The last of my travels in 2014 recently took me to Boston to visit my son. Boston has become one of my favorite cities. Aside from counting my son among its citizens, it holds and honors an impressive history. The city is walkable, its distinctive neighborhoods layered in varied cultures with sights, sounds, aromas and tastes telling tales of the people who formed this great metropolis.

Boston lights the imagination of writers. It shows up in a lot of great books, either setting the stage for a story or taking center stage as a personality. It is never chosen by chance or default. Even in non-fiction, stories set in Boston have a certain “feel” they could not get from any other city.

Here are some Boston-based books worth checking out:

Fiction:
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
An Old Fashioned Girl – Louisa May Alcott
Summer – Edith Wharton
The Late George Apley – John P Marquand
The Last Hurrah – Edwin O’Connor
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Still Alice – Lisa Genova

Non-Fiction:
The Story of My Life – Helen Keller
Boston Firsts: 40 Feats of Innovation and Invention That Happened First in Boston and Helped Make America Great – Lynda Morgenroth

For Children:
Make Way for Ducklings – Robert McCloskey
Johnny Tremain – Esther Forbes

A dozen years ago, the United States was stunned on a gorgeous September morning and freedom as we knew it was forever changed. The images and emotions of that day and the weeks that followed remain fresh in our minds. But 9/11 was not the first surprise attack on the U.S. The day that, in President Franklin Roosevelt’s words, “will live in infamy,” happened 70 years earlier, on December 7, 1941.

Pearl Harbor is in our collective distant mirror now. There are few people left who experienced those years firsthand, the events that significantly transformed both the United States and Japan. Fortunately, literature from and about that time in history is available to us. To understand who we are as a nation today and guide us in the critical decisions we must make in response to modern threats – whether real or imagined – we can turn to books that were written about the people, the times and the lessons we needed to learn when war first came to our shores. Here are some of the best:

Non-Fiction:
At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor – Gordon W. Prange
Day of Infamy – Walter Lord

Fiction:
Battle Cry – Leon Uris
From Here to Eternity – James Jones
Winter of the World (The Century Trilogy #2) – Ken Follett

For Children:
Baseball Saved Us – Ken Mochizuki

You’d think that in a world where we have more accessible information than ever, we would feel powerful enough to tamper our anxiety. Instead, it seems we suffer more needless anxiety than our ancestors. Most of us do not live in a war zone and do not have to worry about the basic needs of life. In fact, one of our challenges seems to be what to do with all of our possessions; that is when we’re not anxious that someone is out to take our possessions.

The daily dose of news launches all sorts of anxieties, without regard to how remote a threat to our wellbeing might actually exist. Whether it is disease, unwelcome foreigners, crime or just plain change we take in the news like a vacuum. To be sure, there are things in the world that can cause anxiety. What attracts us to stories that are designed to cause even more anxiety?

Whether you prefer nonfiction books to help you understand and overcome anxiety or fiction about characters dealing with anxiety, there are plenty of very worthy books to choose from.

On the nonfiction end, you might want to check out these books:
The Anxiety and Phobia Workout Book – Edmund J. Bourne
The Chimp Paradox – Dr. Steve Peters
Overcoming Anxiety – Helen Kennerley

If you prefer to seek entertainment in anxious characters, you’ll find them in these novels:
Oscar & Lucinda – Peter Carey
Of Human Bondage – Somerset Maugham
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

For children:
Scaredy Squirrel – Melanie Watt
Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears – Emily Gravett

Dare I wish you “happy reading”?

The phone keeps ringing off the hook. The mail box is stuffed to the limit. Lawn signs have popped up like weeds. TV commercials tout candidates like cars, all shiny and powerful, except they also describe the competition as total wrecks. It must be election season! This may not be a Presidential election year but it’s one of the hottest, with an unusual number of Congressional and Gubernatorial seats in contentious races. It’s hard to turn off the incessant intrusion into our daily lives. What a perfect time to park in a quiet corner with a good book – about politics. You’ll see that the more things change the more they stay the same. Here are some recommended novel and non-fiction reads:
How to Win an Election – Quintus Tullius Cicero (64 B.C.)
The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli (1532)
Democracy – Henry Adams (1880)
The Last Hurrah – Edwin O’Connor (1956)
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren (1990)
Washington, D.C.: A Novel – Gore Vidal (2000)
The Boys on the Bus – Thomas Crouse (2003)

Don’t forget to cast your ballot. Your vote is as important as everyone else’s – unless you don’t vote; then your vote is less important than everyone else’s. Your absence simply gives your power to the opposition who does vote. If you don’t like any of this cycle’s candidates, vote for the least objectionable. Then, begin the day after the election to find and support one you do want to vote for in the next cycle.

