Amazon Kindle : Ward Play-reads for Hospital

Posted on April 5, 2010. Filed under: book reviews, books | Tags: amazon kindle |

Ann Donald: What a week this has been. For the first time that I can remember, reading was an optional – almost impossible – activity.

I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a sip of vodka hidden in the linen cupboard

It all started when my daughter was admitted to hospital with an as-yet undiagnosed foot infection that confined her to a hospital ward with an intravenous antibiotic drip for six days. As we gathered her belongings for what we thought would be an overnight stay, I was impressed that she took along with her Don Quixote with which to while away the hours. Far from tilting at the Silvermine mountains framed by the ward window, however, Quixote stayed put on the bedside pedestal while Andrea battled to ignore the increasing pain and discomfort.

In my experience, reading has always been the best way of distracting myself from anything unpleasant, so if Cervantes wasn’t doing the trick for her, something lighter surely would. Scanning the bookshelves at home between visits, I lit upon Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes – a book I’d enjoyed enormously when I’d read it years before, and in which he writes a description of music so beautiful I cried because the piece didn’t actually exist. She managed a few pages.

Her father, who is a more pragmatic soul than I, went down to the hospital cafeteria and stocked up on You and Glamour magazines. Her friends brought along Stephenie Meyer’s The Host and Zapiro’s latest collection.

The bookshop team picked out Vanity Fair and Dan Rhodes’s Little Hands Clapping to divert her. She barely glanced at any of them, and I sat alongside her helplessly: if books didn’t work and magazines were equally unappealing, I didn’t know where else to turn.

And if she couldn’t read, then it seemed the height of selfishness to read in front of her myself. (It was only when she was finally operated on after four days that I managed to sneak a few pages of Vanity Fair in the cafeteria. I felt like an alcoholic sneaking a sip of vodka hidden in the linen cupboard.)

Now, foot bandaged and resting on an ottoman, Andrea is sitting in my study armchair, and I know she’s feeling better because she’s reading. Don Quixote is still waiting, but she’s deep into both Little Hands Clapping (a book, she says, that should probably not be on the top-10-books-to-read-in-hospital list given its morbid humour, but is ideal for someone in recovery as it is very, very funny), and The Host (a book about aliens inhabiting intelligent life forms – something akin to the unidentified bugs in her foot, I suspect).

The common factor between these two books is that, while one may be defined as literary and the other as trash, both are entertaining, that is, amusing and diverting – exactly what a good doctor would prescribe.

As it happens, it’s also what a good writer recommends. Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, has recently published a collection of 16 essays, Maps & Legends, which considers "reading and writing along the borderlands". Through these essays, Chabon makes a plea for writers to return storytelling to a place of honour, not disparagement.

As I ponder his words, I watch my daughter. She’s forgotten the ache in her foot, the needles in her hands, the nausea. She’s lost in a story and she’s looking happy for the first time in a week.

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