Might reflect on a year of reading

Might try to de-stress

This week my colleague Dr. Trisha Parekh (a pulmonologist and ICU doc) presented at Grand Rounds on her research on stress and disease sequelae. When we schedule Grand Rounds we have the speakers pick dates which work for them, so, in other words, this talk wasn’t intentionally timed for the festive season. And yet, her talk was unexpectedly poignant. She walked us through the literature on stress and heart disease, asthma, and diabetes, and showed tables where one of the main stressors reported was… the holidays. In the spirit of holiday stress, and looking for escape hatches, let’s talk books. I love, love, love seeing year-in-review reading lists by anybody and everybody (SJP’s popped up in my Instagram yesterday), and sometimes I find these lists surprisingly intimate. My full list is at the end of this post, but first:

Welcome to my book club! I’ll start with the graphics novels and memoirs I read in 2023. I’m currently working on a graphic memoir about medical school and residency, so I was very interested in examining how these different authors and artists approached storytelling, color, and juxtaposing text with images. They all delivered! Alison and Boys Weekend are both graphic novels, while the others are memoirs. Ducks, Impossible People, and Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars are memoirs that deal with really distressing topics, and are simultaneously heartbreaking and life-affirming. Alison, Ducks, Maybe an Artist, and Impossible People all explore what it is to be an artist in the world, which is a theme I always find engrossing. Did you read any of these? Any graphic novels/memoirs that I should have read this year?

Now on to the new-to-me romance novelists I discovered this year. One of the great joys of my reading life is binge-reading a romance author’s full collection. I never expected to have the exquisite experience of reading twenty Baby-Sitter’s Club books in a row, or serial Anastasia books, in my adult life, but inhaling Kate Bateman’s Napoleonic era box sets, or Elisa Sussman’s contemporary celebrity trope romance novels is a close approximation. The thrill of staying in their book worlds! Nothing compares. I just started Nadine Gonzalez’s books this month on the flight home from Miami, and I’m so glad she has more books I can escape to during the holiday season!

This summer I noticed a theme emerging in the romance novels I’d read: unhappy doctors! In fact, in Same Time Next Summer and Exes & O’s (which are both excellent!) the unhappy doctor is the bad ex. In Happy Place, the protagonist is not loving her neurosurgery residency. As of this writing, Happy Place has over 500,000 ratings on Goodreads, so you would think almost everyone who intends to read it has, but I still don’t want to provide any spoilers. However, I will say that most of the doctors I know who read Happy Place had issues with the ending! Proceed with caution, if you plan to read it (it is otherwise wonderful!). The one doctor character I came across in my romance reading who was fulfilled and enjoying his job was Dr. Dil in Dating Dr. Dil, but he had struggled earlier on with burnout in a private practice gig, and found meaning providing cardiology care in an immigrant population in Jersey City. When I think of all four of these books, I think Exes & O’s was the most authentic depiction of the healthcare worker experience, unfortunately. Should I say more about that or just leave it there?

Finally here is the list. And a confession: almost all of these (with the exception of some of the graphic novels) I read on my phone. I have gotten so used to reading books on my phone that now I have a stack of physical books that I haven’t gotten around to! Maybe that should be one of my New Years resolutions? Read more physical books? Yikes, I can’t believe I brought up New Years when the entire point of this missive was to de-stress, escape and luxuriate in the written word, immaculate world-building and steamy love scenes. Hope it provides that magical trap door, if you need it. Now, quick question: did you finish The Bee Sting and what did you think?

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If you have made it this far, thank you and here is a link to my 2024 calendar. And of course, here is the link to my book! It’s really a dream scenario to make these things, and I appreciate your support of these projects! Sending happy holiday vibes!💙