Hello St Marks

Amazon is a wonderful thing; as usual, I'm 4 years behind the zeitgeist. Reading Joan Didion's 'A Year of Magical Thinking' last month, I bookmarked a book she mentioned and ordered it on Amazon. Joan used 'Intensive Care, A Doctor's Journal' as her guidebook to navigating intensive care wards during her daughter's illnesses. Oddly, I assumed it must be interesting. John F Murray gives us his notes and reflections on every patient in his care for a month in San Francisco General Hospital's medical ICU. 60 patients, 15 died. We get their names, the barest bones of their story and the narrative of their passage out of the ICU. Ten or so patients into the book and the names and medical procedures are a blur. The medical detail is extraordinary, but because you never meet the patients (they're mute from intubation or medication, almost without exception), it's a very detached kind of voyeurism. Murray is measured, concerned and concise. If you...

I'm tidying up my reading pile. There are 15 or so books in a stack by the bed and they're mostly either books I think I should read or books I started reading and can't bring myself to finish. 'Final Impact World War 2.3' by John Birmingham is neither type; more a book I've been too embarassed to pick up. Yes, I have read 'Weapons of Choice World War 2.1' and 'Designated Targets World War 2.2', and aren't they titles to add texture to a reading blog? I read somewhere that John wrote the first of these alternate history megabooks to make a pot of money and prove he could, and so he did. I'd say this type of thing is not my bag, but as I've now completed all three of them (about 12cm worth) perhaps it is. It's 2021 and a top secret navy science experiment goes wrong and a cluster of high-tech naval vessels and a few thousand crewmembers are transported back to early WW2. The sudden delivery of nuclear warheads and super weapons te...

'Best book of the year' is a poor claim in January, so I'll declare Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking' one of the best books I've ever read. This is a slim book about grief, which is a poor advertisement for this moving, intelligent, emotional and pragmatic memoir. Joan's husband dies suddenly while her adult daughter lies near-death in hospital. The minutes and months following John's death are described in a loose narrative but it was the brilliant clarity of her self-awareness, reflecting on her experience of grieving and loss and self-delusion that was so devestating and such a privilege to read. Joan being Joan Didion, she researches and investigates the science of grief, the psychology and literature of death, and reflects and disects with the grace and skill of a brilliant and well-trained mind. She goes mad when John dies, so she says. She writes, much later: "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.... ...