Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Last night one of my book clubs met to discuss Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. We all liked the book.

It's about twins who were conjoined at the head and separated after birth, born in a hospital in Addis Ababa to an Indian nun. They were brought up by an Indian couple living and working at the hospital.

We wondered about the name. "Cutting for stone" is in the Hippocratic oath so we knew that was part of the reason for it but we weren't sure what the phrase actually means. One member said it meant quarrying, searching for something, which made sense.

Our discussion drifted when we started talking about the way the two boys in the novel would fall asleep with their heads touching, as they'd been in the womb. We started talking about sleeping with our siblings and having our kids join us in bed. My kids all learned to go to Randy's side of the bed because I couldn't take their wiggling around and bumping me.

We all liked the character Ghosh a lot. He was like the boys' father, although not their biological father. He was a rock, everyone could rely on him and he always had sage advice.

I recommend this one, too.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So, it's been forever since I've written, but I'm going to try again. I won't try to go back and do all the books I've read since my last post, but I'll do a couple anyway.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a very good book I read for a couple of my book clubs. It's set in Mississippi (how fun is it to write that, thinking "M-i-crooked letter-crooked letter-i-crooked letter-crooked letter-humpback-humpback-i"?) right at the beginning of the civil rights movement. Three women are the "voices" in the book. One is a young white woman who wants to be a writer and decides to write the stories of the black women in the town. The other two are two of the black women.

I was afraid it'd be more of that Southern women's book kind of stuff but it really wasn't. The women's voices seemed genuine, and it felt like you kind of got in their heads. The women served as maids/housekeepers and also nannys. There was definitely a comment on the way that these women were trusted so implicitly with such an important task as raising the family's children, yet they were not allowed, in some cases, to use the same bathroom facilities. And then those children grew up to have servants of their own.

I recommend it.