still alice - lisa genova (2007)

fresh from the other book i imagine another lisa genova cannot be wrong so i launch into this one. and wow.

she's a bit too high functioning for me i guess. all that working into the night and lecturing and traveling and researching and supervising and stuff make the fulness of her family life a bit difficult to believe. also the family relationships are all too potentially messy to fall so neatly pat as the book progresses. her children are too conveniently angst-free even though i know we are looking at them through Alice's cognitively distorted lens. i think her husband's actions have the truest ring about them - reflecting as they do fear and resentment and shattered hopes and self-preservation and love.

HOWEVER. this book is a engrossing account of how bits of memory go, and confidence, and then agency, and finally self-awareness. and yet delicate exquisite bits of humanity remain, as i have seen it remain in real patients with Alzheimer's.

i love best that Alice is a linguist. Alzheimer's strikes at her explicit memory, that language-based scaffold by which she chronicles her life. it is cruel to her where she is strongest, and her perspective is compelling as she becomes horribly aware of this and as she reaches past denial to resourceful but ultimately futile compensation.

left neglected - lisa genova (2011)

this is a glorious book that opens my eyes to a patient's tortuous  tortured path through rehab following traumatic brain injury.

she writes like she knows. 

i also like her way of quietly sneaking asides into the descriptions. because of this i am going to look for her other book.

the tattoo murder case - akimitsu takagi (1948), translated 1998

rip-roaringly satisfying whodunit with devious turns and a most salaciously evil twist at the end. dem good story, is all i can say. and when Kamizu explains all over a meal of sushi i feel like eating too. 

the fact that it comes from 1948 also means there is hardly any irritating officialese that peppers so many modern stories. here, the hoi polloi collaborates quite refreshingly with the police.

also, because i read this in e-book form, it doesn't feel like a 1948 or 1998 book. which goes to show that so much of our impressions are contextual.