BOOKS WE READ

 SOME SUMMER SUGGESTIONS

We’ve written before about our reading habits and preferences. What’s on a person’s

bookshelf can offer significant insight into that individual’s true nature. Reading informs what we write in this space. Books on public affairs, novels, and memoirs teach us what keen observers see in world events and expand our understanding of the human experience.

In this post, we recommend impactful books we’ve each read recently. Seeing what we read may also help readers better understand us.

Henry: A Mystery with Larger Consequences

I believe by reading we gain access to the lives of others and, perhaps, understand

ourselves  better.  If so, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe confronts readers with difficult issues. Keefe presents Say Nothing as a mystery in search of answers after the abduction of a mother in Belfast which most laid at the feet of the Irish Republican Army.  However, the entire violent conflict known as The Troubles that consumed Northern Ireland between the 1960s and 1998 provides the backdrop.

Keefe offers up the conflict through the eyes of actual participants in this incredibly tragic loss of life. With access to the participants, many readers might find themselves appalled because no heroes deserving admiration seem to emerge. We see only humans caught up in a vicious conflict with no striking lessons for our species.
I began the book hoping I’d find answers about a conflict I’d read about for much of my life. I wanted explanations for what led ordinary people to engage in such acts of cruelty. Keefe writes the abduction mystery, around which much of the book centers, well and that story engages the reader throughout. If that were the book’s only focus, I could praise it and the writing without reservation.  But, the book leaves me with a greater mystery:  What roads to peace might have been taken without the price of so many lives?                                                  

                 

Rob: Reaching Back for a Consequential

Memoir

People usually talk about recently released books they’ve read or that they’ve finally read an old book they missed along the way, perhaps a literary classic. Sometimes, however, books get released we’d enjoy but never get to. That happened with me and 2011’s An Unquenchable  Thirst: Following

Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life by Mary Johnson. This memoir of a former nun in the Missionaries of Charity, the Calcutta, India based order led by the late Mother Teresa, explores the tension between the life people may believe they want in youth and the life they may grow into later.

Mary Johnson was an idealistic teenager desiring a life of service and dedication to faith. At 17, she saw a Time magazine cover

story on  Mother Teresa and latched on to the idea of joining the MCs. She realized that dream, living as Sister Donata for 20 years, mostly in New York, Washington, and Rome. Then, in 1997, the year of Mother Teresa’s death, she left the MCs and became Mary Johnson again

While I took some interest in her description of the upstairs/downstairs politics in the MCs, the book’s greatest contribution lies in showing how people grow and change. Mary Johnson took a chastity vow when she joined, but left having had sexual encounters of varying intensity with two other nuns and a priest. She realized the vows she took no longer fit the person she had become or wanted to become. She left the order, later married, and continued her service outside the church.  She described herself as an atheist. She became a different person. An Unquenchable Thirst reminds us life takes many twists and turns. Regardless of our certainty, change is always foreseeable.  

Woodson:   Property and Power over People

Social justice is my primary interest. No books

have given me the clarity for achieving social justice like Capital and  Ideology by world

renowned economist Thomas Piketty and Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by nationally renowned American economist Paul Krugman.

Henry once told me he often reads multiple books simultaneously. My private reaction (which I didn’t share until now) was that only pointy-headed intellectuals would do that. Be careful not to judge others too quickly. Reading these two books at the same time

has been  gratifying. Before Henry says, “I told you so,” let me explain that both concern economics and politics, which could explain why the process can work.

Piketty writes from an historic and global perspective, discussing the late Middle Ages, the Early Modern, and Modern and Contemporary periods. He covers Russia, China, Iran, the United States, and         

numerous countries in Africa and Europe. He focuses on the sacralization of property and how it and money determine the choice of government as much as social movements. Piketty contends that if nations study the corrupting role of property and money in government, and build safeguards against their influence, nations can establish more egalitarian societies. 

Krugman writes about current day U.S. economics and politics and the governing ideologies of the two major political parties. Eerily, he seems to prove Piketty’s point: by ignoring the practices of past societies and their sacralization of property and giving moneyed interests disproportionate influence in our democracy, America now experiences greater inegalitarianism than ever before.

