The Emperor

I am a bookstore's worst nightmare. I love to browse, can spend hours in a bookstore, but rarely buy a book. Instead I write down the title of any book that appeals to me and then look for it in the library. With the ease of ordering books through inter-library loan online, I know I can always get the book eventually. It just goes against my grain to buy something that I can borrow for free. Too many  years of living on a teacher's salary, I guess. Gift certificates to bookstores are almost impossible for me to spend. I agonize over every potential purchase, picture myself checking the book out at the library, and ultimately am unable to make the purchase. So I usually end up buying something like a calendar or a reference book, like the Dummies guide to my new camera (appropriately named in my case).  This winter I've had even more browsing time. With the very cold weather Nancy and I were taking our morning walks at the mall nearby. She walks about twice as far as I do now, so we would walk a couple of miles together and then I would go to Barnes and Noble while she finished her walk. It was on one of those mornings that I picked up The Emperor of All Maladies to browse. It's a book about cancer, what the author calls a biography of cancer. And what a book! The author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a young cancer physician and researcher at Columbia University. He is also an amazing writer. I found the book in our library and have been reading it for a couple of weeks. It is literature that reads like the best of thrillers. The author traces cancer from it's first recorded mention in ancient Egypt through ancient Greece and Rome and the often terrible treatments in the centuries leading up to the modern era. He describes the development of radiation and chemotherapy treatments in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the attendant suffering of patients and political and professional battles. If you're wondering who Farber, as in Dana-Farber Institute, is or how the Jimmy Fund came about and who Jimmy is, it's all in the book. It's a big book, almost 500 pages, but I'm more than halfway through it. It's very hard to put down.

The King's Speech was every bit as good as everyone said. I highly recommend it. I'm still feeling good and still can't stop eating, have even put on a pound.