I have to apologize to my poor mother. Growing up, I would often engage in heated arguments about religion and politics with my father and brother. Every week we'd get into it as we drove to the football game, while Mom would beg us to be quiet and threaten to get out of the car at the next traffic light if we didn't stop. But you know, we still loved each other even if we disagreed and even if I had my brother pinned down in the back seat threatening to spit in his face if he didn't admit The Liberals would lose the next election. I think these discussions sharpened our wits. Even today, I often write as if I'm arguing with my brother in Dad's 93 Taurus. I've never believed religion and politics were taboo subjects; after all, what else is worth discussing?
So here are a few books that have made me think and I believe are worthy of heated discussion.
Non-Fiction:
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
I guess this is a bit of an anti-recommendation. This isn't really the forum to discuss the disagreements I have with some of the specific content of the book. Instead, a more general issue I have with this book is that it gives some readers the illusion (delusion, perhaps) that it is a sufficient enough study of science (or theology for that matter) to make an informed opinion on the topic of God's existence and the role of religion in society. I think the book will be wholly unsatisfying to people (theist and atheist alike) who understand the complexity of these issues. And so I do, in fact, recommend reading The God Delusion because it incited a hunger in me for more and better books on topics of faith, religion, and science.
Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich (HarperCollins Publishers)
In his classic work Dynamics of Faith, controversial Protestant theologian Paul Tillich offers a succinct and profound exploration of faith and God. Here he articulates a concept of God beyond human understanding, saying, to be brief, that God doesn't "exist," but is the "ground of being." It?s the sort of non-anthropomorphic view of God that is undefeatable by Dawkins' methods and makes for provocative reading.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
It took Satrapi's mastery of the graphic novel form to move us beyond the trappings of orientalist descriptions of life in theocratic Iran. The artificially of the cartoon form brings universality to the story by distancing it from any specific setting. We learn about ourselves while we learn about Iran, discovering that the joys and pains of childhood are, in their essence, shared by all of us. With wit and childish honesty, Satrapi's cartoon memoir is as artful and stunning as any modern autobiography.
Fiction:
Much of the fiction I read is world literature. Admittedly, there is a limitation in reading translated work, but I think what we lose as readers by limiting ourselves to English literature is far greater than whatever might be lost in the process of translation. Some works by international authors I admire are out-of-print or hard to find such as Par Lagerkvist, Kenzaburo Oe, and Jaroslav Seifert. Beyond these, here are a few recommendations of novels in translation:
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric (The University of Chicago Press)
This Nobel Prize-winning author brilliantly encapsulates centuries of Balkan conflict in a few hundred pages. The action centers on the building of a bridge in a nondescript Ottoman town and is one of the few books to successfully utilize an inanimate object (the bridge) as protagonist rather than simply the setting.The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
This is the fictionalized account of the burning down of the famed Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, Japan by a deranged Buddhist monk. It is a story of obsession that in many ways echoes Mishima's own life. A suitable companion to the book is the equally masterful Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters by director Paul Schrader, a film that juxtaposes scenes from Mishima's novels with scenes from the author's actual life including his infamous suicide by harakiri in 1970.
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
I appreciate the dark inner turmoil expressed in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's work (though the most interesting book by Tolstoy is his political and religious treatise The Kingdom of God is Within You), but my favourite Russian novel is Dead Souls by Ukrainian-Russian Nikolai Gogol. In Dead Souls, a young man attempts to amass a fortune by purchasing dead serfs in tsarist Russia. Unlike his 19th century contemporaries, Gogol has a dark humour and a lively, almost post-modern voice. You won't get bogged down with tedious description in Gogol's work. It's energetic, profound, and hysterical at times - the only flaw being that it remains incomplete as published.
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Andrew Unger is a high school teacher and writer in Manitoba, Canada. His work has appeared in Every Day Poets, CBC.ca, The Winnipeg Free Press and The Winnipeg Sun among others. His first book, Inches from America, was launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers Grant Park in November of 2010.
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