Both books are fun to read and enlightening for those who seek an understanding of how the United States might build a more just and egalitarian society.

A GLIMPSE INTO OUR INNER BEINGS: WHAT WE READ

In this space over the last 3 ½ years, we’ve acknowledged drawing on books we’ve read for ideas on matters we see as worth writing

about. We’ve pointed readers to books (The Half Has Never Been Told, The Color of Law, and The Warmth of Other Suns) we regard as essential for understanding race in America. We reviewed one of them (The Color of Law) in explaining America’s chronic housing discrimination problem. And, we drew on Madeline Albright’s Fascism: A Warning, in sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump’s dangerous affinity for dictators.

                      

Reading books defines each of our lives, beyond the utility of their content. We find

solace in the books strewn around our homes and offices and packed onto our shelves. None of us can contemplate a life without books. But, what do we read and why? With each of us, there’s a story offering insight into who we are and how we’ve evolved.   

Henry: Diversity, Diversity, Diversity

Many books I’ve read have taken me places I

couldn’t have imagined and offered context for the jumbled exploration of my own thoughts. From my earliest years, reading provided a spiritual experience in which I could join others in exploring humanity and personal relationships. Even in childhood, I read many

different things in many different areas.  I still do: science fiction like Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; physics, like The Great  Unknown by Marcus Du Sautoy

and Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams; religion, including The Bible and A History of God by Karen Armstrong; fiction,including mysteries like Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea and classics like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Rabbit Run, and The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. In keeping current on events of the day (and in step with my co-authors) I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

                    

Each of these works, and many others I’ve read, remain part of my fabric. This approach

has a drawback. Sometimes, when I go into a bookstore, I find myself happy and sad at the same time – happy because I’m amidst so much knowledge I’d hope I can absorb and sad because I can’t read it all.    

Rob: A Change is Gonna Come

If 25 years ago I’d been asked for an explanation of what I read and why, the answer would have been quite different than what I offer today. Before the late ‘90s, with the exception of trashy

“airport novels” I occupied  myself with on cross country flights, I read nonfiction. My bookshelf included volumes on elections (Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President series), analyses of World War II

(Richard Overy’s Why  the Allies Won), political memoirs (Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect), and biographies of major historical figures (Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson series).

These books brought  me considerable knowledge about a few subjects and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. But, as I see now, I was missing something. A change was coming.   

In 1999, a friend invited my wife and me into a couples book club. Under its rules, each

person took a turn at picking the book for quarterly dinner meetings. Book club membership changed my reading habits (and my life). During the ensuing 21 years, we’ve read 90 books, about half fiction. I found myself reading, and enjoying, A Confederacy of Dunces, John K. Toole’s wonderful, Pulitzer Prize winning novel  set in

New Orleans, where I once lived, and Stephen King’s 11/22/63,  a time travel novel that presented an entirely different perspective on the JFK assassination. 

My book club experience confirmed the wisdom in the old adage some writers live by: if you want facts, write nonfiction. If you want truth, write fiction. l took that to heart. My

book club experience in hand, and after my wife’s death, I  decided I’d try my hand at writing fiction. I began grabbing more and more novels. I still read lots of nonfiction, but I’m now a confirmed, dedicated fiction reader too.

Woodson: Choices and Goals

My book choices are influenced largely by my life choices and goals. With fewer days left to live than I’ve already lived and with goals remaining, I concentrate my reading on what furthers achievement of my goals.

                        

Because I am a property manager and real estate investor, I read a lot on real estate and economic matters (books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chris Hogan’s Everyday Millionaires, Joseph

Stiglitz’s People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, and  Property Management Kit for Dummies by  Robert Griswold).  My interest in political and racial issues is satisfied by reading books like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful Team of Rivals and the critically  important That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World and How We Can Comeback by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Meltz, and

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Finally, because I participate in several Christian ministries, I read books

on religion, including Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, Instinct: The Power to Unleash Your Inborn Drive by T.D. Jakes, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, and The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. Then there’s the Holy Bible. I read that too.

                         

As with Henry and Rob, my reading focus developed over time. It reflects life choices

I’ve  made because of my evolution as a person and as a professional, and through recognizing the limitations we all face as humans. Reading remains an essential part of my life.