Third time's a charm for Anthony DONE

[Anthony]

I bought back when it came out in the 90's and has been on my TBR since then. Since that time I have gone into medicine and this book means so much more. The first chapters on the pathology of how different disease processes actually interfere and end the life cycle are interesting. But the final chapter should be must read for every person who ever has to deal with someone who is dying, whether that be their parent, friend, spouse, child, or themselves. Despite some of the information becoming dated over the last 30 years, (AIDS is no longer the scary epidemic without a clear treatment path), this last chapter has become even more relevant for the same reasons. We have learned much about disease processes and can prolong lives but should we? We have all kinds of new ways to keep bodies functioning, hearts beating and oxygen exchanging but is that really living? This helps put the struggle many doctors have Hippocratic oath vs condemning a person to their end of days being a vegetable. If you have to deal with the situation of assisting a dying person you need a clear understanding of the dying person's wishes, what the medical community would recommend, and put aside your own personal desires. It's not an easy place to be but this helps put forth information for that discussion.

[Anthony]

As I was wrapping up the list of 52 prompts and still had about a month to go. I opted to read one of the longer books on my TBR list. It sounded similar to other alternative lives books I have read. While it was one of those stories it was not entirely the same. The differences the main character (Ferguson) experienced through the different lives were not only based on his decisions like so many other books (I think of them as the What if books) These different stories had completely different circumstances that took him down differing but not entirely divergent paths. He was always around writing whether news reporter or novelist, he had different people influencing him with similar classic books and music. Then the ending did a great job wrapping it all up and tying the book together. The author could get wordy at times. You can't pick up an almost 1000 page book and not expect them to be that way. But it didn't feel boring at being too verbose. It was well written and I enjoyed the narratives and alternative characters the author created.

[Anthony]

I went back and got the actual next one in the series for Jack Reacher. Not like it was a major spoiler but there were some things in Running Blind that gave away parts of this book. This one is definitely dated with lots of phone book and phone booth usage and only one mobile phone to note in the story. The premise continues along with his other stories and they are all just fun reads.

[Anthony]

I found it hard to define what was a gothic book. I saw ones on gothic architecture and the ones from the listopia seemed pretty general with ghost and spooky stories. So I went safe and just found with gothic in the title. These were old-school ghost stories, from the likes of Dickens, Poe, and Hawthorne. Not bad stories just dry and not very scary by today's standards.