A nonfiction book

Title: Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness
Author: Susannah Cahalan
Publication date: 2012

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.                -- William F. Allman

Susannah Cahalan is a young reporter at the New York Post when she begins to have episodes of paranoia followed by seizures. The author attacks the telling of her story the way an investigative reporter would do so: reading her medical history, watching hospital footage, interviewing those around her including her medical team. These are things she must do if she is to piece together the weeks of her illness as she has little memory of her own to fall back on.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness recounts Cahalan's descent into madness moving from an independent functioning professional to a woman who can't be left alone to retrieve a cup of coffee. During her illness, she is surrounded by her divorced parents, their respective spouses, her own boyfriend and a host of friends.

Having no prior history of mental health problems nor a history of seizures, Cahalan's medical team grows and grows as her parents struggle to find answers unwilling to accept the first diagnosis: that their daughter is a fall-down drunk (which she isn't). The fact that her mother and stepfather are big fans of the show House, M.D. is not lost on Susannah in the telling of her story. Those familiar with the show will see similarities. When the doctor begins to explore autoimmune diseases as a cause, I found myself thinking "it's not lupus!" just as Hugh Laurie always did on House. (It's not, by the way.)

Despite the medical jargon, the author tells her story in a manner that is easy to follow. I read the book in two days and found it very compelling.

When neurons begin to play nonstop, out of tune, and all at once because of disease, trauma, tumor, lack of sleep, or even alcohol withdrawal, the cacophonous result can be a seizure.

The message within the telling of the story is the importance of the caregivers and the support team. To her credit, Cahalan delves into this component of her story wondering how many patients are misdiagnosed and institutionalized every year. She recognizes her parents' influence on her care and even touches on the total cost of her care.

Three stars

A book at the bottom of your to-read list

Title: Wonder
Author: R.J. Palacio
Publication date: 2012

I've been curious about Wonder for about as long as I've been aware of it. The cover art is simplistic and intriguing (too bad I'd already use "book based entirely on its cover!)

My name is August, by the way. I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.

At age 10, August enters school for the first time. He's been home schooled for his entire life due to surgical schedules and recoveries that made keeping up with a regular school year an unnecessary challenge. August is not a special needs student. A fact I really appreciated about this book. Genetics played havoc on him and resulted in craniofacial abnormalities that render most he encounters speechless. For this reason, the prospect of going to school has not been appealing.

This novel alternates sections/chapters in the voices of different characters. I found the chapters from August's sister Via's point of view to be among the best. The book also explores the thoughts of tertiary characters like Via's boyfriend:

olivia reminds me of a bird sometimes, how her feathers get all ruffled when she's mad. and when she's fragile like this, she's a little lost bird looking for its nest.
so i give her my wing to hide under.

Wonder is the first children's book I've read this year. I loved its honesty and its ability to explore the inner workings of tween minds not to mention giving us a pretty realistic glance at fifth grade.

Four stars

Next challenge: A nonfiction book

A banned book

Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publication date: 1953

I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them.

The idea that Fahrenheit 451, a book about a time when all books are banned, would be banned is the very definition of ironic. Having read it, I'm not sure what was found objectionable about it though I have read stories that it was censored for language (use of the words "hell" and "damn" - gasp!).

Guy Montag is a fireman. At a time when homes have been fireproofed, Montag is sent out to burn books, which are banned and viewed as dangerous. Entertainment comes instead from television screens the size of a wall with the best experience affordable to those who have a wall-size screen on multiple walls in a room, a surround screen effect.

I found this novel hard to follow. It's a relatively short story (under 200 pages) but I found myself re-reading passages and, on more than one occasion, falling asleep while attempting to read. There were specific plot lines that confused me, "No wait, what just happened?" I joked with a friend that perhaps I simply cannot fathom a world without books and therefore was resistant to the story.

I love that the challenge has a banned book as a requirement. Banning books is so silly in this day and age. Why do people even bother? Read banned books. To learn more, go to ala.org.

P.S. Sorry for the clunky review.

Two stars

Next challenge: A book at the bottom of your to-read list

A book with a love triangle

Title: Loving Frank
Author: Nancy Horan
Publication date: 2007

I wasn't eager to complete this challenge. Particularly when my hope to use "The Princess Bride" was thwarted by my friends who insisted Humperdink didn't love anyone. I settled on Loving Frank because I'd purchased it a few years back as, you guessed it, a Kindle Daily Deal.

Loving Frank is the fictionalized story of the real love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and his one-time client Mrs. Edwin Cheney, also known as Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Both abandoned their families (spouses and young children) to carry on a love affair across three continents.

Author Nancy Horan does an admirable job of getting into the psyche of Borthwick. Her telling of the story does bring to life the issues of the day. While I'd known Wright had carried on a years-long affair, I really knew very little of his life. Much to my surprise, the Chicago newspapers covered the scandal of the affair in depth so Horan had newspaper accounts from which to draw her story.

Two years in a child's life is the distance between stars, she thought.

Cheney did abandon her children for two years. Not just leave the household but the continent moving to Europe with Wright and later on her own to pursue a career as a translator for Ellen Key, a well-known European feminist whom she had befriended.

It is likely that I would never have loved this book. I admire the author's telling of the story. In fact, I think she did a phenomenal job. But I just can't feel sympathetic for characters like Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed his own genius and happiness were more important than all else -- including his own children.

My reading of this book should be captioned "bad things happen to readers who Google." My unquenchable desire to know all things drove me to read up on Frank Lloyd Wright's life on the internet. As I said, bad things happened ... If you are inclined to read Loving Frank, don't go Googling on your own. Being spoiled on the outcome of this affair truly made it difficult to get through the story.

Next challenge: A banned book

A book that takes place in your hometown

Title: Detroit: An American Autopsy
Author: Charlie LeDuff
Publication date: 2013

Detroit reached a peak population of nearly 1.9 million people in the 1950s and was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 700,000 people, is 83 percent black and is the only American city that has surpassed a million people only to contract below that threshold. 

The prospect of reading a book that takes place in my hometown was one I was excited about. As a native Detroiter, there are many stories fictional and nonfictional to consider. And yet I still ended up reading Charlie LeDuff's book.

LeDuff is also a native Detroiter. He returned to Motown after a Pulitzer-prize winning stint at The New York Times to work at The Detroit News around the same time I left home for the first time and headed to West Michigan. I was intrigued to read a local's take on the plight of my city.

At the end of the day, the Detroiter may be the most important American there is because no one knows better than he that we're all standing at the edge of the shaft.

I wasn't living in Detroit when LeDuff moved from newspapers to television coverage so I haven't been subject to his personality or celebrity before reading his book. Sure, I've read his work in the News maybe even in the Times but this book is part memoir part reporter's notebook. And while I often enjoyed his observations and some of his storytelling I could really have done without his bigoted and racist references. Noting a likely mugger had gold fillings "like the Mexicans get" and referring to his brother's coworker as a retard and others as "hillfolk" or "hillbillies." Just not my cup of tea.

I was acting like an asshole because deep inside that chasm I could hear my own echo: You are an asshole.

Perhaps what was missing from LeDuff's book for me was insight on what is needed to restore Detroit. Perhaps I'm just not ready to consign my city to death. And, perhaps LeDuff really just is an asshole.

Two stars

Next challenge: A book with a love triangle

A book with a color in the title

Title: The Red Tent
Author: Anita Diamant
Publication date: 1998

It is the rare (but cherished book) that paints a tapestry of such vivid locations, characters and storylines that you can picture yourself in their midst as the pages turn. The Red Tent is such a book for me.

Anita Diamant’s novel crafts the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah; sister to Joseph and 11 other brothers in Canaan more than 2,000 years ago. Dinah serves as narrator telling first the story of her father and his courtship of her aunt, his inevitable marriage to her own mother and her mother's three sisters. The second part of the story is Dinah's own story and she tells of her childhood playing with Joseph and being adored by her mother and aunties as the only girl child of Jacob's tribe. The final story encompasses Dinah's years in Egypt.

Despite taking place more than 2,000 years ago, The Red Tent, for me, was a story of feminism at its core. The red tent itself is the physical location where all of the women congregate during that most womanly time of the month. The women of this time were certainly not equal to the men. However, the women within Jacob's tribe asserted themselves more so than would be expected of that time. It is Diamant's skill as a writer and Dinah's voice as a narrator that make me pause to consider that this is a work of fiction.

Though it was published 17 years, The Red Tent remains as powerful today as it was when it was first released. If I hadn't been pushing the limits of my typical book picks to satisfy this reading challenge -- and if a friend hadn't thrust the book in my hands with the decree "you have to read this" -- I would not have experienced The Red Tent.

Five stars

Next challenge: A book that takes place in your hometown