Commencement - J. Courtney Sullivan

This book opens in 2006 - four years after four best friends graduated from Smith and are reuniting for a wedding. Celia, April, Sally, and Bree all have very distinct personalities and backgrounds, but when they find themselves first year hallmates, they form fast friendships. The chapters switch among the four women, telling stories of their pasts, their lives at Smith, and their lives after Smith. April is a hard-core feminist activist, putting herself in harm's way to make documentaries about human trafficking, female genital mutilation, and all things misogynistic in our society. Sally, who lost her mother just months before beginning at Smith, struggles to find love - falling for a Smith professor, before settling down to get married at 24. Bree, a Southern belle, discovers her love for another woman, becomes a corporate attorney in San Francisco, and finds herself torn between following her heart and gaining the acceptance of her family. Celia is the most lost of all - trying to hold on to her college friendships, unsure of the lessons she was supposed to learn from an all women's school, and learning to be okay with her independence. While a lot happens in the book - and the end is a little unnecessarily dramatic - I mostly just enjoyed learning about the lives of these different women. Even though they came together somewhat out of the convenience of their dorm assignments, the friendships they developed were real. The passage of time brought them all to different places in their lives - they made different choices, but nothing changed their need to be together. This is really a powerful story about the strength of female friendships. The writing reminded me of Prep, and while the subject matter seems of the chick-lit variety (in the pejorative sense), the issues are much more complex and satisfying.

Madness: A Bipolar Life - Marya Hornbacher

At the age of 24, Marya Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I bipolar disorder. This realization of why she thinks and behaves the way she does did not come at the outset of her disease. Rather, it came after years and years of cycling through incessant mania and debilitating depression. Hornbacher recalls moments from her childhood, such as her terrible insomnia and inability to stop jabbering flying from topic to topic with no coherent train of thought. She tried to poke fun at herself as all the other children in her class labeled her crazy, but it was clear that while Hornbacher knew she was different, she could never quite figure out what it was that made her so. Hornbacher also had an interesting home life - with parents who were violently fighting one minute, and lovingly playing Scrabble with her the next. It is unclear from Hornbacher's stories what her parents were able to recognize in their daughter as unusual and what they engdendered as a result of their own erratic behavior. As she grows older, Hornbacher's episodes become more severe. She begins starving herself at a young age and develops anorexia/bulimia (the subject of her memoir, Wasted). To alleviate her internal suffering, Hornbacher turns to cutting - one time getting so out of control that she nearly kills herself and is rushed to the hospital. Once there, the doctors seem intent on labeling her as depressed - a common diagnosis for girls with eating disorders. But, the medications only seem to make Hornbacher more crazy. In response, the doctors increase her levels of medication. Hornbacher turns to her own brand of medicine, and within years she becomes a full-blown alcoholic. Her condition prevents any medication which may have worked, from having any noticeable effect. Finally, Hornbacher receives her proper diagnosis, but it is years before the realization of her illness sets in, and before she curtails her destructive and suicidal behavior. Madness is an interesting memoir. Repeatedly I found myself thinking, "Ugh! This woman is SO ANNOYING! She's self-absorbed and self-destructive. She is ruining the lives of those who are trying to help her and never listens to her doctors (even the ones who are intelligent enough to get the diagnosis and the med levels correct." But, then I had to remind myself that these behaviors are the direct result of her mental illness. In this way, I found Hornbacher's memoir amazingly honest. She did not pepper her stories with much self-reflection, and while frightening, it was refreshing to read this type of book from the perspective of someone who isn't deluded into thinking that she now has all the answers, or that she will lead a stress-free wholly positive life now that she has her diagnosis in hand. The issues raised by this book are numerous, but in particular I found interesting Hornbacher's memories of her childhood. People are quick to belive that children are "resilient," that they don't experience trauma like adults do, that they don't remember or internalize, that they simply can't suffer from depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia. Hornbacher's memories suggest otherwise. They suggest, at the very least, that there are indicators that the disease that may manifest at quite an early age. The question being whether treatment on children is safe or effective, and if anything can be done to prevent the progression of the disesase. Hornbacher's experience also emphasizes the relation between eating disorders, cutting, suicidal ideation, alcoholism, and other destructive behviors and mental illness - they feed on each other in ways that often make it difficult to detemine the origins of a given problem. Madness is written as a memoir - it is Hornbacher's story - it is not a clinical examination of bipolar disorder - and it does not answer many questions that I had about the history of bipolar treatment and the state of bipolar disorder in our country today- in terms of the research that is being done, the medication available to people, and how therapy can be used, if at all, to deal with the symptoms. But, what this book does do is open a window into an often misunderstood disease and ignite a dialogue that will hopefully lead to answers and more efficient diagnoses.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Steig Larsson (Millenium Series #1)

