• Fiction: Inside/Outside, by Herman Wouk (told from the point of view of David Israel Goodkind, an Orthodox Jew struggling to straddle his family’s orthodoxy and his own assimilation into secular American society; spans four generations, tracing his personal family history from Russia to New York. Interesting, funny, somewhat complex novel, but I love Herman Wouk’s writing).
• Nonfiction: Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief, by Stephen J. Dubner (Just getting started on this. Dubner is the author of Freakonomics, and he’s an amazing writer. This memoir is about his devoutly Catholic parents, both of whom converted from Judaism to Catholicism in their youth, before they met and married. Dubner apparently spent years trying to piece together the reasons for their conversion, interviewing his elderly mother (his dad had died years before) and also relatives who were estranged from the couple for decades as a result of their conversion. The blurb on the book says this: “By turns comic and heartbreaking, it tells the story of a family torn apart by religion, sustained by faith, and reunited by truth.” This is a very good book.

Recently Read:

• Fiction: The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (finally caught up to the rest of the reading world and read this! I actually blogged on this. If anyone’s interested, here are my thoughts)
• Nonfiction: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, by Peggy Noonan (Noonan’s reflections on politics, family, and religion–love her writing! She is very funny, and of course incredibly insightful)