Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

A twenty-four year old librarian in Slovenia makes an attempt at suicide and lands in an insane asylum. There she meets people whose stories give her insight into how she has lived her own life. Coelho is a Brazilian author who has remarkable clarity about the struggle between conformity and individuation, the need to be true to yourself, and the tenuousness of our understanding about what it is to be insane. With the subtitle "A novel of redemption" Veronika's story is compelling and thought provoking. Great read and probably a good discussion book.

Blindness by José Saramago

José Saramago is a Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is also a communist and atheist but these things are not obvious in his dark novel, Blindness. In it he posits a city whose inhabitants are stricken with a sudden "white blindness." Perhaps you can read political implications into the resulting chaos, but it was really more about individual suffering.

I found this book difficult to read for a few reasons. First are the run-on paragraphs which sometimes go two pages or more. Within those paragraphs, whole sentences are often not separated by periods but merely by commas. There is lots of dialog but no quotation marks (seems to be publishing style these days). You know someone is speaking just from context and the fact that a word following a comma is capitalized.

Secondly, there are many philosophical ruminations embedded in those long paragraphs and they slow down plot development without really adding much to knowledge of the characters. Thirdly, the book seemed repetitious to me. I was eager to know what would happen to the characters, but dipping into their harsh, bleak world was not exactly fun.

Eat, Pray, Love by Eizabeth Gilbert

Crashing from a divorce and post-divorce affair, Elizabeth Gilbert seeks to regain her strength and independence by taking a year to do something purely pleasurable (eat her way through Italy) followed by something inspirational. From Italy she went to an ashram in India where she honed meditation technique and made the spiritual connection she'd been looking for. Then it was on to Bali to visit an old medicine man. Gilbert's sense of humor, personal insight, and clear reporting make Eat, Love, Pray a joy to read. It is the tale of a highly individualistic and courageous woman who transcends the expectations of society to become more truly herself. Excellent book.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

The winner of several literary awards, Out Stealing Horses comes from Norway and takes place mostly in the forests of the northern part of that country. It is essentially a psychological novel told by a sixty-seven year old man who is coming to terms with his relationship to his father. His revery focuses mainly on the year 1948 when he was fifteen and making the transition from child to young adult. In that sense it is a coming-to-age story, but there is much mystery attached to the figure of his father who had worked for the resistance during World War II and that mystery is very engaging. The time sequence is scrambled but not too hard to follow. The first person hero (Trond) enjoys being close to nature, and there is much description of the Norwegian countryside. Trond's own story as an adult is sketchily given but the astute reader will pick up on some similarities between father and son.

Excellent novel. I will probably suggest it for my book club as I know it created good discussion in another book club.

The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami

Many people believe that the Universe is consciousness. In The Self-Aware Universe Amit Goswami comes up with a coherent theory of how quantum mechanics melds with ancient philosophy and modern psychology to show that "consciousness creates the material world." It is only a theory and I sometimes had trouble following the physics and philosophy, but here is my understanding of what Goswami was saying.

When physicists look closely at particles, they find that sometimes they are in wave form and sometimes in particle form (which has caused at least one writer to refer to them as "wavicles.") Before they express themselves as either a wave or a particle they exist as a bundle of potentialities in "superposition." Then, when measured or observed, they "collapse" into one form or the other.

These terms, "superposition" and "collapse," are standard quantum jargon. Wikipedia says that "collapse" is less popular these days than "decoherence" which means a gradual leakage of stuff into the environment even while its source (the quantum) maintains its superposition (chunk of potentiality) which is by nature unmeasurable. However, the January 2008 issue of Discover says that for the first time ever physicists have been able to watch this process of collapse as it happened in a photon.

If we're not "getting" this, I think it's because the physicists are still a little fuzzy about it.

Anyway, Goswami goes on to apply the "collapse into reality" idea to the nature of human consciousness. He sees our minds as having two modes of functioning: the classical mode which holds our memories, logic, and conditioning; and our rarely accessed quantum mode from which we get creativity. He suggests meditation to better access our quantum mode better.

Science and the Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo

One of my favorite books is an out-of-print children's book of cosmology. It says that in the beginning there was a force, spirit, or vibration that yawned and decided to create a universe. Once it had done so, it disappeared, because it was now contained within everything in the universe, including you and me. Ervin Laszo is one of several scientist-philosophers writing books that are essentially saying the same thing. Science and the Akashic Field (subtitled An Integral Theory of Everything) refers to a stillness in which nothing exists and yet the potential for everything is there. An explosion (the Big Bang) releases energy that forms itself into patterns, each pulsating ripple connected to every other ripple and replicating in miniature the totality. "The cosmic proto-consciousness that endowed the primeval plenum with its universe-creative potentials becomes a fully articulated cosmic consciousness -- it becomes, and thenceforth eternally is, THE SELF-REALIZED MIND OF GOD." [His full caps.]

I believe this is a good theory although I'm not sure the use of the word "akashic" (Indian for "ether" or all-pervasive space) is really necessary. I think it is pretty much the same as what physicists refer to as the quantum vacuum or in-formation. By suggesting that the universe is really the mind of God, Laszlo seems to be subscribing to the theory that the universe and everything in it is made of consciousness. This is a popular theory, but one he suggests is condemned to remain hypothetical.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Everyone at book club agreed that Hamid's novel is an absolute work of genius. It is the story of a Pakistani who leaves his country at age 18 to attend Princeton where he excelled in his studies and went on to become a highly competent appraiser of businesses. He struggles with a difficult personal life and with his identity as a Pakistani in America around the time of 9/11.

It's the way the story is told that sucks you in and builds tension. The protagonist is in a cafe in Lahore telling an American the story of his life. His is the only voice we hear. The American's remarks go unrecorded and we have only the responses to them given by the Pakistani narrator. It is evident that the American is uneasy and the reader begins to imagine that he is there to do the Pakistani harm. Or is it the other way around?