Swabbing the Decks: Recently Read Reviewlettes

Lots of being busy has led to a lack of posts here on the blog, and I apologize for that, dear reader. I’m planning on this being a catch-up post of sorts so that I can get back onto schedule. 

So I’ve been reading for sures – I seem to have retrieved my reading mojo after having it slip out of view in March, and luckily, the titles that I’ve been choosing have been really good. (It’s nice when things align.) 

I had noticed that I had slipped off the wagon for reading from my own TBR over the last few weeks, so pulled an old Oprah read from the shelves: “What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day” by Pearl Cleage (1993). 

It’s been a while since I’ve chosen a title that reads like a “hot knife through butter”, so searching for that experience and hoping that this wasn’t a misery novel (as can be Oprah’s wont with her books), I found this to be a fun and optimistic read. It’s also particularly noteworthy as it was published back in 1993 and features an HIV-positive woman as the protagonist. 

Why was it noteworthy in 1993? Because the AIDS pandemic was in full swing, a mix of homophobia and denial across the U.S. (and my city) was common, and I was an AIDS educator in a medium-sized Bible Belt community (ref: homophobia and denial [for some groups] mentioned above).

Oprah choosing this title was a great way to reach an audience who wouldn’t automatically be informed about the disease. It was cleverly wrapped up in a cheerful novel featuring women, and it was Queen Oprah who chose it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back at that time, I can see that she made a brave choice.

This is a homecoming-type novel, where the protagonist goes back to her small hometown after leaving Atlanta, the “Black Mecca” as the author calls it. Typical of a homecoming, she reconnects with old friends, makes new friends, and then makes new plans for the rest of her life. 

It’s well written, it’s easy to digest, it’s a fun read. Glad I reread this one, as I didn’t remember a thing about it from the first time. Plus – it was really interesting to place it in the context of history. Good one.

Pulling another read from the TBR pile, I chose “Cooking and Stealing: The Tin House Nonfiction Anthology,” edited by Charles d’Ambrosio. As I was looking for some longform nonfiction and/or essays to read, this fit the bill completely for me, and I whipped through it. 

As is typical for most anthologies, there were some hits and misses but overall, it was a good read. What was a minor irritation, though, were the typos spread quite liberally throughout the pages. I kept checking to see if it was an advance copy (or similar), but no. It was the final proof and just had typos. Grr. 

Moving on from the typo situation, d’Ambrosio had selected some good essays and/or narrative nonfiction and I managed to glean some author names to search for in the future. Plus, in the end, the title did have more good reads than bad ones, so I consider that a win. Plus – off the TBR pile! 

During Spring Break, my mum had brought me an old Virago copy of “All Passion Spent” by Vita Sackville-West (which was a new read for me). Expecting a rather prickly reading experience, this one ended up being really enjoyable and I actually read it twice, back to back, just to look at how the narrative arc was structured since it was done so well. I’ll be looking for some more by Sackville-West and her gang in the future.

Now, the end of the semester is in sight for both students and teachers, Spring time is here in our area of the country, and things are turning green again. It’s supposed to be 90 degrees this week and I’ve just found out that I’m probably going to go to a work conference in Vancouver.

Life is really good. I hope you can say the same. 

Catch-Up Time…

And it’s time to catch you guys up a bit on the inner circle of life here at Just One More Page… (Can you stand the suspense? I thought you could.)

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So – my face pain has made its return back to chez moi. (See my earlier post about my trigeminal neuralgia journey here.)

START OF MEDICAL TALK HERE: (Just leap over this if it’s really boring. I won’t mind. I’m just trying to bring more awareness to this pretty rare medical situation, but I understand if you’d rather do something else than read about it. Just jump down a few parags and normal blogging will resume.)

It seems that my Christmas brain surgery hasn’t really worked as my pain has returned. (It actually returned after about six weeks, so mid-February.) It’s a tad disappointing as that Microvascular Decompression (MVD) brain surgery usually has an 80% success rate.

(Excuse me a second or two whilst I use some creative language to express my feelings about this: *(^&^*))*%#@@^&*. This could go on for much longer, but I fear not everyone would appreciate that, and I think you probably may empathize with that frustration.)

But so, as this MVD didn’t seem to work, there are a few other options still to try and my surgeon’s willing to try, so at the end of the month, I’m having a Radio-Frequency Rhizotomy which is where you’re put under very fast anesthesia, the surgeon sticks a needle into the soft palate of your upper mouth (close to where the recalcitrant nerve is) and then wakes you briefly to see if they are hitting the right nerve in the right place, you say yay or nay, then the doc puts you back under into the world of anesthesia again, they do some electrical stimulation (I think) that damages the nerve and then you wake up all nice, happy and pain-free (I hope). That’s the plan for the end of the month, so I’m hoping that that works. If not, we’ll find another approach. Fingers crossed.

END OF MEDICAL TALK.

Onto happier things:

It’s Spring Break on campus this week, which means that the campus is mostly empty (of both students and faculty) and so life is much calmer both in the office and outside. This has been fabbo great and I’m managing to get some work done on one or two of those “One Day…” projects. It’s really cool, actually.