This is another of those books I felt compelled to read because I have been seeing it everywhere - along with its sequel, The Girl who Played with Fire. Larsson, an author from Sweden, died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2004. He left three unpublished manuscripts, meant to be a part of a 10 book series. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first. After the first 5 pages, I was not sure if I was going to be able to get into this one - but I stuck with it so I would have a chance at understanding the popularity. My friend Liz asked me this morning "when does it get good?" having reached page 5 and finding the writing hard to get into. While I was at a loss for words to explain what the book is about, suffice it to say, it gets good fast. The book circles around a number of different stories - Henrik Vanger, an aged wealthy investor lost his niece over 40 years ago. He is haunted by her disappearance and obsessed with discovering her murderer before he himself expires. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist, fresh off a conviction for libel against a wealthy and powerful businessman, is eager to disappear from society himself, and is hired by the eccentric Vanger to investigate the mystery. And finally Lisbeth Salanger, a ward of the court and a world-class hacker with a gothic exterior and the ability to find out the most personal information about the most private people, is hired to do her own investigation of Blomkvist. Set in Sweden, against the backdrop of a darkly misogynistic landscape, Larsson highlights the violence in society against women, sometimes in stark and gratuitous ways. The numerous characters in the novel were often difficult to keep track of - not just for the reader - but for Blomkvist in his investigation as well. But, there is love and intrigue, and a mystery filled with twists and turns. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo held my attention to say the least. My only disappointment is that Larsson did not live long enough to enjoy the success, or to write the remaining 7 installments.

Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide - Kay Redfield Jamison

After several teen suicides and attempted suicides in my hometown this past year, I started to feel incredibly helpless. Despite the obvious sadness of young lives lost, I felt overwhelming frustration. It is often easy for people to dismiss teen suicide as the result of immaturity or a lack of perspective - heartbreak over unrequited love or a rejection letter from Harvard. What people ignore is the reality - that the majority of suicides, those of teenagers and adults - are the result of chonic and untreated mental illness. Jamison's thorough and exhausting book attempts to get to the bottom of the frightening epidemic around the world - of men and women, from all walks of life. Jamison explores all aspects of suicide - from analyzing the data to detemine which age groups are killing themselves, to their purported reasons for doing so. She looks at the methods that people use and the notes they leave behind. She includes stories of famous people in history, as well as tragic examples from today. Jamison's book is haunting, but I think so important. It is with all this back story that Jamison then turns to the most important question: how do we prevent suicide? While there are obviously no easy answers, Jamison explores suggestions for how to talk about mental illness as a predictor for suicide, how to recognize and assess the warning signs, and how to cope after a devastating loss. This book was a very difficult read for me. I would read a chapter here and there and then put it aside because I simply found it too sad. But, I am glad I read it. I hope that more people will - I hope it will help us to better understand suicide, to dispel the shame our society attaches to it, to encourage people to ask for help when they feel alone, and to help all of us to be better equipped to give the assistance so many people desperately need.

The Last Assassin - Barry Eisler (John Rain Series #5)

At the end of the last John Rain book, Killing Rain, our half-Japanese hero discovered that an affair with the daughter of one of his victims resulted in a baby boy. At the beginning of installment #5, Rain learns that his son is living with his mother Midori in New York City, oblivious to the fact that Rain's yakuza enemies from Japan have her under constant surveillance. Rain, himself, has fallen in love (or as close to love as an emotionally detached trained killer can be) with a fellow assassin, the beautiful Israeli, Delilah. Torn between escaping his life of murder, and establishing a relationship with his son, Rain sets out to destroy the yakuza boss and regain his freedom. To do so, Rain must return to Japan to his dying mentor, and solicit the help of the irreverant and sometims obnoxious, but always loyal sniper, Dox. As with all the books in the Rain series, this one is filled with fight scenes, brutal murders, and tricky surveillance gadgets. But more so than the others, Rain really develops in this one as a human being - determined to remain dispassionate, but tormented by his conscience. The quote on the back of this one got it right - it truly is "the best one yet!"

