I've been meaning to read this book since I first heard of it back in 2006, when it won the Giller beating out odds-on favourite De Niro's Game (which would go on to win the Booker). The reason it took so long for me to eventually get around to reading it was because it had two things against it: Bloodletting is a collection of short stories and ( Read more... )

This book chronicles the history of cancer diagnosis and treatment from antiquity to the present day, and for being a fairly long book it was a damn quick read for me, because every bit of it was interesting. I was constantly looking for excuses to pick up the book and find out what would happen next. I learned an extraordinary number of things ( Read more... )

A fascinating, easily readable history of cancer, how people conceived of it, how they tried to cure it, and how all that changed society and science. Mukherjee is an oncologist, and salts the text with anecdotes about his own patients. (Those were great and I would have liked more of them ( Read more... )

I used to work at a greeting card store that stood between a coffee shop and a smoothie place. We had a sign asking customers not to bring their drinks inside, because too many people had spilled them all over the cards, but often people didn't see the sign or ignored it ( Read more... )

Hi, everyone! I've been lurking here for a bit, browsing reviews and recommendations -- so many things to explore! To start this off, I got a bunch of books from the library all at once, and have been reading them over the past three weeks or so. I haven't really kept track of the order in which I've read them, so I thought that where I've read ( Read more... )