Cutting for Stone

So I guess this isn't really a good book blog if I don't say something useful about the books I read, so here is my review of Cutting for Stone. I don't think I included any spoilers you wouldn't find on the book jacket.

I loved this book. A lot. I have now recommended it to all my friends and they are a little tired of hearing about it, I think. The book spans the first 50 or so years of the life of Marion Stone, one of two identical twin boys born to an Indian nun and, presumably, the British surgeon with whom she worked. The paternity thing is not entirely clear. The boys are born at a hospital in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, where there parents work. Their mother dies during the birth, and the presumed father flees Ethiopia immediately afterward. The boys end up being raised by two other doctors on the staff, Hema the OB/Gyn and Ghosh, the internist. The love story of these two adults was sweet and completely fleshed-out, even though they were secondary characters. I think that was what I appreciated most about this book - the fact that even the secondary characters felt like complete people. This meant that there were lots of small story lines going at once, but they all knit together pretty well. It also meant that my happy ending loving heart was satisfied when at least a few of the characters ended up well settled and satisfied, even if other characters had a harder go of it.

Marion and his twin brother Shiva grow up around the hospital and both ultimately become doctors (no wonder I love this book, right?). In the course of their lives, they also experience all the upheaval of the coups and dictatorships that dominated Ethiopian politics up until the 1990s. I learned a lot about African history in general, and Ethiopian history in particular, through this novel, without ever feeling like I was being lectured (again, no wonder I love it).

Marion also ends up working at a poorly funded inner city hospital in New York, and there's a lot of interesting discussion of the American residency system and how international doctors are often used to plug holes in our safety net. Studying at a very wealthy, very prestigious medical school, I had never really heard or thought about this. Here, we are expected to intern at a select set of very good hospitals, and the thought that residency might mean something completely different for international medical students never really occurred to me.

There were a few points in the book where I felt the coincidences or plot devices seemed a little far fetched, but in the midst of the engrossing story, I couldn't really argue with the plotting. The character of Genet made me want to scream, and Marion's continued devotion to her was frustrating, but perhaps that was a real and fair portrayal of how some people deal with love and loss. Not everyone marries the guy they fell in love with at 18 and has a nice comfy life like mine. I might be just a bit spoiled.

Overall, I would give this book a 10 out of 10. It is definitely on my short list of favorite books and I would recommend it for anyone interested in medicine, intricate generational sagas, political history, or just generally awesome fiction.

The switch to Wives and Daughters has been a little tough. It's just a very different sort of book. I am enjoying it though. Elizabeth Gaskell has a beautiful writing voice, although I do sometimes have to skip passages where Hyacinth Clare Kirkpatrick Gibson starts droning on about herself. She's very much like Mrs. Bennet, only not even amusing. Just annoying. Maybe more like Mr. Collins. Yes, I do believe most characters can be compared quite appropriately to someone in a Jane Austen novel.

I am cheating just a little with Wives and Daughters - I am listening to the audiobook at work and then reading my paperback at home. It is just so long and dense, and I have a lot of books to get through. I found the audio recording via librivox.org. So here is my shameless plug for an organization with which I am in now way affiliated:
Librivox is a great organization that posts audiobooks of literature in the public domain (anything published before 1923). All the recordings are made by volunteers, so they are not of the quality you will find on Audible. However, they are free! And, thus far, the recordings I have listened to have been quite good. Multiple volunteers will read a given book. In the five chapters I have listened to from Wives and Daughters, only two have had the same reader. Of course, there was one narrator who sounded like an 85 year old Australian with a serious smoking history, so I had to just read that chapter in the book itself. But, overall, a pretty good deal. So, if you like classic literature and want an audiobook, I would recommend trying librivox before you run off to buy it on Audible.

My lovely husband is out of town for the week and my thesis update is all done, so hopefully this coming week will be very productive in the reading department, if only for lack of anything else to do. I'm hoping to finish Wives and Daughters by Friday, but we shall see. That Hyacinth character might just be the death of me.