As discussed, I am in hold jail because I have an uncontrollably itchy-reserve finger. I request more books than I can physically read; this is the ultimate problem. Things get worse when, oh, I have-to-read-100-non-fiction books. I renew madly, holding out this bit of hope that I’ll be able to read everything before due dates, but when my bookshelves physically runneth over, I am obviously just kidding myself. It hurts my spirit to have to admit defeat and return unread books. It hurts my spine to think about lugging books to and from the library if I’m not even going to read them.

On New Year’s Day, I had all the reading options in the world and I decided to start one of those Itchy-Reserve-Finger, Renewed-Five-Times, Almost-Overdue books so that sense of self-righteous achievement could propel me into 2013. Bonus points of it is

That book was Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones, and while I may have begun this book with all sorts of righteous intentions, about a quarter of the way through I was just plain enjoying myself. And when the point of view did a sudden switch, halfway through? I forgot all of my good intentions and just sped through.

Dana knows her father, but he lives with his other family – his real wife and daughter. Dana and her mother keep the secret, finding an uneasy satisfaction in their position as the Ones Who Know, able to “surveil” their counterparts, observing and judging, while the favored family is none the wiser. But while Dana can watch with her mother, from a distance, as soon as daddy’s real daughter – Chaurisse – shows up at a school, a program, a job, then Dana must defer to avoid any unsupervised interactions. Once Dana is at the end of high school, the small injustices of being the second-class family, the obvious  daddy issues, the instability of her future start to pile up, leaving Dana unsure of her family, her future, and herself.

Like I said – I was totally into Dana’s story, woven with family history, her mother’s courtship, her first loves, her friendships, and then I turned a page and BAM there was Chaurisse – privileged, unknowing Chaurisse who has a mother and a father and a secret family. It would have been interesting enough just to hear her side of the story, the flip side of the coin, but it doesn’t take too long to realize that these two families are heading towards each other much more quickly than anyone – character or reader – would expect.

With two teen narrators, this qualifies as one of my favorite invented adult lit sub-genres – The Secretly YA Novel. Add to that  a satisfying, generation-spanning family drama with a bit of literary heft, and oh, it reads like a dream? A nice choice for a new year.

Since moving to Boston I have spent a decent amount of time hanging out in airports, alone. An airport is a strange space – everyone sitting close together, everyone paying a few hundred dollars for the privilege, everyone on a little personal mission to get home or get away.

I flew to and from Columbus, Ohio a few weeks ago; my first experience with Christmas travel. The planes were packed, the terminals busy, and everyone was talking. I talked to Dorothy on her way to Pennsylvania to celebrate Christmas with her niece even though she hates traveling in the winter and would have stayed home, but her son insisted, said that he would carry her the whole way there if he had to. At BWI, I listened to two men talk for a half hour, about their jobs, about Michigan and traveling for work and their families at home. Three college students from different Big Football-type schools sat in front of me on my final leg, and talked about Big Football-type things for the entire flight.

Everyone has a little story when they fly, and you feel alright asking a stranger what that story is, because they are in the airport with you so they must have one. Jennifer E. Smith takes this concept to its most romantic possibilities in The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. Having missed her scheduled flight, Hadley meets Oliver, a fantasy seat-mate for a long flight: cute, chatty, and British. They share their little stories that end up being big ones: Hadley is on her way to London to see her dad for the first time in a year… as he marries her new step-mom, Oliver is returning home from Yale even though he likes it better in the States. Flirtation rises, then the plane lands and they are hustled apart – Hadley has to attend the wedding she is dreading… but will she see Oliver again? Will life ever feel as carefree as when she was with him, in the air?

I am making this book sound much more schmaltzy than it is. The timeline is short, but Smith doesn’t overshoot the Love at First Sight-yness of it all (despite the title); it’s a reasonable amount of attraction. Hadley and Oliver fall in love the way that I love characters in books to fall in love -gradually, with good sense, maybe without realizing. And the third person narration keeps the book from feeling like a drama-fest, full of Hadley’s over-the-top emotions; we, the readers, have just enough distance to allow us to observe when she overreacts without having to roll our eyes too much.

I do wish that the ending had been a bit less frantic, less full of fortuitous Dickens quotes, but hey, when in London, read Dickens, right? Quick, fresh, and fun.

I remember the summer after my high school graduation as one gigantic downward spiral of anxiety. It started with weird job hours, then add in play rehearsals, then add in a break-up, then add in your boyfriend hooking up with someone else in your play, and then the light at the end of the tunnel? Move away from every person you’ve ever known or loved and live with strangers and yay, college!

So I harbored all of the usual college-related angst – would I have enough money, would my roommates like me, how would I get to the bank/pharmacy/Target without a car – but some of my worries were more irrational. Example: I became fixated on what would happen if I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my leg. Who would help me? How would I get to the hospital? How would I get home from the hospital? I would probably just die in the stairwell, right?

I hope you don’t think this is a spoiler – Susannah Cahalan does not die in a stairwell at the end of her memoir, Brain on Fire. However, the rest of her story follows my fear down a path so awful that even my wildest anxieties couldn’t have imagined this was a human possibility.

Susannah is a young professional started a journalism career in New York City when she starts feeling tired, getting distracted, and suffering mood swings. Now, please imagine yourself bringing those symptoms to a medical professional – if you even decided to go in the first place, you would be sent home with a prescription of “You are a young professional in New York so calm yourself down and call me once you’ve magically eliminated all of your stressors. Deep breathing. Yoga. Get some sleep, sweetie.” Par for the medical course. But Susannah’s behavior becomes stranger and stranger – blowing work assignments, crying at the drop of a hat and forgetting why in the next moment; and then one night she has a terrifying seizure and her boyfriend takes her to the hospital. For a month, Susannah is shuttled from hospital wing to hospital wing as doctors alternately struggle to figure out what has happened to her, or try to force her into any number of condemning diagnoses – alcoholism, severe manic-depression, sudden onset schizophrena, and more. And what’s more – once the ordeal is over, Susannah can’t remember anything.

This is a medical thriller, like reading an episode of House MD from the patient’s perspective, but it’s also an interesting piece of self-directed journalism. Susannah’s doctors and family try to make sense of her seemingly unexplained symptoms, eventually finding a rare diagnosis (an autoimmune brain disorder that causes sudden psychosis, is largely undiagnosed and misunderstood, and might look to the outside observer like, oh, demon possession). But the work itself is a way that Susannah makes sense of what happened to her, what her life was like before, and what it is like afterwards. The story is devoid of melodrama, there are breaks for medical research (including diagrams), and without a saccharine “and we all lived happy ever after” – Susannah’s journalism training definitely shows. But there’s also the sensitivity of memoir, a certain sense of contemplation in the prose that reminds you that this is autobiographical, a girl’s life, and now she has to deal with the repercussions of what happened. It was a trauma. It might have changed her brain processing forever. Things have changed.

All in all, a quickly moving, sensitive medical memoir that is also completely horrifying. At least if you fall down the stairs and break your leg in public, passersby won’t lock you up in the mental ward. Just sayin’, 18-year-old Jessica. Just sayin’.