This is my first time participating in Trish, Kailana, Lisa’s really fun monthly topic, Where in the World Are You Reading? Each month, one of these lovely ladies posts a monthly theme about our reading lives. The topic for November is “Reading Companions,” which seemed like the perfect opportunity to post some photos of my most popular family member, Hannah.

As you can see, Hannah does not not always appear to love having her picture taken. If she were a teenager, I’d imagine her saying, “Seriously, Mom. Knock it off with the photos! You are such a dork.” I snapped this one yesterday night after I put down Angelmaker to grab some dinner and she proceeded to take over my chair because, I suspect, it was nice and warm.

[continue reading…]

For many people — artists and art consumers alike — the measure of good art is its aesthetic appeal, a measurement that comes from and is maintained by the art world. This same art establishment promotes an idea that for artists to be politically engaged is to threaten or sabotage their careers as artists. Or, artists who do use their work to comment on social issues find their work “re-positioned as an aesthetic statement,” explains activist, critic and art historian Susan Noyes Platt in her book Art and Politics Now: Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis. In the book, Platt rejects the idea of art as purely aesthetic and, instead,

… celebrates the artists, as well as curators, who loudly cry out against immoral and illegal acts. Some of these artists have been speaking up for a long time; others have just woken up. Some are permanently engaged with political issues; other address them only once.

In the book, Platt focuses on activist artists who are using their mediums to protest or comment on war and oppression as well as artists who try to explore and defy geographical, political or aesthetic boundaries. However, Platt notes that all of the artists in the book (along with herself as the author) have shifted to the side of activism:

We are not just informed, we are outraged by the state of the world, by the actions of the U.S. government, by the devastation of war, by the oppression of the poor, and we have chosen to dedicate our creative energies to contributing to an awareness of those crimes. …

Artists who are committed to engaging contemporary political issues are convinced of the urgent necessity to use the power of art and its image-making capacity to make visible what is kept invisible; to create an alternative to the hegemonic images used by mainstream media to market “the war on terror.”

I have to admit two things before going further. First, I didn’t read all of this book. Like collections of essays, I found some chapters more engaging than others, and so I ended up skimming or skipping topics I wasn’t as interested in learning about in favor of engaging more deeply with issues that I know and care more about. I’ve come to think that, as a reader, doing some of that skimming can be ok.

[continue reading…]

Title: Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Author: Susannah Cahalan
Genre: Memoir
Year: 2012
Publisher: Free Press
Acquired: Book Expo America
Rating:

Review: At 24 years old, Susannah Cahalan was poised to begin her adult life, setting out on her first post-college job and just settling into her first serious relationship. A month later, Cahalan woke up strapped to a hospital bed, unable to move or speak, after a terrifying autoimmune disorder almost took her mind and her life. In Brain on Fire, Cahalan reconstructs her month of madness through medical records, interviews with friends and family, and a journal her father kept throughout her ordeal to tell a story of what happens when our brains betray us.

Brain on Fire first came to my attention when it was featured at the Editor’s Buzz panel at Book Expo America. The Editor’s Buzz panel is cool feature of BEA — editors for five big books coming out this year get to talk about why they think the book is great. Brain on Fire was the only nonfiction selection on the panel, and the book that I was most excited to get my hands on. Then, I waited six months to read it because I wanted to write a review closer to the publication date (self-control, thy name is Kim). Luckily, this book was well worth the wait.

The first thing to say about Brain on Fire is that this book is nearly impossible to put down. Although you know Cahalan will survive her ordeal (since she couldn’t write the book otherwise), it’s intense reading about her breakdown and wondering how much of her is going to come back. It’s entirely possible the Cahalan writing the book is different from the Cahalan who became ill, as readers we just don’t know how that will work out. There’s a lot of tension in that uncertainty and the exploration of health and personality.

The thing I most admire about the book was the way Cahalan reconstructed the time she can’t remember. The early chapters about how the illness slowly started to affect her — paranoia, migraines, loss of feeling on one side of her body, anger, and, eventually, seizures — are really absorbing, but I most admire the way she fills in the “month of madness.” It’s equally gripping, but even more intellectually interesting, since she has to write about this person who is not her that she can’t remember at all. I can’t imagine how bizarre and scary that would be.

Admittedly, the book isn’t quite perfect. Cahalan’s explanations of the science of how the brain works and how her illness affected her brain feel a little unpolished, but I think that reaction might be coming because I’ve read a lot of very elegant science writing to compare it too. And there are some pacing issues near the end of the book, when Cahalan transitions from the time she doesn’t remember back to her search for answers. But Cahalan is young writer (close in age to me, I believe), and so I’m confident if she continues to write those issues will work out with more practice. And really, they’re so tiny in comparison to how gripping this story is that they’re hardly worth worrying about extensively.

On the whole, Brain on Fire is one of those truly unputdownable memoirs (I know that’s cliche, but it’s totally true). Cahalan’s experience itself is terrifying and exciting to read, but she also does the necessary work to put it in context and help the reader understand how something like this could happen (even if, for the most part, contracting a rare disease is entirely unpredictable). If you get the chance to read this book, take it.

I admit to some self-plagiarism — part of this post originally appeared on Book Riot. 

Other Reviews: JulzReads | Jenn’s Bookshelves |

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Whew… it has been a week! After staying up until almost 3:00 a.m. on election night for work (posting local election updates to our newspaper website) and going into work on time the next morning, I spent most of the rest of the week in a bit of a fog (hence, no blog updates).

As a result, I spent a good chunk of this weekend decompressing with a book: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. Born to Run is a mix of a book — part anthropology, part history, part scientific inquiry, part memoir — about ultra-running, an extreme sport of extreme athletes running hundreds of miles in a single race. McDougall, a journalist and often-injured runner, begins the book by trying to explore why most runners are often injured but eventually stumbles across the much more interesting story of the Tarahumara Indians, a reclusive tribe in Mexico’s Copper Canyons who seem to be born to run.

Eventually, McDougall finds himself participating in a once in a lifetime race pitting several of America’s best ultra-runners against the Tarahumara in a 50 mile showdown through unforgiving territory. But before arriving there, McDougall also explores the science of running and a growing anthropological theory that part of what makes us humans (and, in fact, helped our ancestors thrive) was our genetic predisposition for running. If these experts are to be believed, humans were, in fact, born to run.

[continue reading…]