Waiting for Daisy - Peggy Orenstein

Roughly 10 years ago, at the end of law school, my friend Emily gave me Peggy Orenstein's book Flux. Flux is about the difficulties of being a profesisonal women in today's society - with all the expectations of success in the public realm equal to those of men, but still the expectations of success in the private realm, without the corresponding shift in the expectations of our male counterparts. I found the book both inspirational in all that women nowadays are able to accomplish, but also daunting in the effort it would take to accomplish it all. Years later, approaching 40, Orenstein is married and suddenly decides that she wants to have a child. Overwhelmingly successful in everything else she has set her mind to, she has no doubt in her mind that she will achieve motherhood and obtain all that entails. Instead, Orenstein runs smack up against infertility. She suffers through miscarriages and assisted reproductive technologies. She considers adoption and surrogacy, and questions her own decision to wait so long to try and have a family. She experiences wide-ranging emotions from sadness to guilt to frustration to anger. As her desire for a child becomes an all consuming obsession, she finds that it has distanced herself from her partner. Repeatedly Orenstein questions the assumptions she made in her earlier works - that women can, and should, have it all. I found it frustrating myself to read her questioning her decision to wait - to assume that she is somehow to blame for her inability to have a child, or that she would give up all the work she had done in the world and the good her books have brought thousands of people, to go back and have a child instead. Within this book about Orenstein's journey to parenthood, she goes to Japan to write a story about survivors of the Hiroshima bombings during WWII. While there is a parenting connection to her story - many women were disfigured as a result of the bombings and rendered infertile or because of their appearances unable to find partners. There were also many people left without parents and families, and their treatment was often inhumane and incomprehensible. Orenstein's reporting on this underground population in Japan was quite interesting, separate and apart from the personal issues Orenstein was dealing with while conducting her investigation. Given the title of the book, I assumed Orenstein ended up with her daughter, Daisy, in the end. But, I had no idea how she would get there - and after heartbreak after heartbreak, and what seemed to be a lack of support and understanding by her husband, I am amazed that Orenstein found the strength to keep trying. While her success is inspiring on one level, it also saddens me that a person of such intelligence and accomplishments would feel that her life were unfulfilled or lacking meaning simply because of her inability to carry a biological child to term. I question what this understandable reaction says about our society, but appreciate the struggle Orenstein endured and her willingness to share her story.

Ex Libris - Anne Fadiman

I sometimes fear that my obsession with books is abnormal. Obviously, I love to read. But, sometimes, it's not actually the reading - or the thought that I will never read everything on my to-read list - that causes me anxiety. It is the knowledge that I will never even know what all the books are that are even out there (in the categories of books that I even read, which are of course, just a small percentage of the actual books in this universe). Despite the fact that I have over 120 unread books on my shelves at home, I borrow books from the library by the dozen, and I allow myself the occassional trip to a bookstore to actually purchase books, as well as hiding my compulsive Amazon and Powells.com purchases from my husband. I troll magazines and websites for new books, and I hate nothing more than when someone mentions a book to me that I have not read - or even worse, one that I have not even heard of (at the same time I also love when this happens because it means there is even more out there for me to discover - so please keep the recommendations coming!). I have found that one way to ease my obsessive anxiety about books is to read books about books - these are books by other compusive readers. Sometimes they contain lists of recommended books. Other times, like with this book by Anne Fadiman (author of the amazing book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down), they are people writing about why they love books so darn much. Ex Libris is a collection of Fadiman's essays - all related somehow to her love of words and reading. In the opening essay, Fadiman discusses the merging of her library with that of her author husband's. While he stacks his books haphazardly this way and that, Fadmian prefers to alphabetize hers or arrange them chronologically, depending on the genre. I particularly enjoyed one essay about different types of readers. There are those who devour their books - scribbling notes in the margins, ripping out pages, writing irrelevant grocery lists on the blank fly pages- because, after all, it is the words that matter, not the book itself. Then there are those who treat their books with prisine care, always using a bookmark (never dog-earring pages). This description reminded me of my brother who used to barely open the pages of his really thick Stephen King novels for fear of cracking the spine. I think I fall somewhere in between. I hate when my books get wet or dirty, and while I love to highlight and keep track of important things, this was a taboo I had to work hard to overcome in college. I love booksmarks of all kinds, but there have been times when I'm at a loss and leave the book splayed open on my nightstand. Fadiman has essays about her outrageously large vocabulary and her love for words. Despite my life-long love of reading, I admit that I have a very small vocabulary. I always tell myself that I'm going to write down the words I come across that I don't know and look them up, but I never do - Fadiman's essays would have given me a very long list to start with! A couple of the essays were a bit too literary or esoteric for my tastes, but the majority were ones in which I recognized myself (though perhaps I am not quite as refined). Fadiman's essays were a reminder that my literary compulsions are not completely abnormal, and that more importantly, they make me happy and I look forward to many more years of reading, new discoveries, and of course, books about books.