"When you're an artist, it's because there's something inside you that you can't keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jeté, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it's always the same. It's the emotion there isn't a word for. The feeling that's too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable-people who are content-they don't create art."

— Jodi Picoult, from The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine, 2020)

The Book of Two Ways - Jodi Picoult | A Book Review

The Book of Two Ways - Jodi Picoult | A Book Review #BookReview #BookBlogger #AdultFiction

Title: The Book of Two Ways Author: Jodi Picoult Genre: Adult Fiction About the book: It’s a standalone that revolves around Dawn Edelstein who is on a plane when it crash lands. Instead of thinking about her husband Brian, her thoughts are of a man she last saw 15 years ago. She survives and is faced with a choice: fly home to Boston to be with her family or return to Egypt and reconnect with…

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There are five things we need to say to people we love before they die…: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye.

The Book of Two Ways, Jodi Picoult

You ever start reading a book and just know it’s going to destroy you? Yeah, me neither

'The Book of Two Ways' by Jodi Picoult

The Book of Two Ways seamlessly blends Egyptology, physics, end of life care, death and the afterlife with deeply moving explorations of emotional connections and complicated, life-changing decisions, through immersive romantic and platonic relationships and shifting moral boundaries, all in a wonderfully expansive and time-shifting way - 5/5.

I just couldn’t put this down and found myself repeatedly thinking about it when I managed to tear myself away from the pages. 

This is my first Jodi Picoult read and I don’t really know what took me so long. Having just finished my Masters degree in archaeology the month before reading this, both the thematic content of the book and the timing of me picking it up could not have been more perfect. I’ve seen some reviews speaking negatively about the more heavily ‘academic’ nature of the Egyptology/archaeology themes, but I’d advise anyone to read this book regardless because it’s so utterly worth it in a myriad of ways and Egyptology feels like the red thread that ties the entire book together.

Picoult’s character development is incredible - her writing made each of the small cast of character’s personalities, quirks, strengths and weaknesses shine and I really felt for each and every one of them in each version. The sections related to grief and the fear and/or acceptance of death really gripped me, as the one experience each and every one of us as human beings share, no matter our circumstances.

It takes a lot for a book to truly make you feel something, like really deeply honestly feel-it-in-the-gut feel something, but this succeeded 100% for me. I just couldn’t recommend this book enough.

reading ‘the book of two ways’ and losing my mind. bouncing absolute wall

When you're an artist, it's because there's something inside you that you can't keep from spilling out. Maybe it comes in the form of sentences, or a grand jete, or a stroke of a paintbrush. The end result can be a million different things. But the seed, it's always the same. It's the emotion there isn't a word for. The feeling that's too big for your body. To show someone your soul, you have to bleed. People who are comfortable - people who are content - they don't create art.

Jodi Picoult, the book of two ways

Bill Gresens’ Archaeology Book Review for March 2023

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult (four trowels) 

Dawn McDowell’s dreams of becoming an Egyptologist crash when tragedy strikes and her life takes a dramatic turn.  Fifteen years later she struggles to return to that past life and a past love.

Read the entire review at: https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/book-reviews/?review=251550

We sat on the banks of the Seine and looked in its depths. We lay on our backs and pushed the clouds away with our imaginations until we could see nothing but blue, blue that hurt, blue that became the black of the universe. “What are you looking for?”, you asked, and I said, “I’ll know when I see it.” We tried to find my blue in the pottery sold by a Turkish man in a street market; in a handful of bursting berries. We stopped in front of a Chinese restaurant with a tank full of live fish and stared at their rainbow scales. We brushed our fingertips over the heads of pansies in window displays, and counted the navy knapsacks of schoolchildren in uniforms. We went back to the studio, finally, and you mixed paint: aqua and cerulean, indigo, sapphire. You took your brush and stroked them in stripes on the back of my hand, up the inside of my arm. We watched the twilight, all the blues of night being born, and you turned me into art. It was when you moved in me, when you cried out my name, that I found the color I’d been searching for. That blistering blue of your eyes. I’ve been looking for it ever since.

- from The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

fav part of gideon the ninth is for the first pre-canaan house chunk of the book, she's all "ugh I'm so normal surrounded by all these weirdo goth freaks when I blow this popsicle stand everyone will see how cool and normal and charming I am" and then she gets to canaan house and realizes that while she might have been a normie jock in the ninth house she is not exempt from being a goth weirdo who hides important doors behind tapestries and sneaks around in the dark so she doesn't have to talk to people. like we talk about her being a jock forced to be goth but nature v nurture babey she's not shedding that bone freak skin anytime soon

You get close to people who inevitably leave you. The difference is that you call it work. I call it love.

-Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways

Do you think Aziraphale is the literal origin of the damsel in distress trope or did he get the idea from reading books

No I’m ok, it’s just the way that Jesper is probably one of the first men that Inej has felt safe with since the menagerie and Inej is one of the only people who loves Jesper fully and unconditionally regardless of his faults and now they have to leave each other for separate goals that got me for a second there

2022 in books

I will spoil the whole thing after the read-more, just so you know.

Language: Italian (translation)

Original title: The Book of Two Ways

So, first of all: the cover is very cool and I first noticed it on one of those big tables in a bookshop claiming that all the books there were must-read-at-least-once-in-one’s-life. Then hesitated, the book was not there anymore, and then only found it by googling what I remembered of the synopsis.

That said, the protagonist does not look much like that, but I accept it because it’s so sylized that it makes sense that her face is not pictured faithfully on it.

The book is about this woman, Dawn, who finds herself reassessing her whole life and trying to reconcile her dream career (egyptologist)/first love with her actual (fulfilling) life/the family she built for herself. What the synopsis makes you believe is that this happens when she survives an airplane crash - so what I thought would happen (because of the titular two ways) was that we’d follow her past in Egypt for her PhD through flashbacks and, at the same time, see her in the present coming to terms with what she wants to do with her life: go back to her passion for egyptology and her first great love or try and mend her little family.

What actually happens is this: the book starts with the airplane crash and her surviving it. Then the ‘earth way/Egypt’ storyline and the ‘water way/Boston’ storyline start and you have the impression that they are either-or: after the crash she decides on one of the two ‘ways’ and we are following both. The whole point of the Egyptian two ways is that they are paths to the afterlife, so they have the same destination - what I thought was that, somehow, the two would merge at the end and Dawn would get to the final point she was always meant to reach.

Except it was all a lie! Not in the sense that she is a coma and is imagining the earth/water lives, but that they are not parallel ways at all! Earth come after water, because the earth line chronologically starts after the water line and the airplane crash actually happens at the end of the earth storyline - and then, sure, they merge for the reader, but they had never been separate.

And, while the read as a whole is good, this made me feel lied-to.

That said, her job as an end-of-life doula is very interesting and emotional and her original path to be an egyptologist is obviously fascinating. I felt like all the main charatcers were well-developed (aside from the Egyptian characters, who are all a mostly-unnamed mass of underscibed workers - ugh!), the only one who suffered a bit was Brian, who felt a bit too-good-to-be-true in the flashbacks and a bit removed from reality in the present. Having them develop their relationship and marrying for the tax benefits in a couple of paragraphs in a flashback really hurt their believability as this perfect couple as described by Dawn’s brother.

All in all, it was nice, though!