Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen

This was a fun book to read - I enjoyed the contrast between an elderly man's drifting focus on the minutiae that's left to his life (buttoning his shirt and trying to remember the name of his favorite nurse at the nursing home he's in) and his far more vivid memories of his scandal-filled days as a circus veterinarian. It was certainly entertaining (the author drew on the collective facts and anecdotes of the entire train-circus world and actually includes photographs taken from various circuses) and fact filled (she did a lot of research on elephant and other circus animals, and they are fully fleshed characters in her story). However, it also contains some scarringly graphic scenes that preclude me from recommending this to anybody whose soul I value. It seriously took me weeks to get over those scenes. *shudder*