Who's ready for some more book club selections?!?! It's time for another batch of books to read together! We have another round of voting completed and we have another batch of great books to read together. The book for February 2025 is The Physician by Noah Gordon. Feel free to read our book club books in any order that you choose and when you've finished reading, come back here and tell us what you think. Please label spoilers. We have a new trick for hiding spoilers. Type whatever you want and then highlight the spoiler portion and click the + button above and select Spoiler. If that doesn't work (seems to be funky on Macs) just highlight your text and change the color to white >>>This is a super secret spoiler alert!<<< like I did right there. Just a note, anyone is welcome to join in with our book club reading at any time and join in the discussion! The more the merrier! Happy reading!
I also forgot to come back here (I'm so bad about that!) after I finished reading this in mid-January. I really enjoyed this one! It definitely had the same feel as The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett which I absolutely loved too. The idea of how medicine was practiced a couple hundred years ago is fascinating and that you had to travel all the way to Iran to study with the best Physicians was also super interesting. I loved imagining what that city must have been like all those years ago. I also found it fascinating that you couldn't study there unless you were Jewish (or Muslim) and that he wanted to learn so badly, he pretended to be Jewish even though he was a devout Christian. The name Barber Surgeon was strange to me, but that they made little alcoholic tinctures and then had to do a road show almost like a Circus just to get people to come over and listen to what you were selling was so strange. And then after the people would see that you could juggle and do some magic tricks, they step behind a curtain and let them treat their injuries and illnesses. So weird! I also thought it was interesting that even so recently as a couple hundred years ago, their religious beliefs would not allow doctors to look inside the body, so a true surgeon didn't exist back then! Anyway, it was a little longer of a book that I think was really necessary, but I did enjoy the long journey that the main character took. I did think the ending was a bit abrupt after all the detail in the rest of his story, but I was also glad it wasn't more drawn out at the same time.
