Paradoxology; Spirituality in a Quantum Universe by Mariam Therese Winter

The title is a made-up word that combines paradox and doxology, but little is said about paradox in this book; instead, it is basically a song of praise to God. It is very lyrical and contains a some lovely poetry written by the author. However, I have reservations about her use of the word "quantum," because the tie to physics is somewhat tenuous. Winter has definitely done her homework and knows about wave/particle duality, nonlocality, and the shift from a Newtonian based reality to a quantum one. But it seems to me that she is just stepping into a spiritual consciousness that was being presented at Universalist and Unitarian churches back in the 1950's.

Becoming Finola by Suzanne Strempek Shea

A thirty-something young woman travels to a small village in Ireland and becomes enmeshed in the life of the community. There she finds her true love, only to have his fabled ex-girlfriend (Finola) return to sort out things with the ex whom she had abandoned very suddenly. This is a nice story, but I felt it was a little overwritten in places. Perhaps it's only because I know Suzanne is now a teacher of creative writing at Baypath College, but it seems to me that Becoming Finola has a little artistic self-consciousness that wasn't in her earlier novels.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor

Beautifully written short stories are tinged with darkness in this collection. The title story has nothing to do with romance; it is about evil men doing evil things. O'Connor leads with this story of evil, and the mood of subsequent stories rises just a little. But in spite of the overall sadness, the stories are compelling and highly readable.

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

This is a silly little murder mystery not worth writing about.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm

I am truly in love with the mind of David Bohm even though a good chunk of Wholeness and the Implicate Order was over my head. You need a thorough grounding in math and physics to understand all of this book. I was chuckling over terms like "vector in Hilbert space" and "Riemannian geometry." However, Bohm's conclusion that relativity and quantum theory imply oneness (and therefore connectedness) is something I've believed for a long time. Holography plays a big part in his rumination because he sees reality as "interference patterns" in energy that enfolds and unfolds. Holographic images "can distinguish different orders and measures in the whole illuminated structure." I think that this means the images contain information we humans lose when our eyes assemble the picture that makes sense in our minds.

Sometimes Bohm uses the word "autonomous" in describing how the universe works. To me autonomy suggests consciousness (How can you make decisions if you're not conscious of choices? Is growth a manifestation of autonomy?) but Bohm does not explicitly state that the Universe is conscious, so evidently that conclusion -- to which I believe science is pointing -- remains a leap of faith.

The other belief Bohm corroborates for me is that there is no such thing as nothing. What we perceive as "empty space" is actually a huge background of energy; and what we perceive as "matter" is small wavelike excitations in this background like ripples on a vast sea (p. 242).

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb

Sometimes I get tired of heavy duty reading, and I pick up something light and fun. Wally Lamb provided me with 900 pages of escape reading in his wonderful novel I Know This Much Is True. He tells the story of twin brothers, one of whom is schizophrenic and an incredible burden to his twin. A dysfunctional family, broken marriage, career problems, and a couple of mysteries about parentage give Lamb plenty to write about, but I do think the book could have been edited down. There were times when I felt that the author was deliberately putting off getting to the story.