheimer's disease continues to progress, but until then I think it would be best for her to remain at home, and for me to take over as her primary caregiver, with support from friends, neighbors and outside help. So, unless my mother, and I feel otherwise I will probably resign from Children's earlier next year, after I accept a non-clinical position that will allow me to work from home, and move in with her. They have a comfortable house in a peaceful suburb north of Philadelphia, with very friendly and supportive neighbors, and I do like this area, so I would be very comfortable both living here, and possibly retiring here as well.

My travel plans will have to take a back seat for the foreseeable future, until my mother has to go into a care facility, and my plans to retire to Portugal will have to wait for several years, if it happens at all. I have no regrets, as Mom comes first.

It will take time for me to complete the move from Atlanta, as someone will have to stay with my mother while I retrieve my belongings there. My brother probably wouldn't be willing to stay with her, but my dear cousin Tina from Michigan, who visited us both last week and this week, almost certainly would. She has become the daughter my parents never had, and my mother is nearly as comfortable with her as she is with me. When she returns to Atlanta later this month I'll fly to Philadelphia, retrieve my SUV from the airport parking garage, pack as much as I can in it (I'm glad that I decided to purchase it in addition to my convertible with the microscopic trunk and no rear seats), and drive back to Philadelphia a couple of days later. I'm certainly not looking forward to the 800+ mile drive, but, as I said, Mom comes first. I would prefer to drive through the Appalachian Mountains to Harrisburg on I-77 and I-81, then Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but winter weather may force me to take I-85 to Petersburg, just south of Richmond, and I-95 the rest of the way north.

On the reading front I may have time to finish the two books I'm reading by next week, The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Dr Jason Karlawish, the director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where one of his colleagues diagnosed my mother with Alzheimer's disease in October, and Listen: How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations by Dr Kathryn Mannix, a former palliative care specialist in the UK whose book With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize several years ago. I met her at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2018 after she read my review of that superb book, and I am eager to get to this one.

I'm glad you're able to be there for your mother. Let me know if I can be any help at all - I'm only a few hours from Atlanta if you need someone to do anything there for you. The I-95 route is the worst - I always drive through the Appalachians on my way to central New Jersey, where my MIL lives. We'll be heading up there for the week between Christmas and New Year's, so if you want anything brought to you, please don't hesitate to ask. I would even bring you alligator fillets if you can't get them in Philly.

Thanks for your kind offer, Kay! If for some reason I can't travel from Atlanta to Philadelphia by Christmas Week I may ask for...something. As you probably know I received my bachelor's degree from Rutgers, so I'm quite familiar with central NJ. My parents' home is on what is now I-295, until recently I-95, close to the Business US 1/PA Route 413 exit, but they are also close to the Pennsylvania Turnpike's US 1 exit in Philadelphia. Alligator fillets are certainly tempting, although I can order them from Amazon. It might be easier for me to drive to South Georgia and catch my own alligator, though...

>330 kidzdoc: Sad news Darryl, but I think very much the right decision.

I'm sorry to hear your brother won't step up, but it sounds like you and your cousin will be able to support your mother, and I remember your parents were close with and have caring neighbours.

Keeping you all in my thoughts.

Darryl, if you are definite in moving, it might be easiest for you to hire packers and movers to empty your apartment and either deliver everything to your mother's house or to a nearby storage facility from which you could choose what to keep, what you need at hand, and what to get rid of. I don't know how much more stuff you have than books (we've seen those stacks!), but packing everything up is a serious chore, and deciding what to abandon is another serious chore. Taking care of your mother is going to be effort enough.

Judy's idea is a good one, in >334 ffortsa:. It would give you time you may not have or want to spare in the immediate days ahead, having someone else do the grunt work, and moving things to a storage facility near your parents' home would also alleviate the need to make decisions right away, that could wait for some other time.

Don't forget to take some deep breaths..... and make sure you get some sleep. Your own strength is vital right now.

>330 kidzdoc: Hugs. I cannot imagine what you are going through - everyone I lost had died unexpectedly so I never had to just sit and wait, knowing that they are dying.

