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 April 2024. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME. Enjoy.

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How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (2023) by Adam Nicolson looks at the pre-Socratic philosophers from between 800 and 450 BCE who moved us beyond the oppressive world of god-kings and their priests. Focused on the importance of place—and specifically Megale Hellas (Greater Greece)—in shaping how they thought, Nicholson makes the brilliant case that day-to-day existence in the “bustling port cities” of archaic Greece, where there was an emphasis on “fluidity . . . interchange and connectedness,” gave birth to philosophy. Trade, along with the coming and going of peoples and ideas that trade brings, required “new ways of thinking about the world, of configuring our relationships with one another.” It required, Nicholson asserts, a “harbor mind.”

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To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (2023) by Tracy K. Smith, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, is a “memoir-manifesto” which examines her life and her family history as a microcosm of the Black experience in America. Smith writes of the spirituality of the soul, her move toward sobriety and accountability, and her own growing spiritual practice. She makes the case that the soul is not merely “a private site of respite or transcendence,” but it is also a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other, and a sounding board for our most pressing collective questions, such as how to bridge the gap between free and freed. It is a powerful and moving prayer for Americans to accept accountability and do the hard but necessary work of living together with others.

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Felicity (2015) by Mary Oliver is a work filled with joy and beauty, released a few years before the poet’s death. “Poems arrive ready to begin. Poets are only the transportation,” she asserts in Humility. This is a book where “great happiness abounds,” notes one reviewer. “Our most delicate chronicler of physical landscape, Oliver has described her work as loving the world. With Felicity she examines what it means to love another person.” Beginning with Don’t Worry, the work’s very first poem, we begin to understand the notion that love, like time, works in ways mysterious and wonderful.

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The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019 with a new 2022 Foreword) by Meghan Daum could be summarized as a work about “feeling old, spending too much time online, and getting ornery about the politics of young people.” That quick, somewhat snarky characterization from the New Yorker review could be seen as both accurate and yet somehow incomplete. Yes, there are plenty of times when Daum comes across as that person yelling “get off my lawn” at the kids. But there are also thoughtful questions around outrage vs. empathy. “To deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.”

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Willful Behavior (2018) by Donna Leon is the eleventh in what is now a 33-book series featuring the Venetian detective Guido Brunetti. The story begins as Brunetti receives a visit from one of his wife’s students “with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago.” At first the detective dismisses her request, but soon the girl is found stabbed to death and Claudia Leonardo becomes Brunetti’s next case. The plot twists and turns and the detective begins to unlock long buried secrets of Nazi collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during World War II.

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

• The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers by Samuel Burr
• The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk
• Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos by Leah Rampy
• My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future by Alice Randall
• Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in March 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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Photo by Tünde from Pixabay.