When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi, 2016)

Book club selection (via PJ; session held (via Zoom) November 21, 2021).

A doctor who wishes to also be an author gets cancer, and writes about it.

Preface is written by a friend - talks a lot about Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici".  This struck me because a quote from the book is on frontispiece of my copy of Bach's Goldberg Variations.  Beautiful description of music (written well before Bach but still).  (Not yet inspired to read Browne's book, however.)

Useful recounting of things we've heard before - doctor as listener, guide.  The awfulness of cancer treatments.  What it felt like with the clock ticking, loudly.

Author in the early going was trying to figure out "the relationship between meaning, life, and death" - lots of discussion about this.  Thinking perhaps he would be the one to figure out the un-figure-out-able.

Husband-wife relationship - a little hard to read - husband never really gave up prioritizing career.  Then the illness intervened.

Dropping author names, similar to Amor Towles.  Ivan Ilych (Tolstoy) as a deep discussion of dying.

Some discussion of religion - the idea of original sin - which I think he described well - forget the theological strangeness, it speaks to something observed in human nature from the beginning.

Having a child in this kind of situation.

You can't read this without the main message being - don't screw up the days you have on trivia.  Not a new idea, but this is a good vessel to express it.

The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens, 1841)

(555 pages)

I was much interested in this particular Dickens work - partly because of the descriptions in his biography of readers in America - as installations of the serialized book reached American shores, supposedly crowds on the waterfront were shouting "What happened to Little Nell?"

But in the story arc, I found Little Nell a bit flat.  And her grandfather a bit annoying.

Swiveller - an unexpected role!  The schoolmaster plays a key role.  The "small servant" at the law firm, also.  Kit (and his mother), Barbara (and her mother).

The dwarf (Quilp) - drove a lot of action; mostly comic character.  Nell's unkind brother.  The two lawyers aren't very nice.

I read this immediately after the Joseph Conrad novel described below.  OK the two authors are going for different things.  But the difference in character-drawing is so striking.  Dickens characters often one-dimensional, but he's effective at driving a plot using this.  Conrad characters so much more balanced, complicated.  

These are just enjoyable reads.