As others had said - hire help with packing and moving/storing - you don’t need that aggravation on top of everything else.

Darryl, I am sorry to hear about the tough times and momentous changes ahead. I'm glad yuo have a cousin and neighbors that can help support you and your mom. As many have mentioned, please make time for yourself as you put together a care plan for the next few months. {{{Hugs}}}

I'm so sorry, Daryl. Wishing you strength for the weeks ahead.

I'm a bit behind on LT this week Darryl, but thoughts remain with you. Your parents are lucky to have a son like you who is making them priority #1. I'm sure current circumstances have you exhausted.

a caution note - if you decide on the mover idea, make sure you know about the company and reputation. Or, ask your cousin if she can remove the items that are most precious to you and find storage for them. Then you wil not be heart broken if something is broken, stolen or just missing.

And I agree with Alison, what a wonderful son you are for your parents. They no doubt would be so proud and thankful to you. Please take care of your self as well - make sure you are rested, hydrated, eating good foods, and taking a break now and again from your work.

I talked to my son about you. He remembers our Philly meetup and sends his sympathies. I admire what you’re doing and am sorry for you for what you’re going through.

I am going to add my voice to those suggesting that you hire a company to come in and pack your appartment. While it is true that you will get some stuff that you might not want, it will be closer to you and therfore easier for you to sort and deal with if it is up there.

I am relieved to know that the area in which your mother lives is one where you are comfortable and feel like you could make a life there. That helps me feel that you are not feeling pressured to do something you don't want to do. I think it may be easy for you to find a part-time practice there as well. Take it from me, you are going to need some time away from your mother. I don't say that to be mean, but full time care-giving is very mentally taxing. I thought I could do it and I failed at it. Now that my mother has fully recovered from COVID she feels better and is easier to get along with. Of course, I was trying to work from her home at the time. It certainly would have helped me if I would have had an office space in her house from which to work, but that wasn't possible. I am older than you and will be retiring soon, so I already know that if I am to become my mother's care-giver some adjustments to the house will have to be made to accommodate some of my needs because I would like to work part-time in the future.

Thinking of you...

Thinking of you and I put a PM to you on your profile page.

Oh, Darryl, I am only just getting to your thread now. Thinking of you. XXX

  

Thanks again for your kind prayers, thoughts, and support, everyone. My father, David Richard Morris, Sr., died early yesterday morning. I posted the following tribute to him late last night:

According to an article in Huffington Post, a good man never lets you forget how much he loves you; he always supports you; he will inspire you; he does the little things; he never crosses the line; he always tries to improve himself; he understands that actions speak louder than words; he will open up to you; he will always be honest with you; and, he will stand by you through thick and thin.

My father was all of those things, and more. He was a self made man who overcame a troubled childhood and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Howard University in Washington, DC and a master's degree in theoretical physics from The City College of New York. He taught transistor technology to students at CCNY and NYU who attained jobs that were closed to him because of his race, but he was eventually hired as a civilian engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he specialized in the development of gyroscopes for U.S. Navy nuclear submarines which patrolled the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and kept all of us safe from attacks by sea from hostile foreign governments. His work ethic and management skills allowed him to steadily advance, and, after his division transferred its operations to the Naval Air Development Center in suburban Philadelphia, he became a highly respected branch head, where he supervised a large team of skilled technicians and engineers, while serving as a mentor to young female and minority engineers.

He was also a dedicated husband to his wife of over 60 years, a devoted father to his two sons, a devout Christian, and a great friend, neighbor, son, and uncle, whose cooking skills rivaled those of his talented wife.

My father died peacefully early this morning, December 6, 2021, 12 days short of his 87th birthday, at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. He selflessly devoted his remaining years to the care of his ailing wife, whom he loved as much as any man ever had, while putting his needs and desires last. He touched hundreds of lives during his time on Earth, and his loss will be a profound one to his family, neighbors, friends, and fellow churchgoers who loved him dearly. He was my primary role model, along with my mother, and without their endless support of and love for me I wouldn't have been half the man I have become. I love you, Dad, and while I will miss you dearly and grieve your loss every day, you will always be with me and I shall do my best to live up to the high standards you set for yourself, and for us.

