To read again

I just finished the first chapter of Mountains Beyond Mountains. Last week, I attending a talk given by bestselling author, Atul Gawande, at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. I had just finished his book, Better, and bought, with the aid of a 33% off coupon, The Checklist Manifesto, at Borders on Newbury Street. Last Thursday, I attended a noon conference at the Life Sciences Building across the street from Children's. It was a seminar on social networking through blogging and other online media. There had seemed to a few writers in the audience, a few with their own blogs, and one attending from my own pulmonary department who writes book reviews for JAMA and has a sleep medicine blog with Psychology Today.

And this morning, I woke up, grabbed my journal, and wrote what was on my mind for 20 minutes. Now I'm blogging, after finishing that short, first chapter.

I love words, stories, and I love turning the pages of a book. I'm not sure I could ever be a loyal Kindle user, but I do think the idea is a good one. It's quite cold these days in Boston, and I'm rediscovering how reading a book enables me to leave my small Fenway apartment without having to brace myself against a windchill that strips away my body's protective layer of heat. I can escape, even without having to turn on the TV. That is the most remarkable thing of all.

I'm finally reading again. Not quite like I used to when I was a child growing up in Southeastern Connecticut, where I would check out piles of books from the Waterford Public Library, and go through them even at the dinner table. But even so, I'm slowly starting to make time for words that create stories. Words that do not begin with "The patient is a 14 year-old female with a history of...", but words that are chosen, then discarded, then crossed out, then chosen again. It's comforting.