I'm in a book "club" with my one buddy, and she picked first, so we're reading The Emperor Of All Maladies. It's wicked. I can't imagine getting sick before... well, practically ever. You could take your pick of any period of human history and there would be massive, gaping holes in our medical knowledge even as recently as the '80s or '90s. And there are gaps today, notably, and eponymously, in our understanding of cancer. It's crazy to think that pretty much any diagnosis of cancer was a total death sentence, and the earliest breakthroughs in treatments (as we would now recognize such things--I don't count a shaman rubbing worm's wort a worthy treatment) , in the 40s and 50s, were only remissions of a few months, and even then only in certain types of cancer. I'm only a third of the way through it, and the "biography" goes linearly, so I'm not at the cutting edge yet.

Goals for books read this year? I think it's to read once a day. And so far, so good. I don't think tracking a number of distinct books is good for much other than stroking the ol' ego. I've read articles or essays that have impacts on me much larger than any books, and single books that take weeks or months to read. Anna Karenina took me like five or six weeks last summer.

NB The audiobook is how I'm mainly ingesting the book, and I don't like the narrator. It's a Brit, and it makes it sound prim and stuffy. I'd much prefer the author to read it, but oh well.