I read Andrew Porter’s Flannery O’Connor award-winning collection The Theory of Light & Matter over a month ago and I thought I didn’t like it. I was wrong. Today, I fished the book out from the pile that surrounds my bed because I was determined to write about it.
As I flipped through the pages [...]

Sensei Anthony Stultz wrote the smallest book I have read yet this year, the 73-page Free Your Mind: The Four Directions of an Awakened Life. Stultz offered a simple and structured approach for people find peace of mind, personal empowerment, and the way to greater freedom in life. A student of both psychology and theology, Stultz [...]

Put away the cucumber sandwiches and hot tea. Text messages, emails, and cell-phone subterfuge all surround Vicky Bliss in this jarringly modern book of suspense. Best-selling author, Elizabeth Peters revisits Bliss after a 10 plus year hiatus. Bliss has only aged a few years, but the world around her is altered drastically. Peters acknowledges this [...]

The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth is a fascinating work by the third president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson set out to produce an account of Jesus Christ’s life and teachings that was not tainted by the evangelists, those writers of the four gospels named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and [...]

The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd is, for more than 250 pages, one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. Our hero is a freshman at State, enrolled in art classes. He meets an older sassy wild card named Himillsy Dodd who is full of fun and big ideas. They spend [...]

Thich Nhat Hanh’s 1997 book True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart is a very short and physically small book (the book only has 108 pages and is a little larger than an index card). The book’s physical size is no indication of the breadth of knowledge and thought contained between the covers. Instead, one can [...]

All About Lulu is so good that I am willing to forgive its author, Jonathan Evison, for being a little coy with the reader. This is saying a lot. Next to adverbs and Chuck Klosterman, coyness is my biggest literary pet peeve. But what Lulu lacks in upfrontness she sure makes up for in humor, [...]

Months after everyone has read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, I’m going to add a “me too” to the mess of people who added it to various “best of …” lists.
Hans is a Dutch banker, a passive go’er with the flo’er whose wife lights back to London from Manhattan after 9/11, taking their son with her. Already [...]

When I was reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, I could not help thinking of the move “Stand By Me.” Like that movie, The Virgin Suicides was apparently narrated by a male peer of the five girls that committed suicide. The whole suicide thing also made me think of the movie “Heathers.” The common thread [...]

Vine Deloria Jr.’s The World We Used to Live In is a treasury of stories that detail the great spiritual powers held by the medicine men and women of the many indigenous tribes that once roamed free in North America. Deloria explored the following: dreams and visions, spiritual powers (including healing, location, and prediction), communication [...]