My sincere condolences Darryl! What a wonderful tribute.

A beautiful tribute to a wonderful man. You are lucky to have had him as your father. Best wishes, Darryl.

My sincere condolences, Darryl. What a beautiful tribute to a beautiful person.

A wonderful and heartfelt tribute, Darryl. There is no doubt that he lives in you and you have inherited much from him.

Deep condolences.

Thank you for sharing about your father's life, Darryl. Clearly, a life very well-lived. Peace to you and your family.

So beautifully written, Darryl, and a real chance to hear about the life he lived. Sending you warmest wishes in this most difficult time.

Deepest condolences. Beautifully written tribute to your father.

That is a beautiful, heart warming tribute Darryl. Thank you for sharing it with us. I will be keeping you and yours in my thoughts at this sad time, and wishing you many good and loving memories.

Ah that’s lovely, Darryl. I’m sure he was very proud of you. Sending hugs and condolences

That's a great tribute, Darryl. My sympathies to you and your family.

Our sincere condolences, Darryl, thanks for sharing your loving tribute to your father.
Hugs from both of us.

Beautiful tribute; A great man indeed. My condolences to you and your mom. May memories give you peace comfort and strength. May his name be a blessing to all who knew him

Thanks for sharing your tribute to your father. I'm glad you had his love and support. Thinking of you and your family.

I'm so sorry for your family's loss.

I'm so sorry to hear of your father's passing, Darryl.

Darryl, my condolences. That was a beautiful tribute—he sounds like a great man. Wishing some peace to you, your mom, your brother, and all of your family.

I am so sorry for your loss, Darryl! Hugs.

Lovely tribute!

I'm so sorry for your loss. What a touching tribute.

I’m sorry for your loss. As many have said here, you put together a beautiful and special tribute.

May his memory be a blessing to all who knew him and a source of comfort and peace for you

>346 kidzdoc: So sorry, Darryl.

What a lovely tribute to your father, Darryl. I'm sorry for your loss.

So sorry for your loss. What a remarkable man! Thanks for sharing his story

My condolences for your family loss and my appreciation for the loving tribute to your father.

Thanks again to all of you for your kind comments about my father and my tribute to him. They are tremendously important to me.

Barring a sudden and unexpected development I will submit my resignation to Children's tomorrow, in order to accept a much more assignment as primary caregiver for my mother in her home. I'm sure that I've mentioned that she has moderate Alzheimer's disease and requires 24/7 care. After caring for her around the clock for the past 2½ weeks and gentle discussions with her about her and my future, advice from neighbors, friends, family, and one of my oldest friends, a Lutheran minister in a nearby who will conduct my father's funeral service and has agreed to be my spiritual advisor, along with numerous prayers, it is obvious to me that placing her in a memory care center or nursing home, or hiring 24/7 in home care with strangers, would almost certainly cause her to become profoundly depressed and withdrawn, stop eating, and die within a few months. That is a scenario that I absolutely cannot live with, and since I'm in a good financial situation where I don't have to work I am far better suited to do this than anyone else in the family, especially since Mom trusts me and feels as comfortable with me to care for her (with support, of course) as anyone other than her husband. I'm not sure when I'll return to work, but there is a lot to do here, so I've decided to not rush things and not work until the middle of next year, and possibly not until 2023 or later.

This thread is extremely long, but since the year is nearly over, and because I don't know how much reading I'll do in the next three weeks I won't start a new one until the Club Read 2022 group is created.

>372 kidzdoc: An incredible gift to be able to make to your mother Darryl, and to yourself, in hopefully being able to extend her life while it is possible to do so. I am sure you will both have some special moments together, and you will know you have been able to do your very best for her.

I'm pleased also that you both have a breadth of support around you, with good advice and care from those close to you.

