reading list

Recommended reading, past and present:

-"The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One" by Margaret Lobenstein
Think you have ADD? Maybe, instead, you're a Renaissance soul who can't figure out what to do because you have too many ideas and passions... This book, written by a life coach, can help you think through and validate who you are.

-"Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" by Anne Rice
The author, made famous for making vampires famous, recently returned to her Catholic roots and wrote this historical novel about Jesus Christ.

-"The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People" by Cathleen Falsani
Cathleen Falsani writes about faith and pop culture for the Chicago Sun-Times. In this book, she talks with some famous folks -- from Hugh Hefner to Anne Rice to Bono to Jonathan Safran Foer (one of my favorite authors of the moment) -- about their views on morality, faith, religion, and being good. Ps-Anne Rice thinks Johnny Depp would make a good Jesus Christ in the movies.

-"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer
If you think this is just another book about 9/11, you're wrong. It's a story about a boy and his search for a missing counterpart to a key he finds after losing his father on 9/11. But it's more than that. Foer breaks the rules of writing in his style and the format of this book... but he also writes things only a fiction writer can pull off; he writes with amazing creativity and ingenuity that's not only original but compelling, too.

-"Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog" by John Grogan
This story is about a dog. A labrador retriever and his owners, two newspaper journalists who live in touristy Florida, move to a hillside in Pennsylvania and try to have kids in between. But it's Marley, of course, who steals the show and who will, ultimately, break your heart while making you laugh out loud. Only dog lovers -- and who isn't? -- will love this book.

-"Bad Cat: 244 Not-So-Pretty Kitties and Cats Gone Bad" by Jim Edgar
To be fair to the cat lovers, here's something for you. My family discovered this book when my father was in the hospital, fighting for his life after a surgery gone bad. When my sister brought the book into the hospital room, our room of sadness and grey days turned into those of laughter and hilarity. We couldn't stop laughing, and Dad had to stop reading the book so that his stitches wouldn't burst. Literally. Flip through this book when you need a good laugh.