Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in February 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

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Witness at the Cross: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Friday (2021) by Amy-Jill Levine examines the stories, texts, social contexts, religious background, and perspective of those who watched Jesus die: Mary his mother; the Beloved Disciple from the Gospel of John; Mary Magdalene and the other women from Galilee; the two men, usually identified as thieves, crucified with Jesus; the centurion and the soldiers; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Dr. Levine, known as AJ to friends, brings her deep understanding of scripture, insightful commentary, broadness of perspective, and engaging wit to help us consider this climatic moment in the Christian story. AJ also graciously agreed to answer my questions about this work in the latest of the More to Come author interviews.

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When We Cease to Understand the World (2021) by Benjamin Labatut (translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West) is a troubling and haunting book that I could not put down “about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.” By taking the real-life discoveries of scientists and adding rich fictional detail to link their compelling stories with real-life consequences, Labatut makes the reader face uncomfortable truths. Labatut “has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.”

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Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing (2023) by Ben Jealous is a work of pragmatic and enduring optimism in a sea of national malaise. President of People for the American Way, former president of the NAACP, civil rights leader, scholar, and former journalist, Jealous writes from a lifetime of reaching out to others and listening to what they have to say. In this engaging memoir, Jealous uses a series of more than 20 stories from his life — modern-day parables — to make the point that we must truthfully and fully address the tensions that have been building up throughout this century if we are to survive. And yet he remains optimistic, recalling the words of his grandmother that “pessimists are right more often but optimists win more often.”

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The Word in the Wilderness (2014) by Malcolm Guite features a poem for each day of Lent. The season in which we traditionally reorient ourselves, slow down, and recover from distractions is also a good time to change the very way we read. Guite, in this thoughtful forty-day journey, suggests poetry is a good tool to achieve that change. “Poetry asks us to be savoured, it requires us to slow down, it carries echoes, hints at music, summons energies that we will miss if we are simply scanning. In this way poetry brings us back to older ways of reading and understanding both the Word and the World.” In the hands of writers such as the great Irishman Seamus Heaney, poetry — much like prayer — can be “banquet, music, journey, and conversation.”

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The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2004) edited by Steven Palmer and Iván Molina expands the perspectives around this intriguing Latin American nation by bringing new voices to the conversation. “Exceptionalism” is a term often used to describe Costa Rica, which is seen as “different from other Latin America countries.” It has never been consumed by civil strife or race-based oppression, the story goes, and it is the only country to have enjoyed uninterrupted political democracy for three-quarters of a century. Yet as Palmer and Molina write, some observers suggest that exceptionalism is at the center of a dubious mythology. This work is composed of short pieces that give a much fuller understanding of Costa Rica, showing it “as a place of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and call into question the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble.”

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What’s on the nightstand for March (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

• The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk
• American Oligarchy by the editors of Mother Jones
• Why Louisiana Ain’t Mississippi . . . or Any Place Else! by Carol Highsmith and Jay Dardenne
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
• To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul by Tracy K. Smith
• How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks by Adam Nicholson

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in January of 2024 and to see the books I read in 2023. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

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Image by Jay Mantri from Pixabay.