Books

I’m trying to keep track of what I read. In the past, I’ve been smart enough to annotate my books and write when I start and finish them, but too dumb to have written down what I’ve read.

What I’m Reading

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

What I Want to Read

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (sorely overdue)
• The Plague by Albert Camus
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Pity the Reader by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
• The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T.R. Reid
• Understanding Health Policy by Bodenheimer and Grumbach
• And What’s Beyond That? by Stanley Falkow

Note: I’ve been pretty bad at updating this–I still care about books.

What I’ve Read in 2021

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm by Rob Lefkowitz and Randy Hall
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
• The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
  • What a powerful little book of poetry. Don’t agree with everything, but some very poignant points in it!

What I’ve Read in 2020

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  • I finished this book and was underwhelmed at first, but found myself returning to the ideas of a “light” and “heavy” life time and time again. My metric for a good book revolves around how much I think about it after I read it. Considering I still think about these themes, I’d say it was a great book. I think I didn’t connect with the characters personally, but the search for meaning and love in the face of drastic societal unrest resonated with me greatly.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
  • Some good, weird sci-fi. A friend suggested I read this after taking a class linking the book to the ethics of genetic engineering. If not framed in that manner, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it that way. Still decent, though!
• No Time to Lose by Peter Piot
  • This book discusses several pandemics. While incredibly interesting, I got 250 pages in until I realized it made me more anxious about COVID and gave up on it.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Read #n)
  • One of my favorite books; when I first read it in 2015, this book ardently affirmed my stance as a pacifist. War is an ugly beast released by legislative executives who do not feel the brunt of it. War hurts the working class and disenfranchised most, physically and mentally. By using time travel as a guise for PTSD, Vonnegut created a heartbreakingly hilarious piece of fiction that sardonically discusses the bombing of Dresden and Billy Pilgrim’s mental collapse in the years following.
  • Vonnegut writes so child-like and hilariously; I emulate him in most of what I write.
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
  • Fadiman changed my mind on Western medicine. I used to cling to the ideal that modern medicine and science could be a panacea for all of the world’s problems. The book follows the Lees, a Hmong refugee family, and their struggle to treat their daughter for epilepsy with Hmong folk medicine and Western medicine. The story is a heartbreaking struggle of miscommunication and cultural discordance between US healthcare and the Hmong community. How can you explain the clinical efficacy of Dilantin to an illiterate family whose self-sufficiency has been stolen from them by a US sponsored war?
  • In context of COVID, rampant systemic racism (in science, too!), and the polarization of our society, this book convinced that we need more than science for a harmonious, equitable society.
• How We Do Harm by Otis Brawley and Paul Goldberg
  • Another killer book which made me question the American medical system deeply. Why aren’t there evidence-based guidelines for treatment of widespread disorders, such as melanoma or breast cancer? Why is off-label drug use permissible in common disease scenarios, even if there isn’t scientific evidence for their effectiveness? We need logic and science more than ever and it is a disgrace to medicine that we have veered so far from them. We don’t live in the age of Hippocrates and postulation anymore; we live in the era of statistics and rationality. By no means do I think research and science are perfect, but they are all we have in the fight against disease and the fight for humanity.
  • Note: I work in rare disease; some of the points in the book wouldn’t apply to these patients. If you have an n=1 rare mutation in a child, how are you ever going to do an RCT? It is better to treat as rationally as possible at that point.
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (Read #2)
  • Mersault embodies the Absurd. Throughout the book, he acknowledges that his decisions would not matter one way or another–saying that he would marry his mistress just as he’d marry anyone else, that it didn’t matter that his mother was far away while sick, that it didn’t matter if he died at thirty or eighy. Mersault drifts through life with minimal ambition or direction, besides his physical instincts. He has sex, eats, works, sleeps, and repeats. Mersault is Camus’ antithesis to the realization of an absurd, indifferent universe. Mersault creates no meaning for himself.
  • Camus, on the other hand, was known for his handsomeness, his boisterous nature, and his kindness. He loved life in the face of the Absurd, something that anyone who discovers the indifference of the universe should emulate. He loved humanity and people; he once said that he learned much of his personal philosophy from the teamwork and ambition of soccer. In the face of an indifferent world, we can only hope to live with as much zest for life as Camus–and to stay away from the listless, laconic nature of Mersault.
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Quite well-written and ethereal. The concept of a “body” really stuck with me. It got kind of dense/philosophically written and put it down 100 pages in, though.
• Deep Medicine by Eric Topol
  • Eric Topol loves his neural networks. He does a really even handed job of explaining the follies and triumphs of utilizing AI in medicine; in particular, he emphasizes how algorithms can be easily fooled. For example, one that thought asthmatics did better with severe pneumonia erroneously. AI can be a black box–but it can’t be that way when it infiltrates medicine. Topol also spends plenty of time talking about fine tuning algorithms and looking into the black box in order to glean insights. Migraine Alert, for example, predicts migraine onset before pain comes around! AI in medicine is creeping slowly and into individualized tasks. I genuinely hope that it can make some sense of giant microbiome/diet datasets and further the humanistic aspect of medicine.
  • It’s pretty inspiring to see such an accomplished physician be so knowledgeable about computation as well. He laid out a fantastic roadmap describing how he hoped to see medicine become more empathetic through AI zapping away at time consuiming activities. He proposed a really interesting concept of having radiologists and pathologists review AI classified images and spending their extra time at the bedside of the patient. I wonder how many miscommunications have occurred because of radiologists or pathologists relaying information other docs don’t know much about. With AI, hopefully we can avoid those. Here’s hoping to a better, unified, data-driven health system. Or, you know, I could move to the UK.
• Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
  • The book links horror and the consequences of environmental pollution gorgeously. Pretty quick read, I think I finished it in like a day and a half. I recommend it as a gripping, kinda trippy novella that’s also an easy read. I’ve also never read any Argentine authors before!
• I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
  • My first audiobook!
  • Pretty spooky, but I thought the ending fell short. That’s all I’ll say!
• Chemistry by Weike Wang
  • This is the story of a PhD student who burns out terribly in the lab, probably due to her pathologically strict upbringing. Unfortunately, this sort of mentality is incredibly common. I’ve had plenty of friends call my crying about the insane expectations that their parents have projected onto them from childhood. It’s heartbreaking. There is something about the struggle mentality that parents’ of immigrants have that does not translate over well to times of plenty. In times of struggle, many of our parents who made it to America had to be #1 in the class–and the alternative was staying in agrarian work or corrupt countries (in the case of my Dad, the latter). I don’t think that many parents’ of immigrants realize that the life vs. death mentality is somewhat less necessary now.
  • I thought the narrator was too angsty at the beginning of the book, but I soon started sympathizing way more with her as the book progressed. Her slow rotation towards happiness really brought a smile to my face.
• Ahead of the Curve: David Baltimore’s Life in Science by Shane Crotty
  • Well, I’m an microbio/immunology major so David Baltimore has been mentioned in basically every class I’ve ever taken. I really, really enjoyed learning about his life, his first ventures into science (not too distinct from mine!), and his attitude (arrogant, but with the intelligence to back it up).
  • Crotty does a fantastic job of giving an even-handed discussion of hard topics like the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA and the Imanishi-Kari Affair. He writes really, really well as a plus!
  • On a personal note, the connection between molecular biology and history really got to me. I’ve been learning about PCRs and blots since middle school, but this really put the recency of molecular bio in context for me. PCRs were made when my Dad was 21. I’m 21 now, and I wonder what life-changing achievments being currently developed will define the future of my field.