Ever get caught in a nightmare you knew was a nightmare but couldn’t escape? All you want to do is wake up and be safe again. Yet we deliberately go into Halloween “haunted houses”, watch horror flicks and sit around a campfire exchanging spooky tales. We love goose bumps and feeling the hair on the back of our necks stand up … under certain conditions. Every time we face fear and triumph, we reassert our ability to overcome what threatens us, whether or not it truly exists.

The thing about scary things is that they require our participation, our validation that, indeed, they are fearful. The challenge to writers of horror stories is to find those triggers in us that induce fear, presenting questionable situations and events in believable ways. The most effective, memorable horror stories often play out only in the mind of the main character … or maybe not. Emotion overcomes logic as we, along with the protagonist, fall under the spell of the supernatural.

In the spirit of Halloween, here are seven recommended scary classics that are spooktacular:
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
The Shining – Stephen King
The Woman in Black – Susan Hill
Collected Ghost Stories – M.R. James
Ghost Story – Peter Straub
Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood – Selected by E.F. Bleiler

If you’re looking for something lighter to get you into the Halloween spirit:
The Canterville Ghost – Oscar Wilde
Topper – Thorne Smith

It’s a small world after all. Global media and internationally interdependent economies have brought people of different countries and cultures closer than ever. This can be rewarding but, too frequently, we bump up against “the others” in harmful ways, often the result of ignorance and misunderstanding.

News reports may tell us “what” happened but unbiased journalism has been overtaken by market forces that present “news” through adversarial viewpoints, constricted by space or time limitations. The result is that, even with internet access to the world, we easily and unknowingly remain isolated from “the others”. We tend to fear what we don’t know; fear instigates conflict.

I suggest we treat good literature as ambassadors of understanding. There is a wealth of literature that opens a world of other cultures to us while entertaining us. Whether novel or non-fiction, these books inform and enlighten us as few “news reports” can because they bring us into the lives of “the others”.

Literature is not “news”; it doesn’t pretend to be. It does, however, allow us to inhabit new places, get inside other people’s skins, share their experiences and see life from other viewpoints. Soon, we begin to stop seeing the “otherness” and recognize the “sameness” of humanity.

Your port of entry into other worlds can be your library, book store or eReader. Here are some of the places you might want to visit:
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan (China)
Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi (Iran)
The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri (India)
The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson (North Korea)
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)
In the Time of the Butterflies – Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic)
Stones from the River – Ursula Hegi (Germany)
Same, Same But Different – Benjamin Prufer (Cambodia)

For young readers:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie (Native American)
Same, Same But Different – Kostecki-Shaw, Jenny Sue (India/America)

Any fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation is familiar with Lieutenant Commander Data, a Soong-type android who went through several episodes fruitlessly seeking to understand and feel humor. At one point, he confesses, “I am superior, sir, in many ways, but I would gladly give it up to be human.”

Humor is a peculiar human trait that can’t be learned or forced. It’s organic. It is harder to elicit laughter than to generate tears. In today’s world, humor is a precious commodity. With daylight diminishing during this season, humor can be as effective as sunlight to lift our spirits and maintain a balance in our daily lives.

Fortunately, humor is as accessible as a book.

What puts one reader in stitches may fall flat to another reader. To help you find books that have tickled many a funny bone, I’ve rounded up a dozen that appear on multiple lists as funny favorites:

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
Catch-22 — Joseph Heller
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Doug Adams
Bridget Jones’s Diary — Helen Fielding
Lamb – Christopher Moore
Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Dave Barry Slept Here – Dave Barry
The Importance of Being Ernest – Oscar Wilde
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – Jenny Lawson

Cheers!