what we're reading....

as you might expect, there is a quite a bit of downtime while we're here- so we read. it's hard to find a quiet place to flip through the channels at the ronald mcdonald house, and we generally start to bristle a bit at the noise that television brings to a room after we've been here for a while. isaiah is still pretty wiped out, so there are stretches of the day and the night that we just kind of sit around- so we read.

i recently finished arthur and george by julian barnes, and jen is blazing through it now--it's really good. i'm in to the beautiful cigar girl now by daniel stashower- which is also really good. when i leave that somewhere by mistake, i'm reading vows by peter manseau- which is a little crazy because it's written by a guy who's parents are former a former nun and a former priest. pretty good though. jen has been dipping into some rilke poetry- always good and life-affirming, even when (especially when?) he's writing about death. we're picking through the news via the chicago tribune- but it's pretty much all bears, all the time at this point. our regular periodicals are getting flipped through as well--the ehrenriech piece jen referenced last week is in harpers and there is a timely article by jerome groopman in last week's new yorker called "what's the trouble: how doctors think" (link is to this week's issue, though).

we focus pretty exclusively on the craziness of isaiah's condition on this site- so maybe this will give you flavor of what we fill up some of the quiet(er) moments with.