More Than Four Sides

Tag: books

  • Addicted to reading

    S actually feel asleep tonight in a sphinx-like pose in front of his tablet, reading the first Percy Jackson book, The Lightning Thief. How can anyone sleep like that? After about 10 minutes, he finally rolled off his elbows. Good night, dear readers!

  • Mental illness … and the Nature of Evil

    The past fifty years have seen a huge change in society’s understanding and attitude toward mental illness, but stigma still remains. Just this past week, the news that caught my ear (since most of my news comes to me via NPR) was that lawmakers are attempting to make it easier to force people with mental illness…

  • Death Row

    My first year as a physician, I served as an intern in the hospital where I now work and teach, as an attending physician. One of my least favorite rotations during that intern year was the four weeks i spent in the Emergency Department, the ED. Despite the fact that my training closely tracked the…

  • Sister-strife

    I have one sister.  Only one sister. She was born when I was six years old, and, unlike my friends now, who encourage their first-born children to hold their newborn siblings within hours or days of her birth, my first memory of my sister was that I was not allowed to touch her, let alone…

  • Reading electronic books

    There’s been a lot of discussion on the news and on the web lately about the influence of e-books on our brains, and on how we read and how we learn.  And the net is so ephemeral, that I can’t find, now, an article that I read and found fascinating just a couple of days…

  • Providing an anchor, an invisible rope

    “…my eye beams a rope around her, because I will jump in—splash!—and rescue her the moment she’s in difficulty.  And then she’s twelve years old, self-conscious in a modest navy sports swimsuit, …[but] she’s still the little girl in the pink-and-orange flowery swimming costume to me, and I still have my invisible rope around her…

  • An intense read

    January First I ended up staying up until past 3am on a weeknight to finish reading this. It hit too close to home on too many levels. My sister and I grew up with a mother who continues to suffer from severe bipolar disorder, which has robbed her of so much in life. Like Janni,…

  • Raising book-lovers

    The boys went to the library today, and brought home a dozen books between them. We will certainly be reading them all, but not tonight. I’m not sure what got into S, but he was really acting out, and finally I gave him an ultimatum that I never thought I’d hear myself utter – “That’s…