Stoop Books: Disappearing Earth and When Breath Becomes Air

Bringing you two mini Saturday stoop book reviews! Read on!

Disappering Earth by Julia Phillips

I liked the beginning and the end but honestly could have skipped the whole middle. The opening chapter focuses on the abduction of two little girls from a small city on a peninsula in Eastern Russia. Every chapter following focuses on different people in their community and how the disappearance impacts them. It does the Love, Actually thing where characters from other subplots pop up throughout the book, but there's almost no follow up on any of their plot lines, and we don't even meet the mother of the girls who disappeared until the second to last chapter, so it was pretty hard for me to get through it once I realized I wasn't gonna get follow ups or closure on any of the subplots. The book was initially developed and published in literary magazines as short stories, and with that knowledge this stylistic element makes sense, but it doesn’t really feel like a novel until the last two chapters finally pick up the threads that have been dropped through out the book.

(Also, like in any story that takes place in Russia, there are a thousand characters with a thousand nicknames each and a lot of similar sounding names, but Phillips put a character list in the beginning, which was helpful but not detailed enough for me.)

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

This book has the energy of The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch crossed with that Ted Talk by the neuroscientist who had a stroke and understood what was happening to her in real time. Dr. Kalanithi wrote this book while he was dying from a vey rare and aggressive form of lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with right at the tale end of his neurosurgery residency at Stanford. The first half of the book is about his life up until that point and details his journey to become a doctor and a lot of his medical philosophy, while the second is focused on his transition from doctor to patient.

This is a book that is about death and dying, faith, literature, family, and what it means to live a good life. It's heavy, but beautifully written and will hit you with an emotional train in the final pages. Read if you're willing to get absolutely wrecked. I, personally, full body sobbed for the last 25 pages or so.

That’s all for today! See you tomorrow for my Golden Globes predictions (which will probably be wrong but still fun!).