The book I’m recommending today was a slower, thoughtful read for me. I am adding it to the “Newer Classics” list which is where I categorize the epic reads published in the past 20 years (or so).
This book was apparently a national bestseller years ago – or so the cover claims – but I hadn’t heard of it until my Dallas friend who also recommended A Fine Balance (I will always be recovering from that book) recommended it to me.
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
This book took me more than a month to get through it. I read it over two vacations: Jamaica and Memphis (post coming soon). I was always happy to pick it up but I wasn’t zipping through it either.
Set in Ethiopia, with a cast of Indian doctors and nuns, this book has a lot of medical detail. Two conjoined twins are born, shockingly to a nun, and the book follows their lives as they love and hurt each other, as they become doctors themselves, and as one of them (the narrator) tries to unravel the mystery of their birth and the presumed father who ran away. And I was also very interested in this mystery!
With political violence, personal violence, family secrets, medical procedures, the immigrant experience, and so much more, there is a lot to digest while reading this book, and it didn’t fully grip me until the second half (this is just a warning to keep reading).
I am giving a lot of disclaimers about this book but it is an epic read in the sense that when I finished it, for days I was still putting together all of the circular themes.
“I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain”
The father figure of the book tells a popular African tale about a man who kept trying to lose his horrible slippers but every time he did, worse came of it.
“I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did…the key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”