Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan 264 pages

This was a fascinating book.  Susannah Cahalan was young, driven and intelligent.  Suddenly she starts behaving in ways she can't rationalize or understand.  Eventually, she becomes someone her family and friends barely recognize.  This was a compelling story about a neurological disease that is barely understood still.  Susannah was lucky to have recovered as well as she did, others have not.  She is a reporter, and she wrote this book largely based on her investigative skills, by interviewing her family and medical teams, and by watching videos of herself during a period she has absolutely no recollection of.  I couldn't put this down, it was engrossing.

Z: a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, 375 pages

Z is a credible, fictional account of Zelda Fitzgerald's life just prior to her marriage to F. Scott until shortly after his death. Knowing very little about her life beforehand, I was captivated by this book from the jazz age time period, to the endless parties around the globe hobnobbing with some of the greatest literary minds ever, to F. Scott's alcoholism and his abusive nature (who knew?), and to her schizophrenic diagnosis that landed her in and out of mental institutions. Some doctors now believe based on old medical reports, that Zelda was actually bipolar.

 Although Zelda's life was spent in the shadow of her more famous husband, she was an author, painter and dancer in her own right. I can't help but wonder where she would be had she been born in a different time. This really was a well written, highly entertaining book that made me want to know more, to reread The Great Gatsby one of my all time favorites, and to read Zelda's work as well.