>372 kidzdoc: Moving can be very dislocating for a person with Alzheimer's, and having just lost her husband of so many years, it would be especially difficult. I'm glad she won't be faced with that double whammy. So many changes for you. I'm glad you have a strong support system there. I know you've been frustrated with work lately due to all the Covid insanity and with Atlanta due to politics, so maybe there are more silver linings in this transition (besides getting to be with your mom)?

What a perfect solution. And with your skills, you can later get a job anywhere if you want to. Your parents raised you up to be the caring adult you are, and are undoubtedly so proud of you.

please remember to take care of yourself at the same time you are caring for mom. Went through this with my mom, mother in law and brother in law, and seen the strain in all of us as we attempted to care for them. I said before, do what will keep you happy and sane. good food, exercise, rest are all your friends (as are good books) Be sure you have some time to yourself in anything you enjoy doing

Is your mom able to ask about her husband, does she know he died? I hope that preacher is there with you if and when you tell her. Im so glad you have so much support.

>372 kidzdoc: - It sounds like you are surrounded by exactly the right people and supports, Darryl. And that you are moving forward with the right balance of thought, care and intention.

I concur with what was said in >373 Caroline_McElwee:, >374 labfs39:, and >375 cindydavid4:.

{{hugs}}

>346 kidzdoc: What a beautiful tribute. Sending you my deepest condolences.

>377 figsfromthistle:
I think you mean to quote back to 346 - not 246. post 246 is about the author Orhan Pamuk.

Darryl, those sound like all the right moves. I'm especially glad to hear you have so much support in place, and can extricate yourself from your work fairly easily. I hope all the next steps flow as smoothly as possible—all good thoughts to you and your mom.

This is a big decision Darryl, and I'm glad that you've been able to make it with input from those around you, and in consultation with your mother. It won't be an easy task at times but you can rest assured that it is absolutely the right thing to do, and it sounds like you will have people around you to turn to when you need practical or emotional support and help. I will keep you in my prayers as you make this transition in your life. I'm sure your mother knows that she is a very fortunate woman to have had care from her loving husband and now from her dear son.

Catching up and so sorry to hear your sad news, Darryl. Your tribute to your father was very moving - he clearly was an inspirational man, and judging from your quick actions to make such an enormous life change to care for your mother he was hugely successful in also raising an inspirational son.

>346 kidzdoc: I'm so sorry for your loss, Darryl.

That is a moving tribute to him and I am sure his later days were filled with pride for the great man his son became. This is truly exemplified by post >372 kidzdoc: which did, I'll admit bring me to tears.

You and your mum will be in my prayers and I hope that you will treasure your days together.

Adding my voice to the others with regards of your wonderful tribute, Darryl...and your big decision to take on your mother's care full-time. My mother had Alzheimers, so I understand.

>378 benitastrnad: Thanks for noticing that. I went and corrected it :)

Darryl - got this today from Hennepin County Library in Minn, MN, one of the best libraries in te country in my opinion. It’s a list of books for seniors with dementia.
https://hclib.bibliocommons.com/list/share/1341964159_hcl_minnetonka/1981226579_...

My condolences for your loss Darryl. You wrote a wonderful tribute to him. He must have been a special person. I agree with everybody here, a good decision to take care of your mother yourself. I’m glad there is a good support system at her place. Wishing you all necessary strength, Darryl.

>346 kidzdoc:, >372 kidzdoc: So sorry you have lost your father, Darryl. I have a snippet of memory from an LT meetup in Philadelphia several years ago, when you were perusing the Penn Museum store for an archaeology-themed hat for your father, which left me with an impression of his sense of humor.

As I've been occupied with the decline of my parents for the past year and a half, I view your situation with sympathy and admiration. We have it comparatively easy: three siblings local, and my parents bought into a retirement community with graduated care 15 years ago, which has simplified decisions though I now know from experience that such care doesn't happen automatically; it requires a bazillion phone calls and meetings to make arrangements, and continuous advocacy. And while the physical care is fine, psychological support is lacking. Not a thing I'd previously considered, but so many of the residents have lost spouses and capabilities that were a source of confidence and meaning; it's completely rational to feel depressed and anxious. With your mother embedded in a social network, and you able to provide medical care, staying with her at home makes sense; but I can barely begin to imagine the task list for making the transition.

