What can you do

Many of you are asking what you can do to help me get through my cancer treatment – and I finally thought of an answer. I’m looking for book recommendations; specifically, light and cheerful books. 🙂

I have a new kindle and a new “unlimited” subscription. I like any genre that does not have an obvious political or religious message. I’ve been trying a variety of books that are well-reviewed and on best-seller lists, but it seems like most well-written books are upsetting.

For example, the most recent book just I read, The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman, is well written and apparently well researched. It is set near Jerusalem around 70 CE. Because of the quality of the writing, I really felt like I understood the characters and their culture. The detail was amazing, and I felt immersed in that time and place. It was as if I was really there. But it was not a time or place where I wanted to be. War, terror, rape, murder, slavery, starvation, disease, suicide and massacre. It was an awful, traumatic experience – for the characters, and for me along with them.

I also recently read The Dressmaker’s Gift, by Fiona Valpy. It’s a novel about some young women who were part of the French Resistance during WWII who ended up in the death camps. It was also very immersive with excellent detail. It really put me there – and “there” was not a good place.

I know we need to understand that these unimaginably terrible things really did happen, so we will do what we can to keep them from happening again. But I’m just not up for consciousness-raising historical horror right now.

Prior to reading that those, I had tried a couple of lighter books, but they were stupid. Surely there are authors out there who write thoughtful, low-emotion books? I’m not just looking for a happy ending – I’m looking for less trauma throughout the book. Maybe I need to get comfortable with “stupid.”

So send me your boring, your bland, your dumb and slightly amusing reads, where nothing really happens and no one really cares all that much anyway.