Books

Looking for some good reads (or maybe something to avoid)?  Here are some of the books I've been reading with some recommendations.  Generally, these are not all books I would teach, just provocative texts with real style.  Have something truly amazing to recommend?  Add it here!  (AP marks next to authors worthy of choosing for that course.)

Also, see my Japanese Literature and Indian Literature and Tibetan Literature for these recommendations.  Most noteworthy authors include Haruki Murakami, Kobo Abe, and Yasunari Kawabata for fiction; Alex Kerr for nonfiction.

Interested in knowing the "classics" that are out there?  Look at my AP English Master Reading List or my own survey of Eastern Michigan University professors on What Every College Freshman Should Have Read.

Recommended Non-Fiction Authors:

• Amis, Martin. I recently completedThe Second Plane: September 11: Terrorism and Boredom, a collection of essays on global politics from this British essayist, written between 2001 and 2008. A provocative vocabulary mixes with a contemplative blend of reason and gut reaction. His essays are speculative, often hypothetical narrative, building from a broad research and experience-based examination of sociology.  On to more of his works! 

• Eco, Umberto.  Italian writer and semiotician (ask an AP student), Eco's essays are terrific at deconstructing American society (I especially like his collections How to Travel With a Salmon and Travels in Hyperreality), but his novels are more famous.  Specializing in stories within stories within stories and blending history and fiction, his Name of the Rose is a medieval murder mystery--but a real challenge to read for all of the Latin (there's even a sourcebook to help understand it!).  My favorite (and maybe my favorite novel of all time) is Foucault's Pendulum.  This is the DaVinci Code the way it should have been written, but it's thick with history (occult and traditional) and thicker in strands and twists; nevertheless, the labyrinth is well worth the exploration: "Jacques deMolay, thou art avenged!"

• Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  Not fiction, but worth mentioning.  This work is more than 30 years old, written by a neo-Marxist Brazilian educator.  Freire writes about power structures, linguistic and political, which serve to limit the ideological understandings of objects/victims. Freedom, he insists can only come from the oppressed which cease to see themselves as objects of oppression but subjects of a new rhetoric.

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• Hoff, Benjamin.  A writer of popular books on the Tao, his two most famous works are The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet.  The first of these is the better; both integrate Milne's work with classic lessons on Eastern philosophy.

• Junger, Sebastian.  Journalist and investigative essayist, his collection of shorter works Fire is better than his well-known The Perfect Storm, though both were worth the read. Fire examines the struggle of battling forest fires; other essays in the collection look at the uneasy peace in Cypress and kidnappers in Taliban Afghanistan. More recently, A Death in Belmont is an almost-memoir of the writer's brush with the Boston Strangler, a disturbing case which examines injustice in America. War, Junger's first-person account on the front lines with Battle Company in Afghanistan, is also a terrific philosophical insight into the nature of courage, patriotism, love, and the human psyche.

• Lewis, C. S.  Christian writer with a deep and sensible understanding of how humans reason the spirit.  Three works stand out for me:  the children's series of Narnia, beginning with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (which--trust me--reads far differently now than it did when I was 10), his discussion of love in Four Loves, and his classic work on faith, Mere Christianity.

• Mortonsen, Greg.  Three Cups of Tea has already been widely acclaimed, but finally having read it, it's inspirational not only for its author but also its beautiful prose and compelling storytelling. Mortenson accidentally loses his way in a K2 descent and ends up discovering a people in need of schools; his life purpose changes and he begins building real education for women and children across Pakistan and Afghanistan. He battles through fatwas, opium rings, and politics to find his life quest. 

• Pollen, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma. A look into the total impact of our food choices, from economic to environmental, from fast food to organics.  Pollen may not change the way you eat, but he will change the way you think about it.  Eat local!  Beware our corn-fed industrial cuisine, and don't trust the word "organic."   If you like that and want to add more political fire to your food meal, try Brian Halweil's Eat Here:  Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket.  It's a 2004 book and not as well-written as Pollen, but still exciting to see what we can eat locally.