Some end of the year thoughts

Book rec roundup, medicine is hard, etc

Dear reader,

It’s hard to believe we’re in the last few days of 2024 — it feels like I’ve blinked and the year has passed. Lately, my life has been primarily doctoring, with writing snuck in at odd hours (while eating dinner, those rare days off, my notes app as I’m falling asleep). I’ve just turned in my latest draft of ANATOMY, though, and each time it feels closer to the shape it’s supposed to be.

Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about medicine and the ways it’s changing me. One of the strange, surreal things about residency is that the days are so busy that otherwise important / meaningful / often heartbreaking moments just…happen, and then you move on because you have to, there are more patients to see, there are hours more left in the hospital. You break the news to someone you’ve just met that they have metastatic cancer, you perform CPR on a patient on the floor of a hospital room, knees aching, you come home and fall asleep immediately and do it again the next day. Every day, I’m thankful for this job — what a privilege it is to bear witness in these moments — but I’ve increasingly noticed how normal it feels to be surrounded by suffering, by grief, by death. Someday, I think, I’ll write about it. For now, I’m mostly just living it.

An annual round-up of oddly specific book recs:

• THE LAST HOUR BETWEEN WORLDS by Melissa Caruso, about a single mother, a time loop, and a party that descends through different layers of reality (pair with another fantasy novel about motherhood: THE BOOK EATERS by Sunyi Dean)

• LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C. Pam Zhang, about class consciousness, food, and desire (pair with a collection of short stories that feels equally sharp and dreamlike: NINETAILS by Sally Wen Mao)

• STRANGE PRACTICE by Vivian Shaw, about a primary care doctor for the undead, a murder mystery, and some of the most accurate medicine I’ve seen in fiction (pair with a contemporary novel about medicine that will also have you laughing out loud: BETWEEN FRIENDS & LOVERS by Shirlene Obuobi)

• ROUGH SLEEPERS by Tracy Kidder, nonfiction about Boston’s unhoused population and the Harvard physician who cares for them (pair with a memoir that will also elicit big, complicated feelings about how we interact with the world around us: H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald)

That’s all! Some goals for this coming year: to keep reading widely and joyfully, to practice better medicine every day, to turn in a final draft of ANATOMY, to finish drafting a project I’ve been working on since 2015 — more to come on that.

See you in 2025,

Grace

P.S. For the second year in a row, my younger brother has coded his own version of a Goodreads Wrapped (available to all!). I am delighted both as a reader and as his sister, obviously — you can check it out at myyearinbooks.com for some fun + personalized reading stats.