I have never, for one, enjoyed reading reviews. There is this unflinching paranoia that the writer may give the plot away and leave me moody; housing inactive residual pockets of deja-vu-ness that would crop up should I one day turn the pages of the novel - oh yes, this seems familiar! It would be a horrible notion if he has somehow successfully managed to make me hate a novel before reading it (or judging it by its cover).

If your astute powers of deduction has not failed you so far, it is no spoiler that this entry marks the occasion when a reviewer has - surprisingly - earned my trust.

The Guardian hosts a special page for the Booker prize, a little treat I thought I could peruse through to allow me to procrastinate (studying) a little longer. Al Kennedy is - as other words fail to describe it so easily - brilliant! His review on ‘The Gathering’ told me what I already knew (from a conversation with Alfred in the hospital library), but he managed to describe it with much passion that now, as I’m typing this, I’m wishing my agenda is left free so that I could read this book with a cup of tea. He states that the author, a Miss Enright, believes that ‘telling a story is not enough..it must be well told‘. His homage to the author is a review that is well written despite it being a simple description of the novel. His personal thoughts are sprinkled sparingly: dissection of characters and events are teasingly minimal, but pungently invokes curiousity for the reader.

My favourite bits include these quips and quotations:

1. This is a world where fidelity is impossible and sex is absurd, but love is forever, like a scar.

2. Veronica [a character] reminds us that she is named for the saint who wiped Christ’s face on his way to the cross, producing his image “on her tea towel”, a nun tells her - this was “the first ever photograph”. Veronica mentions, characteristically deadpan, that she still thinks of the saint whenever she’s given a moist towel after a Chinese meal.

3. He [the character Liam] becomes the ultimate definition of love’s stupidity - an outpouring of energy towards people who are always destined to disappoint, to be disappointed and, above all, who are compelled to leave us in the most devastating way, by dying.

4. She [the author Anne Enright] has uncovered the truth that sometimes our great adventures are interior. When someone we love dies, leaves, the action is elsewhere. That battle with cancer, that dramatic crash, that bolt from the blue - it’s all scripted for someone else. And yet still we insist on being changed, moved, reshaped. It is our nature, the nature Enright charts.

Oh, when exams end, what wierd and wonderful things (like reading endlessly) await me! My toes bristle with anticipation for this madness to end!

The classic triad of an emo medical student: coffee, medical textbook, poem anthology.

“I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.”
- excerpt from XIII (Dedications) by Adrienne Rich

After cleaning up the little mistakes I have made in my Pain presentation - psyching myself up for an academic battlefield as I stand in front of Consultants tomorrow - I opted to read a little before switching off the lights. And if your wandering foresight would trail towards textbooks - why, how could you - I would rather wash my hands clean off of anything remotely related to Medicine (well, not absolutely) and scroll over instead to Lucia Li’s blog on Medscape.

Some background info: Medscape is a medical student website, packed to the rafters with anything that may interest your average nerd. Being American, you could say that it is the more commercial, super-shiny, sugar coated version of the more professional, informal version of the studentbmj (of which I am a massive fan of). But it is their constant updates from hand-picked bloggers that really sets this website apart from all others.

Lucia Li must have taken over Aaron Singh, for there must be a token UK student in the blogroll. In this instance, with both of them coming from stoic sterile Cambridge, their take on the conventional curriculum takes off the sharpness of cheesy medicine that the newfangled schools (mine included) prefer to dabble in for vogue-sake. Whilst Aaron approached it with much humour and normalcy (proving indeed that Cambridge-folk can be human), Lucia Li writes with such honest conviction on personal musings.

I wish I could write as reflectively as her. Often at times, my blog has been overused as an outlet to vent and document; rarely does it provide worthy nuggets for myself or any other reader. I feel like I’m slowly dissolving myself into writing Pop Blogging - to be tied to churning poetic emotive vomit and nothing more. I believe that one of the greatest gifts any person could give another is Inspiration; and it is very much this that drives me to trawl through the complicated webbing of social connections - to talk to people and to absorb their ideas. I hope to inspire someone in my life too, and indeed eventually be with one who could do likewise.

Salman Rushdie wrote this beloved quote, one that I would love to recite ad-nauseum should I have the capacity to remember the technicalities:

Who what am I?

My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contain a similar multitude.

I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.

To move back to Lucia Li - for she must be the focus of this post certainly - she has indeed inspired me to write with more substance; less bang, more grit. I certainly wouldn’t want to read all my past literature and indeed come to the conclusion that my 6 years in medical school ran by with little maturity. I know I have learned a lot over the years; the challenge now is to transcribe it perfectly.

I hope this is not just a phase.