My condolences Darryl and very best wishes with the changes you are making to support your Mum.

I'm very far behind with keeping up on Club Read threads once more, so I've only just now seen the news about your father. Let me add my sympathies to everyone else's, and also my best wishes to you and your mother, that things may go as smoothly for you in moving and in caring for her as they possibly can.

Hi Darryl. I'm so sorry to hear about the death of your father and all the difficult decisions you had and have to make for your mother. My sincere condolences. On FB i read about the beautiful ceremony to honour your dad. My thoughts are with you and your family. Take care of yourself, Darryl.

I know its going to be a tough time for you this Christmas Darryl, but I hope that you and your mom will share precious memories of Christmases past, and that the changes you will make in 2022 will run smoothly, and that there will be some joy.

Echoing what Caroline says Darryl. I know it will be a difficult Christmas for you this year but wishing you all the best for 2022.

I was just catching up on CR threads, and I am so sorry to read of the death of your father. From following your thread over the years, I've come to know what a special relationship you have had with your father (and your mother, too, of course). Losing a beloved parent is always hard, and having it happen at this time of year can only sharpen the pain. I'll be thinking of you. Please keep us all advised of your plans.

Federico Barrocci, The Nativity, 1590

Merry Christmas, everyone. I thank you again for your well wishes and kind comments, and I apologize for not replying sooner. My father's funeral was a week ago today, on his 87th birthday, and the service was a small one, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was intimate and very meaningful, with statements from my brother and myself, and a very touching eulogy led by a local Lutheran pastor whose family and mine were close friends when she and I were kids.

My mother has struggled over the past week, with worsening tremors, confusion, and intermittent bursts of extreme anger, toward another longtime family friend who comes to bathe her and help around the house, my brother, and myself. Fortunately those symptoms have significantly dissipated over the past two days, and hopefully they won't return. My cousin, who has become the daughter my parents never had after her own parents died, will arrive from Michigan on Monday, and as long as my mother doesn't lash out at Tina I'll fly to Atlanta on Tuesday or Wednesday, retrieve my SUV from the airport, load it with items I'll need the most (including books, of course!), and drive back to Philadelphia on Thursday or Friday, while Tina stays with Mom.

I developed upper respiratory tract symptoms yesterday which could be consistent with COVID-19 in a fully vaccinated and boostered person, and my mother has been coughing more at night, so we'll lay low until I can get tested for COVID-19, hopefully on Monday. Fortunately we're both feeling better today. I'll make us a nice but nontraditional Christmas dinner of moqueca baiana, an Afro-Brasilian seafood stew, Spanish garlic potatoes, and Thanksgiving Brussels sprouts, along with chocolate babka from Russ & Daughters, a century old Jewish appetizing store in NYC's Lower East Side, for dessert.

I doubt that I'll finish reading the books I'm currently working on during the next week, as I've hardly read anything over the past four weeks since I arrived here, so I'll carry them over into 2022.

Darryl, sending you strength, physical and emotional. Please take care of yourself. Good that your cousin is arriving soon, to give you the break you need right now. It will be nice for your mom too.

Deep breaths (as long as they don't trigger coughing spasms!)

Merry Christmas Darryl. Nice to have an update. Hope you feel better soon.

>395 jessibud2:

I will echo that. Take care of yourself, you are no good to your mother if you get ill.

no need to apologize AT All! We all know you will respond when you are ready. Im glad your dads service was meaning full for you. Its gonna take your mom a while, tho you know that. Bless you for taking such good care of her but I echo the above; you can't help your mom if you are ill.

Our rabbi said when we sat shiva over mom, let people do for you, as much as they can. Hard for us to let them or to ask but its vital to you at this time. Safe travels and be well

Wishing you and your mom well in the future. Take one day at a time and hope for the best. Safe travels. May your days ahead be healthy and calm.

