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

After the election, I chose a different set of books to read from those I had originally placed on my nightstand. Each was a deliberate choice to focus on one or more aspects of what we are facing as a nation.

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021) by Adam Grant makes the strong case that to have real intelligence, we need to rethink and unlearn what we believe and assume. Because we favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, we cling to old beliefs. But in everyday life, and certainly in politics, we need to let go of knowledge and opinions that “are no longer serving us well” and anchor our sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency. “If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.”

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Small Things Like These (2021) by Claire Keegan is a short yet deeply moving novel (recently made into a movie) set in small-town Ireland during the Christmas season of 1985. Bill Furlong is a coal and timber merchant who, while delivering a load of coal to the local convent, makes a discovery that forces him to consider his past and the choices he must make. This little gem of a book brings us face-to-face, in a simple yet memorable fashion, with how we confront our past and with the evils of a community’s complicit, self-interested silence. It is also a deeply moving story of “hope, quiet heroism, and empathy.”

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On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy (2024) by Lee McIntyre is a powerful punch for truth packed in a pocket-sized guide. McIntyre shows how the effort “to destroy facts and make America ungovernable didn’t come out of nowhere.” It is the culmination of decades of strategic denialism. Political parties learned about denialism from some of the best: the tobacco lobby which sprang into action following the first scientific report in 1953 linking smoking to lung cancer. McIntyre, who published this slim book before the election, makes the point that January 6th was “the inevitable result of seventy years of lies about tobacco, evolution, global warming, and vaccines.” These “truth killers” on the science side provided the blueprint for how to deny facts that “clashed with their financial or ideological interests.” 

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Attitudes of Gratitude: How to Give and Receive Joy Every Day of Your Life (1999) by M.J. Ryan begins with thoughts on gifts—what happens in our lives when we begin to practice gratitude. Then, Ryan’s essays on attitudes—those underpinnings of action—consider the outlook or stance we need to take in cultivating gratefulness. Finally, she moves to practices, suggesting practical ways we can develop and maintain thankfulness in our daily lives. In this series of brief motivational essays, Ryan reaches back to timeless wisdom to teach us how to unlock the fullness of life—no matter the current circumstances—through the simple joy of living from a grateful heart.

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The Power of Reconciliation (2022) by Justin Welby was published for the 2022 Lambeth Conference, when Anglican bishops who share a common faith but have sharp disagreements assembled from around the world in Canterbury. The book addresses the issues of peacemaking for facilitators of community and societal, rather than religious, issues. It is challenging in its message and, at times, in its applicability to issues more relatable to the common reader. However, in tackling an issue that is front-and-center in today’s fractured world, it is also vitally important. As I was reading the book, Welby resigned in the wake of an independent report that he had taken insufficient action in response to a longtime sexual abuse scandal in the church. Why consider this difficult message about an intractable subject delivered by a flawed man? Because, as Welby and others note, we have no viable alternative.

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

• Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World by Timothy Brook
• Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff
• Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy by Lewis H. Lapham
• Avant-Garde in the Cornfields, Ben Nicholson and Michelangelo Sabatino, Editors
• In the Beginning Was the Spirit by Diarmuid O’Murchu

Let’s end with something from the great Tom Gauld to make you laugh.

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in October 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 from Getty Images on Unsplash