Ron's Picks

Once every few years – if you’re lucky – you read a book that you know you’re going to remember all your life, a book that you miss dreadfully now that it’s done, that reaches a part of you you don’t often get to feel, and you like.  For me, Cutting for Stone is one of those books. 

Maybe it’s because I’m a doctor, and this book is about doctors and patients and medicine.  Maybe it’s because I know the author Abraham Verghese,  deeply respect his practice of medicine, and found his first book ,My Own Country, an extraordinary story of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in rural America.

But I don’t think so.  I think it’s because this is a rich, deeply personal and elegantly told story, dreadfully sad and yet incredibly fulfilling.  And the writing, the writing is magical and efficient.  Listen to this paragraph, as this infant, perhaps six months old, tells you about his caretaker Rosina, while being held in her arms:

Rosina’s forehead is a ball of chocolate.  Her braided hair marches back in neat rows, then flies out in a fringe that reaches her shoulders.  She is a bouncing, rocking, and humming being.  Her twirls and turns are faster than Ghosh’s.  From my dizzy perch her pleated dress makes gorgeous florets, and her pink plastic shoes flash in and out of sight.

Or this one:

I believe in black holes.  I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.  I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life.

You  smell and taste and hear this story as much as you see it:

In the lobby I registered coriander, cumin – the familiar scents of Almaz’s kitchen.  On the stairs I inhaled the very brand of incense that Hema lit each morning.  I heard the faint drone on the second-floor landing of “Suprabhatam” sung by M. S. Subbulakshmi and the sound of a bell being rung, as someone in some other room, in a different direction did their puja.

Follow this family from India to Ethiopa to America and back as the main character is born, raised, educated, experiences love and pain, happiness and anger, satisfaction and grief, and chooses between the “perfection of the life, or of the work.”  This is a journey, and these are people, you will remember always.

This is the story of two men who have known each other since childhood and whose lives remain intertwined despite decades of distance.  It is a dark and brooding tale, for neither man has come to grips with much of anything except his relationship to the other, and yet now, they are torn apart.  Eli Gottlieb, trained as a poet, has written a lyrical and haunting story.

The unseasonably dry spring and summer of 1910 left the new “National” Forest of Idaho and Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains dry, brittle, and crackling, dying to burn with the first August lightning. Determined to stop it were a few, brave, adventuresome, but raw, newly minted Forest Rangers, spirited on by National Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot’s conviction that man could control forest fire, that nature could be tamed. Timothy Egan tells the story of the biggest forest fire in hundreds of years, one that consumed a forest equal to the size to the state of Connecticut. Along the way, he writes a portrait of the main characters, Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, the Forest Service rangers in the Bitterroots, and the industrialists, lumberman, miners and railroaders whose money and corruption stymied the Service every step of the way until all each cared for burned. It is the story of the beginning of conservation. This is an action paced story of history that educates while it entertains. Anyone who liked American Buffalo or Undaunted Courage or has enjoyed the writings about the National Parks will find this a rewarding read.

I can’t say enough about this first novel by Marisa Pessl. This is the story of Blue’s (yes, that’s her name) senior year in high school, told in the form of a course of study, as she enters her freshman year at Harvard - hence the title. In this year, Blue not only discovers herself, she discovers the secrets of those many years of her childhood and adolescence when year after year she invented a new life in a new town, driven by her college professor father’s annual decision to take a new and temporary teaching position.

It isn’t the story that makes this work special, it is the author’s execution. This novel is deeply funny, elegantly crafted, expertly researched: overall a real tour de force, an unique, one of a kind read. When you finish this book, go back and reread the first chapter. You’ll see what I mean.