I second Madeline's message- talk care of yourself and it is good that you have help from great friends and relatives.

Thanks for the Christmas wishes, everyone. We (my mother, brother and I) had a quiet but very pleasant Christmas together, especially since my mother wasn't agitated by David's visit as she was on Thursday.

David purchased four books for me from my wish list:

The Trees by Percival Everett
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby
Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa

I'm feeling better today, with my symptoms being limited to sinus congestion, intermittent cough, and fatigue. I'll touch base with my cousin Tina later today to find out if she is still coming tomorrow, and to decide if I should fly to Atlanta next week, or wait until her next visit. I'll try to get a rapid COVID-19 test tomorrow, as that may also influence my decision.

Hi Darryl, and thanks for checking in. I'm glad you had a good Christmas—I hope things settle down a bit for your mom. It's not really surprising that she's acting out on folks, though. That's a lot of processing for her, especially if she doesn't have the language to explain how she's feeling at her disposal (and who does, for something that big?).

My son had COVID a couple of weeks ago—not surprising, I guess, since he's in hospitals every day, but I'm glad he got it now and not last year this time. He said it was like a very bad cold, with one of the worst sore throats he's ever had—but only for a couple of days. He quarantined and was better enough to have Christmas with his girlfriend and her mom up in Binghamton (I had them for Thanksgiving, and I'm not the biggest Christmas person, so that was fine). I hope you feel better soon.

>402 kidzdoc: Hope you continue to feel better, Darryl, and I'm glad your mom is less agitated. I hope she is sleeping, so you can as well.

Nice book haul.

Have been thinking of you, your mum and brother through these tough first times (first Christmas, first loved one's birthday etc) without your dad, Seasons Greetings and best wishes for perhaps a more hopeful but also reflective (perhaps) New Year.

>403 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. You're right about the difficulty my mother is having with processing this monumental loss, one which I'm struggling with as well. She is fully aware that he is no longer here when she is lucid, but when she has one of her episodes of sundowning she will frequently call out his name instead of mine, become more agitated, and isn't able to communicate or comprehend comments from me or others well. Her worst day was Thursday, three days ago, and since then she has slowly improved, so I'm encouraged that this phenomenon was a temporary setback rather than a marked long term decline.

This illness seems like a regular viral upper respiratory infection than a case of acute COVID-19, although I understand that COVID-19 in fully vaccinated and boostered individuals can have few if any symptoms. Fortunately my mother's symptoms are milder than mine, at least so far. I did manage to schedule a rapid antigen test for Tuesday morning, and I'm increasingly inclined to postpone my trip to Atlanta until sometime in January.

I'm sorry that your son contracted COVID-19, but I'm glad that he's doing better. One of my (former) work partners said that several physicians within and outside of the group have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, although as far as I know no one has had more than a mild infection.

>404 labfs39: Thanks, Lisa. Mom is sleeping now, and I'm inclined to take an early afternoon nap before I make lunch, and then start Sunday dinner (ratatouille over Moroccan couscous).

>405 elkiedee: Thanks, Luci.

>404 labfs39: Funnily enough, my mother, who was taking a nap on one of the sofas in our living room — she can no longer sleep in her bedroom, as that is where my father suffered the collapse last month that preceded his death — woke up, heard me yawn, and said "I think you need a nap." She playfully threatened to use The Wooden Spoon on me if I didn't comply with her order, so I will go to sleep for a couple of hours.

I'm sure it was a difficult Christmas, Darryl. I'm glad your mum has settled a little and hope you get that chance to go back to Atlanta this week. Day at a time....

Thinking of you, Darryl.

I can only assume that Christmas was difficult in your household this year. I hope you were able to hold on to your fondest memories and enjoy the family still here. Sending best wishes to you as you make this transition and I hope you feel well soon. Hugs.

>407 kidzdoc: Nice moment of levity, as well as an opportunity for her to mother you. I like it. Hope you slept well.

I'm more than ready to put this annus horribilis behind me, and now that I've created my first Club Read 2022 thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/337910) I will bid a not so fond adieu to this one.