The Love List #2: Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese is the author of several Kepler's favorites, including Cutting for Stone, My Own Country, and The Tennis Partner. He is also, impressively, a renowned physician as well as Professor and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. Reader's often come in to pick up Cutting for Stone, having heard about the novel from besotted friends, or read about it in some magazine or newspaper. A little while later, they hurry back--having finished the intensely satisfying story of twin brothers, Ethiopia, medicine, and love--and ask fretfully for Mr. Verghese's two memoirs. "You have them, right?" they ask. "You haven't, like, run out or anything? Because I would really like to read them as soon as possible."

This is Abraham Verghese

THE LOVE LIST #2: ABRAHAM VERGHESE

The two books I would recommend because they are so much on my mind now are:

The Cat's Table
by: Michael Ondaatje

[Notice that this is the second mention of Mr. Ondaatje's newest novel on the Love List. The Cat's Table is two for two! Mr. Verghese also had some more detailed praise to add.]


You can imagine my excitement when The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje’s latest, arrived on my desk. I found myself reading aloud with a loved one, savoring, just a few pages a day that were carefully rationed. Reading aloud was a way to make every morsel last longer, have it linger on tongue and ear. I can’t think of a book I’ve read where the sense of a journey—in this case, a ship going from Ceylon to England via the Suez Canal—is so carefully mirrored in the reader’s experience...When it was over, I had that sense one lives for as a reader: the feeling of having discovered a truth not just about the imagined world of the novelist, but also about oneself, a truth one can now carry forth into the world, into the rest of one’s life....

In One Person
by: John Irving


[In One Person won't be published until May 2012. Surely, you are jealous of Mr. Verghese's apparent and early relish of A NEW IRVING. So, while you cannot pick up a copy of this yet, keep it in mind--you can read this interview with Irving, in which he drops a few hints about the new book--and maybe take a look at Irving's other books to crank up your anticipation.]