Rico knows how he feels

Rico says he's reading Martin Cruz Smith's book Stalin's Ghost. Great stuff, as usual.
In this Arkady Renko novel (great detective character, by the way), he gets shot in the head, but survives.
There is a description of things all-too-familiar to Rico: "He exercised his memory by reading. Or recollecting telephone numbers and connecting them to names. The oldest numbers came to the fore, reestablishing their precedence: passport, army service, phone numbers for faces he hadn't seen in years. More recent numbers were wisps of fog."

Rico says it's been 27 months since he got 'shot' in the head by his angioma, and his memory is doing better than Arkady's, but it ain't perfect yet.