A very slim yet powerful tome by Oliver Sacks, who’s written so many other great books. These are a few short essays written as he’s contemplating his life once he has received a diagnosis of metastatic cancer. As always, his succinct prose strikes a familiar chord about where priorities are and where they should be.
My love affair with all things Hamilton continues as I finally got this audiobook from the library. If any of you out there love actors and performers and hearing about how they get their ideas, then you’ll love this audiobook. An added plus is that Mariska Hargitay is the narrator. The story of how Lin-Manuel Miranda brought the story of Alexander Hamilton to the Broadway stage is really riveting, and just reinforces the genius of Miranda. Staying true to himself and all his musical influences while being so aware of how it would translate on the stage is just awesome. A huge thumbs up for this.
This debut novel for Emma Cline is very true to the 1960s, with young girls looking to find themselves and ending up finding security in cults. The main character, Evie, is lost — her parents just got divorced, her dad is living with a younger woman, her mom is trying to find a new husband, and Evie and her best friend have a falling out. What she ends up finding is this clan of girls in the park. That leads her to their ranch, where she gets drawn into their wild lifestyle of drugs, sex, and eventually horrible crime. The story starts in Evie’s present time and keeps flashing back to tell this story. I enjoyed this weird book, which concentrated not on the horribleness of this time, but more on the relationship between the girls.
