63. The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

listened on Libby/borrowed from the library

narrated by Patti Murin

Unabridged audio (15:47)
2020
416 pgs.
Genre/Level
Finished 6/16/2021
Goodreads rating: 3.65 - 42,662 ratings
My rating: 5
Setting: Contemporary Egypt & Boston

First line/s: "My calendar is full of dead people."

My comments: This book blew me away  There's so much to it, multiple stories flowing in and around and together.  There may be some spoilers in the following.  There are some really difficult themes:  1 - end of life, and not just because so much of the story is about the protagonist being a death Doula and deeply involved in hospice.  2 - physics and quantum theory, both of which no matter how "clearly" they are explained, will never be clear to me.  3 - loving, deeply loving, two men at the same time.  And there are two parallel stories about two different women and their situations that cut deeply at the heart.  4 - choices.  5 - family.  6 -  losing a beloved parent.  7 - abandoning everything you know and love to raise an underage sibling.  And I realize there's so much more, layer after layer.  Between the research and the story outline, I can't even imagine how long this book took to write.  And the ending.  Oh my gosh, the ending.   It was brilliant.  It could've ended in two very different ways.  You're left realizing that, in the end, it's always about choices.

Goodreads synopsis:  Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She's on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband, but a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong.

          Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, her beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, where she helps ease the transition between life and death for patients in hospice.
          But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a job she once studied for, but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.
          After the crash landing, the airline ensures the survivors are seen by a doctor, then offers transportation wherever they want to go. The obvious option for Dawn is to continue down the path she is on and go home to her family. The other is to return to the archaeological site she left years before, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and maybe even complete her research on The Book of Two Ways--the first known map of the afterlife.
          As the story unfolds, Dawn's two possible futures unspool side by side, as do the secrets and doubts long buried beside them. Dawn must confront the questions she's never truly asked: What does a life well-lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind? Do we make choices...or do our choices make us? And who would you be, if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are right now?

49. A Guide For the Perplexed - Dara Horn

2013, W. W. Norton & Co.

336 pgs.(I stopped at pg. 168)

Adult CRF

Stopped reading on 11/8/2013

GoodreadsRating: 3.69

My Rating:  Didn’t like it (1)

TPPL

Setting: Massachusetts and Egypt (Cairo & Alexandria)

1^st paragraph:  "What happens to days that disappear?  The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held -- a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worires and triumphs and regrets -- all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room.  When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to do was open those gates."

My comments:  I've been wading through this book for over a week and am only half way through.  Last night, at my usual "reading time" I didn't want to read it, realizing I didn't like it at all.  I don't like the characters, I don't "get" the second time period that it keeps switching back to (it's boring) and I have absolutely no desire to discover what's going to happen. So why waste my time?  So sorry, Ms. Horn.....

Goodreads Review:  Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt’s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is abducted—leaving Judith free to take over Josie’s life at home, including her husband and daughter, while Josie’s talent for preserving memories becomes a surprising test of her empathy and her only means of escape.

A century earlier, another traveler arrives in Egypt: Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor hunting for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue. Both he and Josie are haunted by the work of the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, a doctor and rationalist who sought to reconcile faith and science, destiny and free will. But what Schechter finds, as he tracks down the remnants of a thousand-year-old community’s once-vibrant life, will reveal the power and perils of what Josie’s ingenious work brings into being: a world where nothing is ever forgotten.

An engrossing adventure that intertwines stories from Genesis, medieval philosophy, and the digital frontier, A Guide for the Perplexed is a novel of profound inner meaning and astonishing imagination.

Clever Ali - Nancy Farmer

Illustrator: Gail de Marcken
For: Kids with the ability for sit for a longer read aloud
2006
Rating: 4.5
Endpapers: intricate brown & white scenes covering the page completely






Preface:
from In Praise of Books

A book is a garden you can hold in your hand,
An orchard you can take on your lap.

A book is a companion who sleeps
Only when you are asleep,
and speaks only when you wish him to

A book is a tree that lives long
And bears delicious and abundant fruit
That is easy to pick and perfectly ripe
At all tiimes of the year.

A book obeys you by night and by day,
Abroad and at home,
It has no need of sleep
And does not grow weary from sittting up.

-----Al-Jahiz
-----born in Basra in 776

The illustrations and text are all framed. de Marcken uses patterns from mosaics, woodwork, plaster, and marble from Cairo's mosques and Islamic antiquities. Calligraphic symbols are part of some of the framing. Very detailed, very lovely.

The story takes us into the two-wife household of the sultan's royal carrier pigeon keeper - a very important and prestigious job. Ali has four younger brothers and when he turns seven he moves from the women's part of the house to the men's part of the house. He also goes to work at the palace with his father to learn how to tend the pigeons. The story unfolds the same as one of Jahazarad's Arabian Night Tales would - with elements of magic and cruelty, where ingeniousness is needed to get out of a life-threatening jam. It's a long story, so well-suited for older readers and listeners.