[stylist] what I've been reading

[Chris Kuell]

Here is a list of the books I've read in the last 6 weeks or so, if anyone is interested.

chris
The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley  (2004)

A somewhat interesting novel about an unemployed, drunken, loser black guy who has a wealthy white man rent his basement for a few months at an exorbitant rate. Mosley's African American protagonists are always 'players', and I find this aspect of his work overly stereotypical.  

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

A novel about an Italian kid in California who becomes an Olympic runner, then joins the Air force in WWII, gets shot down and is a Japanese POW for 2 years. The POW scenes are one worse than the next, and in the end, with God's help, he forgives all. Yeah, right.

Double Shot: A Culinary Mystery by Diane Mott Davidson  (2004)

Murder she wrote with a catering backdrop.

Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg  (1986, 2005)

Goldberg is a practicing Buddhist, and this book is about how she uses journal writing as a daily meditative practice. It's interesting, and probably a good way to open the unconscious to see what spills out.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks  (2001)

An excellent historical novel about a town in England that walls itself off from the rest of the world to contain the plague for a year in the 17th century. A novel based on real events. 

The Social Animal: Hidden sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks  (2011)

 Brooks is a journalist/anthropologist/psychologist, and he used a fictional couple's lives, from birth to death, to detail some of the plethora of knowledge he has gathered over the years. He's a good writer, and makes what could be very dry quite fascinating.

The House on Olive Street by Robyn Carr  (1999)

An entertaining novel about 5 women writer friends, one of whom dies in chapter 1. The other 4 spend a summer screwing up and fixing their own personal lives.

The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell  (1949)

An interesting, if a little boring, discussion of the basic aspects of the hero myth, and how many different myths from all continents and cultures contain the same elements. These include popular religions, and Campbell proposes the myths are part of our psychological makeup. The book is dated and he relies a little too much on dream research by Sigmund Freud for my taste. 

The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly  (2011)

A mediocre legal thriller, I wish Connelly had stuck to the Harry Bosch novels.

Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship by Martin Gilbert (2007)

Gilbert is an all-around Churchill expert, and this book details how from Childhood Churchill had Jewish friends and always pushed for an independent Zionist state, as early as 1920, despite anti-Semitism in England and throughout Europe. .

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (1974)

This book won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction in 1975. Dillard spends a year at a cabin in the woods of Virginia, basically studying and reading about nature. She is a fabulous writer and a few sentences can't do this work justice, but she goes through all the wonders of all the seasons and discreetly points out that this massively complex eco system we live in has to be the product of a God. As she wrote--the agnostic asks 'who turned on the lights?' while the person of faith asks 'why did they turn them on?'