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Awfully quiet around these parts lately, on both your part & mine. So rather than tell you stories about the horribly horribly delayed flight home from Savannah, or Puke Fest '08 courtesy of either some bad food or an even worse virus, or how two of my closest friends from college came to visit during Puke Fest (but they did not cause it with any of the wine, nope, in fact it was a legitimate evening spent on the bathroom floor) and how even through the stomach pain I wanted to figure out a way to wrap them up and keep them here for forever....... instead lets talk about the December book and politely remind you that, ahem, lets see how you felt about Chiefs. Because I loved it. Pink puffy heart loved it and I want to talk to you about it.....in the meantime, Melissa picked a book that I think looks pretty darn intriguing for December AND

 I'm giving you until at least mid-January to send in a review because, man, these holiday sure are busy. 

By: Sarah Manguso 

The review from Publisher's Weekly: In 1995, when Rome Prize?winning poet and fiction writer Manguso (Siste Viator) was a junior at Harvard, she suffered the first attack of a rare autoimmune disease called CIDP, which would turn her body against itself. CIDP attacks the myelin coating of the peripheral nerves. The result is increasing numbness, followed by paralysis spreading from the extremities inward, until the sufferer can no longer control his or her breathing, and dies. In short, lyrical chapters?the book free-associates between memories, while sticking to a rough chronological order?Manguso recounts the harrowing indignities of her treatments, frequent relapses, descents into steroid-induced clinical depression, crucial college sexual experiences had and missed, and trips back and forth between schools, hospitals and her parents' Massachusetts home. What makes this lightning-quick book extraordinary is not just Manguso's deadpan delivery of often unthinkable details, nor her poet's struggle with the damaging metaphors of disease, but the compassion she acquires as she comes to understand her pain in relation to the pain of others: suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the shape and size of a life.

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