Stats:

Books read: 14 (9 Fiction, 5 Non-Fiction)

Unique Authors: 13 (11 Men, 2 Women)

Most Read Authors: Nathan Hill (2)

Average Rating: 4 (3.94 Fiction, 4.1 Non-Fiction)

warning: some spoilers may be contained in the following reviews

The Tennis Partner - Abraham Verghese

I’m obsessed with reading about tennis, so when I discovered that Verghese had written an autobiographical memoir about it, I knew I had to read it. Verghese recounts his time living in El Paso, practicing medicine at a local hospital, as his marriage unravels. He finds solace in this new town in David, a medical student and former tennis professional, and the two men begin to hit together, beginning a beautiful ritual - until David falls back into drug addiction. The novel is a beautiful homage to the game of tennis, a powerful friendship, the majestic landscapes of West Texas, and a gritty view into the disease of addiction. I did get a bit tired with the level of detail he got into with regards to technical details of medicine (although I enjoyed the patient care aspect), and I imagine other people like me without a medical background might find those parts tedious. 4/5

All-Night Pharmacy - Ruth Madievsk

This is my friend’s friend’s sister’s debut novel. The first half was captivating - the unnamed narrator and her sister went on these drug-induced, self-destructive benders all over Los Angeles and the prose drew me deeper and deeper to the point where I started fantasizing about going off the deep end myself. The second half was meh though, the frenetic pace at which I read the first half slowed down as the narrator got clean, had a sexual awakening, and dealt with her intergenerational trauma. 3.5/5

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig

The goal of this book is wonderful. We experience so many different emotions, yet the vocabulary available to us in English to talk about them is so constrained. So Koenig decides to coin new words himself, to create a richer tapestry of ways to describe the human experience. Some of them, like sonder, have already entered the broader vernacular. I named my blog, moledro, after one of these words.

I discovered his website many years ago, and finally picked up the book that details 288 different words. Here are a couple ones I liked:

aftersome

adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

midding

v. intr. feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to your friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be. 4/5

The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri