Four Books for the Holidays

The original idea for this month's post was a humorous reflection on my family's Xmas traditions. Then last night I learned that a good friend, someone from my critique group, was in a very bad motorcycle accident. When I started to write about him, it read too much like a eulogy and we're not there. Hopefully, on next month's post, I'll have good news. Needless to say, my Holiday spirits have dimmed a bit.

Instead I'll give a recap of the most memorable books that I read this year.

When Breath Becomes Air, a remarkable and poignant memoir by Paul Kalanithi. He started his university studies with the intention of being a writer, then switched to becoming a neurosurgeon, only to have terminal lung cancer interrupt his promising career. Kalanithi's literary talent shines though his prose and his 1st POV narrative reminded me of Flowers For Algernon, where we the readers are helpless bystanders as the author describes his descent toward the tragic end. 

Atomic Habits by James Clear, came to my attention via one of my ghostwriter clients. As we struggle to get a handle on life and find ways to improve our station, we often turn to self-help books. While the advice is usually sound, finding ways to exercise it can be frustrating. One of Clear's habits is the idea of getting one percent better in a specific area of your life. In applying this concept to himself, my client determined that getting one percent better meant devoting one percent of his day (which calculates to 14 minutes 24 seconds) to a particular effort. Not even fifteen minutes. How many increments of fifteen minutes a day do we waste? Sitting in traffic. Scrolling through social media. I embraced this idea and used it to improve a skill I'd been slogging after for years, improving my Spanish. 

Now my daily routine is to study Spanish for at least fifteen minutes a day, usually by reading a book in Spanish. Which brings me to Corrido de Amor y Gloria by Reyna Grande. While Corrido is fiction, the story is based on the Mexican-American War of 1847, during which Mexico lost more half of its territory (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, California, and parts of Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas) to the US. The narrative is told through John Riley, one of the Irish-American soldiers who defected to fight for the Mexicans in the St. Patrick's Battalion, and Ximena, a Mexican curandera (healer), who served as a battlefield nurse. Besides laying out the historical foundations for the war and sharing the cruel deprivations suffered by the ordinary Mexicans, Reyna also relates the internal treachery and political machinations that undermined their nation's resistance. 

I continued my "One Percent Better" practice in Spanish as I explored one of my favorite periods in history, the years between WW1 and WW2, in El Hombre Que Amaba a los Perros by the Cuban mystery writer, Leonardo Padura. We follow Lev Davidovich, aka Leon Trotsky, in exile and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, the Spanish communist who wielded the murder weapon, the infamous ice ax. The tome sprawls over 700 pages, and Padura does a masterful job giving us context and tension as the characters maneuver to their fateful encounter in Mexico City on August 20, 1940. Trotski died the next day.

On that cheery note, Merry Christmas, and I'll see you Next Year!