Happy Endings and Atul Gawande

At the moment I'm between writing projects--or rather I'm trying to decide which direction to go in.  One possibility is a longish short story to be called "Happy Endings:" I don't know anything more about than the title, but I like it a lot.

At the same time, a book group I belong to has just read Atul Gawande's latest, Being Mortal.   It's an essay about how we deal with the end of life now.  A surgeon, writer, and public health researcher, Gawande is thought-provoking and extremely readable.

This last quality comes in part because he's thought a lot about the story that each of writes in our own lives.  He writes:

"For human beings, life is meaningful becaue it is  story.  a story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens...

"A semingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted ot a great cause. ...Unlike your experiencing self--which is absorbed in the moment--you remembering self is attempting recognize not only the peaks of joy an the valley sof misery but also how the story works out as a whole.  That is profoundly affectedby how things ultimately turn out.  Why would a fooball fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. 

" And in stories, endings matter."

Worth thinking about, whether you're contemplating your life or those of others.

What I Read...

I'll go into more detail later, but here are a couple of interesting (and extremely different) books I read over the last few months:

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
From the Library Journal: "Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa...has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine... [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history... should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.”

Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa...has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine... [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history... should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.”  - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mornings-in-jenin-9781608190461/#sthash.6cgzRfTl.dpuf

“Every now and again a literary work changes the way people think. Abulhawa...has crafted a brilliant first novel about Palestine... [This] intensely beautiful fictionalized history... should be read by both politicians and those interested in contemporary politics.” –  Library Journal - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mornings-in-jenin-9781608190461/#sthash.6cgzRfTl.dpuf

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron
A novel about Rwanda which won the Bellwether Prize, awarded biennially by Barbara Kingsolver for an unpublished novel that addresses issues of social justice.

And for something completely different

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
A romantic comedy featuring an oddly charming, socially challenged genetics professor,   as he seeks true love.

More Book Talk Coming up, Now That I've Got a Lot of Book Work Done

This morning I sent off a draft of my new non-fiction book Road through Time to a publisher who seems interested in it.  What a great feeling!

Reading it over for one last time before I let it go, I was rather pleased with what I've done.  Will be interesting to see what the publishing guys say.

This last couple of weeks I've also beeing working revisions and copyreading proofs of my novel River Music, which should be available in mid-May.  That, too, was a very interesting experience, as it had been more than a year since I'd read it.  Marc Côté at Cormorant Books had done an excellent job in editing it, and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the book was--like reading somebody else's work!

So now that things are more or less back to normal, I'll be posting more often.  My work schedule hasn't kept me from reading other things, so I've a great backlog of comments on books to share.

The photo, by the way, is of the Andes, taken on my research trip to South America a year and a half ago.