I read Rabbit, Run as an intern taking thirty hour call shifts every fourth night in the pediatric intermediate care unit. Other than Rabbit dissatisfaction with absolutely everything, I remember nothing about the novel. With a gun pointed to my head, I could not tell you one reason why John Updike is an amazing author.
I read The Naked and the Dead as a second year resident. I vaguely recall being impressed by Norman Mailer's plot structure. By reputation, I thought the novel was going to be entirely slick sentence structure and metaphors. I remember little else.
Somewhere in the third year of residency, I switched to biographies of great figures in the American Revolution. David McCullough's glossy long-game portraits of imperfect humans were more compatible with chronic fatigue and low-grade depression.
As a fourth year resident, I read Tim O'Brien's July, July and knew then and there that modern fiction is simply a pastime rather than an art form. Just perfect for a mind crammed with facts and fractured by interminable monthly rotations. I ate that shit up.
Going backward in time, I distinctly recall a period during the second half of medical school in which I was alternating Philip Roth novels and Harry Potter books. I enjoyed Roth more than Hogwarts, but both provided straight-forward prose with many access points for escapism and didn't require much emotional investment.
My reading skills have eroded. I glean and extract so much less from the printed page than I used to.
This reality is an abomination to my teenaged self scouring used bookstores for lesser regarded Thomas Hardy novels and my college-aged self consuming The Iliad as a diversion from term papers.
I read Moby Dick thrice in a ten year period, eliciting more from my favorite novel with each pass. I retain warm memories of sitting in a Scottish monk cell poring over the Trask family's three generation demise. At my best, I could organize a whole cadre of Dostoevsky characters in my mind. I once hung in there on the Mason-Dixon line with Thomas Pynchon.
These days I seem to end up reading too many double-spaced paperbacks with "discussion questions" in the back. I recently read all six hundred plus of Wolf Hall, only realizing that it was not great literature a the two thirds mark. Tom Robbins novels exhaust me. When I've been drinking, I have a nervous compulsion to inform people that I've read more than a few of Michael Chabon's works. Colson Whitehead is rapidly becoming this era's Chabon Thank God for David Mitchell's bibliography and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy or I'd have little to show for the last decade. On the rare occasion that I do read a true work of art, such as Adichie's Americanah, I seem to follow it up by reading a bunch of crap again.
Medical school scraped my literary soul and residency compartmentalized and pragmatized my intellect. It's as if I'm reading the books out loud to myself -- slowly and with desiccated meaning. This is who I am, but not who I thought I'd be. What should my punishment be? Redemptively: Joyce or Dreiser? Self-flagellation via Albom or Gladwell?
I read The Naked and the Dead as a second year resident. I vaguely recall being impressed by Norman Mailer's plot structure. By reputation, I thought the novel was going to be entirely slick sentence structure and metaphors. I remember little else.
Somewhere in the third year of residency, I switched to biographies of great figures in the American Revolution. David McCullough's glossy long-game portraits of imperfect humans were more compatible with chronic fatigue and low-grade depression.
As a fourth year resident, I read Tim O'Brien's July, July and knew then and there that modern fiction is simply a pastime rather than an art form. Just perfect for a mind crammed with facts and fractured by interminable monthly rotations. I ate that shit up.
Going backward in time, I distinctly recall a period during the second half of medical school in which I was alternating Philip Roth novels and Harry Potter books. I enjoyed Roth more than Hogwarts, but both provided straight-forward prose with many access points for escapism and didn't require much emotional investment.
My reading skills have eroded. I glean and extract so much less from the printed page than I used to.
This reality is an abomination to my teenaged self scouring used bookstores for lesser regarded Thomas Hardy novels and my college-aged self consuming The Iliad as a diversion from term papers.
I read Moby Dick thrice in a ten year period, eliciting more from my favorite novel with each pass. I retain warm memories of sitting in a Scottish monk cell poring over the Trask family's three generation demise. At my best, I could organize a whole cadre of Dostoevsky characters in my mind. I once hung in there on the Mason-Dixon line with Thomas Pynchon.
These days I seem to end up reading too many double-spaced paperbacks with "discussion questions" in the back. I recently read all six hundred plus of Wolf Hall, only realizing that it was not great literature a the two thirds mark. Tom Robbins novels exhaust me. When I've been drinking, I have a nervous compulsion to inform people that I've read more than a few of Michael Chabon's works. Colson Whitehead is rapidly becoming this era's Chabon Thank God for David Mitchell's bibliography and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy or I'd have little to show for the last decade. On the rare occasion that I do read a true work of art, such as Adichie's Americanah, I seem to follow it up by reading a bunch of crap again.
Medical school scraped my literary soul and residency compartmentalized and pragmatized my intellect. It's as if I'm reading the books out loud to myself -- slowly and with desiccated meaning. This is who I am, but not who I thought I'd be. What should my punishment be? Redemptively: Joyce or Dreiser? Self-flagellation via Albom or Gladwell?