Books - What are you reading?

I'm getting through the epic that is Siddartha Mukherjee's " Emporer of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."
It is beautifully and carefully written. Not as immediately joyful to read as Ramachandaran or Sacks or Gawande but this passage has really stuck for me.

There is, in retrospect something preformed in that magnification, a deeper resonance–as if cancer had struck the raw strings of anxiety already vibrating in the public psyche. When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonation, having been struck by history.
So it was with cancer. As the writer and philosopher Renata Salecl describes it, “a radical change happened to the perception of the object of horror” in the 1970s, a progression from the external to the internal. In the 1950s, in the throes of the Cold War, Americans were preoccupied with the fear of annihilation from the outside: from bombs and warheads, from poisoned water-reservoirs, communist armies, and invaders from outer space. The threat to society was perceived as external. Horror movies–the thermometers of anxiety in popular culture–featured alien invasions, parasitic occupations of the brain, and body snatching: It Came from Outer Space or the Man from Planet X.
But by the early 1970s, the locus of anxiety–the “object of horror”, as Salecl describes it–had dramatically shifted from the outside to the inside. The rot, the horror–the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay–was now relocated within the corpus of society and, by extension, within the body of man. American society was still threatened, but this time, the threat came from inside. The names of horror films now reflected the switch: The Exorcist, They Came from Within.”

It's a little glimpse into a great book. Worth the effort.