What's on my reading table

A few weeks ago, a friend ran up to me in the grocery store parking lot. She said she'd thought of me often as she read The Memory Keeper's Daughter. "Had I read it?" she wanted to know. I said that I hadn't it. She said she really wanted to know what I thought of the book and wanted to discuss it with me at some point.

With that lead in, I picked it up and read it. From an analytic point of view, it made no sense. The doctor husband never would have picked orthopaedics as his specialty. He would have been a cardiothoracic surgeon. That said, I really had to wonder about my friend. She seriously thought this book was an accurate depiction of the life of a doctor's wife. The wife in this novel became a drunk and had several extramarital affairs. Gee, somehow I'm not too flattered that my friend thought of me.

The book is a soap opera of implausible plot developments and a disappointment. I really wonder why it is a best seller. But I wonder why a lot of books become best sellers.

Another odd book, What Therapists Don't Talk About and Why was bought based on the glowing review in a professional journal. Reading about the myriad of possible professional quagmires, a strong case is made for therapists to undergo their own analysis. Psychoanalysis directly deals with the emotions that surface when treating other human beings. Have I found such a recommendation? Why no. Not so far.

The third book Cat's Cradle is a gem. Kurt Vonnegut has been compared to Mark Twain. I like to think of him as America's Voltaire. To the end of his life he was perennially the little kid shouting out that the emperor wore no clothes. Vonnegut was a German prisoner of war during World War II . This book was written during the height of the cold war when the US and Russia were busily building bigger and badder bombs by which they could annihilate each other. Forty years later things haven't changed a lot. It's just a different cast of characters. While he pokes fun at political inanities and scientific irresponsibility, he illuminates his readers with incomparable wit laced with dark realism. The plot centers around the fictional inventor of the atomic bomb and his children who inherit the means to end the world. He throws in a cardboard banana republic, a xylophone virtuoso, a Russian dancing dwarf and a calypso religion. What can one expect? It's Vonnegut, not Tom Clancy.