What Are We Reading?

Meg McGough, Marketing and Subscription Director, Journal of Histochemistry & Cytochemistry

I am finally getting around to reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Both authors work for Forrester Research and their work is both enlightening and entertaining. I am also reading The Mature Mind: the Positive Power of the Aging Brain by Gene D. Cohen for answers to my questions about my aging parents and my own aging brain. It’s a good antidote to downsides of growing older. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown is for recapturing something I’m missing.

For even lighter fare, I’ve read all four mysteries written by  Colin Cotterill. Set following the end of the Vietnam War, the series features Dr. Siri, a reluctant communist and a 72-year-old surgeon drafted to be the one and only coroner in Laos. These books are short, quick reads. Finally, I recently read Metzger’s Dog by Thomas Perry, a comic thriller long out of print with memorable characters on two legs and four. The CIA at its best and worst, it will make you laugh.   

Deanna Wamae, Publisher Relations, Copyright Clearance Center

As I prepare to leave on vacation for two weeks on Martha’s Vineyard, I have been stocking up on beach reads - nothing work-related here!  With the exception of Your Baby and Child; From Birth to Age Five by Penelope Leach, everything I have been reading has been for the pure joy of reading.  For those new parents out there, Leach gives what I have found to be very balanced insights into child development and parenting.  It was given to me when my daughter was born by a dear friend of mine, and of all the parenting books on my shelves, it has been the most helpful one.

Since my book-buying began in anticipation of my vacation more than a month ago, I have been working my way through the stack before even stepping on the boat, and have not been disappointed with my selections so far!  I have just finished, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, published by Viking.  A non-fiction travelogue, the book chronicles one woman’s journey to Italy, India, and Bali over the course of one year, where she explores the possibility of living a spiritual AND hedonistic life.  It is funny and smart and very entertaining.  I highly recommend it.  Another book I have finished and liked a lot is A Thousand Splendid Suns  by Khaled Hosseini, published by Penguin USA.  Hosseini is the author of The Kite Runner, which I also very much enjoyed.  Both books are set in Afghanistan, and tell the story of a people living and coping in a setting of nearly constant violence and war.  The beauty of the books is in the  well-developed and thoroughly real characters and the details of their “ordinary” lives and moments of beauty against the backdrop of constant upheaval.    All of the main characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns are female, and the story is bittersweet, highlighting the extremes of cruelty and compassion, violence and tenderness, victimization and power.