Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

If you've ever watched the TV show "House" before, then you'll have an idea of what this book will be like. We meet a young, thriving Susannah at the age of 24.  Susannah starts experiencing some mild medical issues when she thinks she has a case of bed bugs in her apartment.  Her health quickly declines with terrifying problems.  What starts as flu like symptoms turns into seizures, paranoia, and even hallucinations.

Doctors run a multitude of tests on her.  They all come back with clean results and no diagnosis.  With no concrete evidence to go off of, the initial guesses from doctors range from bipolar disorder to mono.  One clueless doctor even tells her that she must be suffering from alcohol withdrawal and just needs to lay off her partying weekends.  Her seizures continue to progress with no signs of stopping, so she is checked into NYU's epilepsy ward.

Susannah's boyfriend, Stephen, is ever-present during her entire hospital stay.  Remarkably, they had only been dating for 6 months prior to her hospitalization.  Susannah's estranged parents are also very involved.  Since they still had issues with one another, they communicated all of the day's medical updates through a journal to one another.  Susannah also introduces the reader to nurses and doctors who are assigned to her case.

Before Susannah's disaster, she was a a journalist with the New York Post.  Putting her journalistic skills to use, she recreates her "month of madness" because she couldn't remember all of it herself.  She interviewed, researched, and pieced together information from her family, boyfriend, hospital staff, doctors, etc and was able to amazingly cover all of the time that she couldn't remember.  She was able to weave it together seamlessly.  The amount of effort she put into reconstructing her narrative is what impressed me the most.  She is able to give you enough insight to the medical information so you can understand the whole picture without getting lost in the jargon.

I don't want to give any spoilers to this book by explaining her final diagnosis.  You'll have to read it to find out yourself!  It is really difficult to write much more without giving too much information away!

The book is just under 300 pages, and it took me 3 sittings to finish the book.  I didn't even notice the time that flew by when I would sit down and read it.  After reading "Atlas Shrugged," I wanted a book that was really gripping and easy to read.  The internet helped me on my quest to find something exciting.  I found this book on quite a few different "must read" lists online.  It currently has a 3.99 out of 5 star rating on the website Goodreads.  Susannah posted on her Instagram (linked here) that they were planning on making a movie out of the book with Chloe Grace Moretz to star in the film.  I can imagine that this would make a great movie.  I would highly recommend this book if medical mysteries interest you!  Happy reading everyone!

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

This book will peak your interest if you like one of the following: anything to do with trains, the difficulties of running your own business, strong female main characters, political unrest to due an overly strict government, or you just like suffering through 1,000+ page books for no apparent reason.  About 2/3rds of the way through the book, I realized that no one was actually going to read this book based on my review, and I almost gave up on it.  I think I finished it just to say I did it and less out of enjoyment for the book itself.  As a matter of fact, I struggled through a lot of this book.  I told my mom that the author must have suffered from writer's flood versus writer's block.  You could have cut out 600 pages of the book and it still would have made sense.  I'll still give you a brief overview of the story just in case in interests some poor soul out there who wants to read it.

Dagny Taggart, is the Vice President of Taggart Transcontinental.  This is a family run railroad business.  Taggart Transcontinental starts to have difficulty as more and more regulations are being implemented by the government.  The political figures make these regulations with intentions to hurt successful companies while saying they are trying to level the playing field for all businesses.  In an effort to save her railway, Dagny works with Hank Reardon, of Reardon Metals, to create a new, cost effective railroad with a new metal alloy Reardon created.  As Dagny and Hank continue to work together, the government starts to crumble the entire industrial backbone of the country.  Many of Dagny's supporters and friends, who are also business owners, are disappearing into thin air to save themselves.  Dagny is on a mission to find out why her friends are disappearing, as she knows she will most likely be approached at some point about whatever it is that makes them leave.  Will she be able to save Taggart Transcontinental?

It is a very well written book.  Just too long winded for the every day causal reader.  I had to put post-it tabs in my book to make sure I was staying on task and meeting my quotas for the week.  In Section Three of the book, the author changes course entirely - it is where you learn about all of Dagny's disappearing friends - it suddenly becomes exciting again, but I felt like the excitement was short lived.  And I thought the resolution to the book was so-so.

In closing, if you are a die-hard lover of books, and you are looking for a ridiculous challenge... try reading the Game of Thrones book series!  Just kidding.  But really...  You may love "Atlas Shrugged", you may hate it, you may fizzle in and out of it like I did, but at least you can appreciate the time and effort Ayn Rand took to write this monster of a novel.