Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

In the aftermath of 911, nine-year-old Oskar Schell struggles with the loss of his father whose calls from the burning World Trade Center he heard on the answering machine while he was alone in the family's apartment in New York City. Jonathan Safran Foer puts the reader in the head of this highly imaginative and sensitive boy as he seeks for meaning in the life and death of his father. The result is sometimes hilarious, but mostly poignant. The back story about his grandparents is a little too bizarre to be believable, but being in Oskar's mind is wonderful even though he often has "heavy boots" and is not feeling "one hundred dollars."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close would be a good book for discussion, but I probably won't suggest it for my book club, beause I think they would find it weird and perhaps too challanging -- Oskar's voice is distinctive, but narration sometimes switches to other characters and can be a little hard to follow.

March by Geraldine Brooks

The little women of Louisa May Alcott's famous novel were mostly without their father who was away at the Civil War. In March author Geraldine Brooks imagines the adventures of the absent father who joined the Northern Army as a chaplain. Before leaving, he had cast his family into poverty by giving his wealth away in support of abolitionist John Brown. So the March family in Concord, MA struggled to keep body and soul together while Dad went off to fight for the Union and the abolitionist cause.

March is wonderfully imagined and drawn. Brooks is subtle and nuanced in her portrayal of March as an idealist who worries about his courage, his worth, and what role he should be playing in life. A strong underlying theme in the story is the lack of communication between Mr. and Mrs. March. In our book club we talked about how the experiences each had endured during their prolonged separation would impact the marriage. It was clear that March would be returning home a profoundly different man.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Do imaginative artists uncover the nature of human consciousness? According to Jonah Lehrer, they do -- at least in the field of neuroscience. His short and very thought-provoking book describes how the work of Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolf relates to the current understandings of mind and consciousness as revealed by the neurosciences. Lehrer describes how the work of some artists, originally rejected as jarringly modern, chaotic, or meaningless, can be seen as the artist's way of breaking down old thought patterns to establish new ones. It is as if they have had an intuitive insight into how our neurons and synapses work. I found it utterly fascinating.

Excellent book.

Body Surfing by Anita Shreve

Fun story of love and betrayal at the beach.

The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra

I was attracted to this book because its underlying thesis is that developments in quantum mechanics are pointing to a new perception of reality that should have us turning away from Cartesian dualism (mind/body) and Newtonian physics (the world is separate from ourselves and can be measured objectively.)

As Capra puts it, "The universe is no longer seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of separate objects, but appears as a harmonious indivisible whole; a network of dynamic relationships that include the human observer and his or her consciousness in an essential way."

He also quotes British physicist James Jeans who in the 1930's said, "Today there is a wide measure of agreement . . . that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."

Capra's clear and cogent presentation of human intellectual history draws on a wide variety of time periods and cultures. It's also well documented. However, Capra lost me when he started applying his thought to economics and sociology. The Turning Point; Science, Society, and the Rising Culture was first published in 1982 and smacks of 1960's and 1970's intellectual stylishness: the big bad military-industrial complex, small is beautiful, back to the farm, etc. Because I'd just read Friedman's The World Is Flat, I felt much of the economics in The Turning Point was outdated. In an odd way this made the book more interesting because you could assess Capra's views of the future against the way things have actually been turning out.

Very good book about the need to change our perception of reality.

The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson

A young English mathematician named Andrea Aspinall is recruited by British intelligence for duties as a spy in Portugal during World War II. The cast of characters she works for and against are indeed a company of strangers. Many of them are double agents. They appear, disappear, and reappear in Andrea's life throughout the novel's time period of 1940 to 1989. Towards the end, with the Berlin wall coming down, it becomes difficult to keep track of who is spying for whom. The twists and turns and surprises keep happening and it all leaves the reader wondering if anyone really knows anything about their compatriots.

Good spy novel.

The Art of Seeing by Cammie McGovern

A story of two sisters, one of whom is going blind, Cammie McGovern's first novel focuses (pun intended) on the sisters' relationship. There is much overt and implied reference to visual perception (the younger sister is a photographer) as the two girls move into adulthood both supporting and competing with each other. Tightly written, The Art of Seeing has inspired me to go buy McGovern's second book, Eye Contact.

Good novel.