Check two off!

Some books are so beautiful in their prose, they require your undivided attention while reading them.  They are the kinds of books one reads straight through or has to put down, if only for a moment, because the language is so precise and lyrical as to be breathtaking, the characters so vivid and life-like you think they could be in the room with you.  Cutting for Stone is one of those books.  As you can see from the sidebar, this book has been removed from the Bedside Table because I finished it.  Yay me!  One book off the Seven list.

I highly recommend Cutting for Stone.  Abraham Verghese's skillful writing transported me to Ethiopia, New York City and back again.  His website describes the story this way:

The story is a riveting saga of twin brothers, Marion and Shiva Stone, born of [well, we are deleting this because I think it is a spoiler of sorts; of course you can always read the blurb at Verghese's website but that would ruin it I think]. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.But it's love, not politics -- their passion for the same woman [I kind of disagree with this because, well, Shiva doesn't strike me as the passionate type] -- that will tear them apart and force Marion to flee his homeland [what a journey that was] and make his way to America, finding refuge in his work at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him, wreaking havoc and destruction, Marion has to entrust his life to the two men he has trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.


When I came to this book, I was tabula rasa.  I hadn't heard about it anywhere, only from Margaret who recommended it to me.  I didn't read the back or look it up online, which helps explain why I think the above is a spoiler.  I am so glad to have approached the book this way.  I tried to guess, engaged in the story, wondering what was going to happen and how.  I have found that some of the best novels seem to ask, "What is the most unexpected thing that could happen in this story right now?"  And then those novels answer with something so unexpected and almost unpredictable, the reader is drawn further and further, mesmerized, into the story and then it's done.


Please be sure to look at the bibliography Verghese provides.  He did an incredible amount of research for this novel, which is always comforting to me as a reader.  It means the author isn't trying to write about something he or she is clueless about.  


And of course, this is another novel in movie production, with a release in 2013.  In order to learn who is in it, one has to be a member of IMBDPro, so we will have to wait until more information is released.  My little neck hairs are standing up.  This movie has the potential to win cinematography awards, IF the producers film in lush and beautiful places closely resembling what the book described, but we all know how big an IF that is, which is really sad because the nature, the brilliance of the flowers, the sound of the rains are exquisite.

Don't waste your time on  The Jane Austen Book Club.  It was so bad you have to google it for yourself.  I didn't get very far into when I stopped - too many sniveling females that Jane Austen would only use as background instead of main characters; too many 21st century American cultural maladies; too much gratuitous sex.  Poor Jane is turning over in her grave to have her name attached to such drivel.  Life is too short to read bad books, so I put this one in the trash.  Really, it was that bad.

Spend your reading time with Cutting for Stone.  You won't regret it!