Like most people, I find pretty much everything about cancer terrifying. It doesn’t help that I’ve chosen a profession [Firefighter] that has all kinds of increased rates of cancer. Most of us at work don’t even like to talk about it because it reminds us that the unknown and uncontrollable might hit us at anytime. So you might wonder why I chose to read The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010) by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Every once in a while I like to delve […]
Do not try to sing the title to the tune of “The Circle of Life”
It’s weird, sometimes, how much other people’s stories can mean to you. It’s part of the reason I love reading (good) memoirs – coming across that one story, that one line in their tale, that hits you right in the heart, or the head, or rings some distant memory bell of your own. The thing that makes you see that people – with all their infinite indiviualities – still have so many little points of connection. And that’s how I felt reading The Story of […]
Me and Earl Turned Me Into the Crying Girl
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a fantastic book. It’s a book about friendship, navigating the world of high school and yeah, it’s about cancer and loss. Now I just said that it was a fantastic book, I think for the first time in my adult life I’m going to utter the phrase, “I think that the movie may be better”. Greg has some interesting ideas on how to get through high school. It mostly includes talking to everyone but not becoming […]
This Star Won’t Go Out
It’s difficult to think critically about a book like This Star Won’t Go Out, because it was clearly put together with lots of love by the grieving friends and family of a charming, precocious, and kind sixteen-year-old girl who died from complications with thyroid cancer. So instead I’ll try to give you an idea what it’s like. The book revolves around Ester Earl, who was about as lovely as any fictional book heroine you could imagine. She was funny, thoughtful, self-depricating, creative, kind, friendly, uncomplaining, […]
Faultless
It is not often that you find a perfect book. I didn’t find this one, I was told to read it by a dear friend (popcultureboy) and am very glad I did. My Sister-in-Law died young and brutally fast from a brain tumour in February 2013 and after that I was directed by well meaning souls to all sorts of ‘cancer’ books. So at first I was a bit wary because in this book “despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few […]
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