The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Ignore the scurrilous language and the burden of tiny-print footnotes and you can't help being drawn in by this novel about a family with one foot in the Dominican Republic and one in New Jersey. Oscar is a normal but enormously unattractive guy who is often hopelessly in love and in the end gives up his life to it. In the background there are stories of the horrors endured by the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo years. The footnotes that look so daunting at first are actually amusing bits of historic scuttlebutt and the story is all the more vivid for the casual attitude and language of the author.

The God Theory by Bernard Haisch

Subtitled Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's behind It All, Haisch's personal take on the nature of God is typical of a spiritual man of science. His answer to "What's behind it all" is consciousness; God is an infinite, timeless consciousness. But he also honors the Kabbalah in noting that "all descriptions of God are necessarily wrong, because an infinite, timeless consciousness can have no characteristics that can be properly translated into physical terms. Love, light, and bliss come the closest."

Haisch is an astrophysicist and Catholic seminary drop-out; currently he says he's an independent Christian who occasionally attends a Unity Church. He believes that scientists who rigidly adhere to a reductionist materialism are as dogmatic as religionists who ignore the principles of science.

Mystics of all religious traditions invert science's assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of the material brain and its neurochemistry. They say that matter does not create consciousness; consciousness creates matter. Quantum mechanics is coming close to agreeing. "In the physics laboratories of today, we acknowledge an enigmatic, but undeniable, relationship between consciousness and the outcome of quantum experiments."

Excellent book for pulling science and spirituality together.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

A Spanish shepherd named Santiago sells his sheep and ventures into northern Africa to travel to the pyramids and find his "treasure." The adventures he has along the way increase his life skills and enhance his spirituality. There is much that is mystical in his experience, the basic lesson being that "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." As a simple moral tale, The Alchemist has been compared to Jonathan Living Seagull and St. Exupery's The Little Prince. It is pretty easy to read but difficult to pull Santiago's experiences into a cohesive philosophy.