Outside work, all is going smoothly as well. The weather is a bit bipolar at the moment: freezing temps when we wake up, and then 70’s when we leave the office at 5p so it’s sort of “ski-jackets and shorts” type of season. 🙂  Certainly no complaining from my camp though as just a month or two more, and it will be hot temps and they stay around for months (at least until Oct most years). I am really enjoying this shoulder season of medium temps!

Reading, naturally: I’ve just finished two books, for which I was going to grace you with some mini-reviews but as I started writing about them, I discovered I had more to say. (You know how it is sometimes.) So – review of one of them is still to come.

The other title that I finished up the other was “Saturday for Funerals” by Unity Dow and Max Essex, and this title covers the state of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana. (I’ve been having some rather *serious* reading lately, haven’t I?)

The title “Saturdays are for Funerals” comes from a reference that in Botswana, funerals are traditionally held on Saturdays and for a while there, there were so many funerals happening (due to HIV) that it was difficult to do chores or anything else. So many people (and their extended families) were being affected that it had become part of the regular routine of the week, like work.

This book was actually a more optimistic read than I had thought it was going to be. Botswana, as a country, has had some effective governance during the time when this book was written, and both of the authors are deeply involved with HIV/AIDS, Dow as a judge (helping families w HIV/AIDS) and then Essex as an infectious disease physician at Harvard. They both have worked together on various projects, and the book had sections written by both of them throughout its chapters.

I’m happy to read work by co-authors if the different pieces flow together in a coherent way, but I’m afraid that this wasn’t the case for this book. Unity Dow is a judge in Gabarone, a large city in Botswana, and she works very closely with city residents (and families) and her writing was more of a casual nature and detailed the cases and how they were adjudicated. Max Essex, on the other hand, is a physician with Harvard and writes to a more academic audience, so his approach is clinical, scientific-based and removed, so the two authors had quite a contrast between them.

For the most part, I didn’t mind having such vastly different approaches to this large public health problem – there’s multiple sides to the issues, after all. However, after a while, the contrast became a barrier to the reading experience, and I rather wish that a neutral editor had come in and smoothed out the parts a bit. Still, it was good information, and it was great to have a book about the proactive steps that one African country is doing to address HIV (and other public health issues), and how they have been working.

So, a bit of a mixed bag here, but if you’re interested in HIV/AIDS or other public health challenges (and some successes), this would be a good read. Botswana was greatly impacted by HIV early in the epidemic years – WHO had estimated that 85% of fifteen-year-olds in this country would die of AIDS – and it’s good to hear positive news about how this was (and is being) addressed by their health care providers and educators.

Another quick read was Tattoo Street Style by the blog The Tattoorialist. I had thought it was going to be more of a graphic design look at actual tattoos, and there was some of that, but it was mostly a look at people who are serious tattoo people who are into major body art. So there was lots of tattoo pictures, and then some extra about the person who was actually wearing the tattoos. Interesting – just not the book that I had thought it was going to be (and that’s ok.)

 

 

So life is good here at Just One More Page. Read on, my friends, read on.

 

 

 

Catching Up Time…

(This post is a little early as I will be out of town tomorrow and thus unable to post. I realize how important my blog posts are for your general wellbeing and the smoothness of your day, so here you go for Wed’s edition. :-} )

So – catch up in my world of books…

Finished up The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin which I almost dropped halfway through due to ongoing and deep confusion about the characters…

I finished it in the end and it was actually pretty good. (It was shortlisted for the Booker in 1999.) This is another Irish author with the story set in Ireland in the early 1990’s. A ruptured and dysfunctional family are thrown together when one of them is found to be dying of AIDS and they all reconvene at Grandma’s house for his final days.

It’s not an easy read – it’s actually quite an uncomfortable read really – but it is very good. Toibin liked to add unpredictable twists in how he explains the characters and as the story changes, so do the names of one or two main characters. Tricky at first but once I understood what was going on, I could pick up on it and enjoyed the sly word play.

For example, the grandmother of the family is called “Granny” for all the first third of the novel. When one of the brother’s friends shows up to help with his health care at home, suddenly the grandma is called “Mrs. So and So” whenever the scene links the friends and her. So when she has a conversation or interacts with these non-family people, she is referred to (by Coibin and his characters) as Mrs. So-and-So. When she’s interacting with her family, she is referred to by everyone as Granny.

So, it’s confusing but worth it when you work it out — like being a member of a secret club idea.

It’s a novel where “nothing much happens”, but with this one, it’s all under the surface. Beautiful writing, tough stuff, good read. I recommend it and I also recommend that you stick with it until at least after halfway. It’s worth the effort.

Additionally, I’ve been reading the 1963 edition of Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. Ogilvy founded the worldwide ad agency, Ogilvy and Mather, and was considered the “Godfather of Advertising” back in the day. (Bit later than Mad Men if you know that show.)

Written 50 years ago, the advice is still golden and good to know if you’re in a communications field (which we all are as we communicate with other people all day every day in general). It’s written in bullet style, for the most part, and I’m enjoying being reminded of advertising “best practices” ideas and also learning new things.

Speaking of which, I’m learning Twitter (and how to) at work. I already FB, but needed something more immediate to reach our audience. I’ve finally jumped into the world of Immediate Social Media. Does anyone else twitter or Instagram or use any other tool? I’m always up for tips of the trade.

Update about the Ogilvy book: I couldn’t take its dated approach after a few more pages and its discriminatory advice, so I placed in the charity pile unfinished. Bah.