Paul Kalanithi, WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

I know, everyone is reading it. And, probably, everyone should be reading it. It’s heartbreaking, empathic, beautifully written; it reaches far beyond the hackneyed message of "make the most of what's left.” The author, a neurosurgeon who died of lung cancer at 36, asks openly, how do we find our values, in the middle of crisis, when life has been upended? And then how do we find them again, the next day, when something else has changed? One of my favorite parts of this book was his acknowledgement, early on, that "a word meant something only between two people, and life's meaning, its virtue had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form." He draws on his undergrad and M.A. in English--he references dozens of authors who wrote about the passage of time, from Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" on--and it adds a depth and reflexive humor to the entire book. Another of my favorite bits, alluding to the "pair of claws” in "Prufrock": "For the last several months, I had striven with every ounce to restore my life to its precancer trajectory, trying to deny cancer any purchase on my life. As desperately as I now wanted to feel triumphant, instead I felt the claws of the crab holding me back. The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death's approach." I think readers who liked Atul Gawande's Being Mortal would appreciate this.

Alison Bechdel, FUN HOME: A FAMILY TRAGICOMIC

My friend Lucy gave this to me for my birthday, and I'm so glad she did because I probably wouldn't have picked this graphic novel up on my own. I'm so word-oriented that it took me a while to get used to switching back and forth between the captions and the illustrations, but it's darn clever. And honest and painful. The "Fun Home" is actually the funeral home (just one example of the Bechdel's playfulness with language, turning things upside down and inside out) that her father runs. A good deal of the book is about her conflicted and complicated relationship with her father, and I won't spoil by telling why.

Colm Toibin, BROOKLYN

Beautifully written but peculiarly distancing. Perhaps Toibin wants to create in the reader the feeling of estrangement that Eilis feels because she moves from Ireland to Brooklyn and eventually feels like a stranger in both places. It's written in the third person, focalized through Eilis; but we get passages like this: "George seemed at a loss as he stood sipping his drink. He said something to Nancy and she replied. Then he sipped his drink again. Ellis wonderied what he was going to do; it was clear that his friend did not like Nancy or Eilis and had no intention of speaking to them; Eilis wished she had not been brought to the bar like this. She sipped her drink and looked at the ground." We at times have intimate access to the shades and shifts of Eilis's thoughts and feelings, and yet I felt often as if I were looking through a murky glass at the scene; for that reason it took me about 40 pages to become immersed in the book. It's a quiet story but compelling, and some of Eilis's humor (when we get to hear her speak) is very wry and even caustic. My only issue with books like this is that they remind me of Ally MacBeal (because every male character fell in love with her at some point). Perhaps because we don't hear Eilis speak very often, I can't figure out what is so exceptional about her that Father Flood meets her and almost immediately pulls all kinds of strings to bring Eilis to the US and then digs up people to pay for her tuition at bookkeeping school and advocates insistently on her behalf; the boy Tony sees her and almost instantly falls in love with her and his brother Frank develops a crush on her; when she returns briefly to Ireland, Jim Farrell sees her and falls desperately for her. Am I jealous? :)

Jonathan Safran Foer, EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

A young boy loses his father in the 9/11 attacks and afterward finds a "key" in an envelope that he believes will lead him to some understanding. (The "key" could be too heavily symbolic, but it didn't seem so to me, partly because it isn't Oskar's, or even his father's.) There are also other stories of loss and departure and pain woven in too, giving a sense that heartbreaking, history-making tragedies occur periodically ... and by facing our own losses, we can help the next generation with theirs. A clever, outside-of-the-box sort of narrative, with pictures and other elements that call attention (in a good way) to the many ways we make sense of our world by representing events to ourselves. I was moved to tears several times, and some of the phrases and sentences are so beautiful, I found myself wishing I'd written them. (Thanks to Lucy for this one!)

Lily King, EUPHORIA

Beautiful writing, a feeling of otherworldliness, and all the heartache of Ondaatje's The English Patient. Arg.

Daniel James Brown, THE BOYS IN THE BOAT

Extremely well-written, engaging, page-turner about the eight boys from Washington who won gold in the 1936 Olympics. While it tells the story of all eight boys, it is focalized largely through the personal memories of the #2 man in the boat, Joe Rantz; it begins with his horrifying childhood (his stepmother was like something out of Disney), creating a psychological trajectory of him transcending not just his material poverty but his lack of trust in others, to become part of this team. The author is also very congnizant of the historical context--the myths that the Eastern US was writing about the Western US, for example, and how that created a sort of "meta" story (intertwined with the Seabiscuit story, for example, rough-hewn but real power coming out of the west), about the boys of Washington and Cal (UC Berkeley) versus the "privileged" Yale, Cornell, Harvard crews. The boat story is also cross-cut with the rise of Hitler and how the Olympics were used as a propoganda opportunity, with Leni Riefenstahl and Goebbels duking it out for power. Fascinating. Couldn't put this one down. If you liked THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY (Erik Larson), you may like this one too.

Simon Baron-Cohen, THE SCIENCE OF EVIL: ON EMPATHY AND THE ORIGINS OF CRUELTY

The author happens to be the cousin of Sasha Baron-Cohen (as in BORAT). That notwithstanding, the book presents a pretty unshrinking and unhumorous look at the lack of empathy which allows people to be able to see others as objects, to commit atrocious cruelties upon them, and to feel no remorse. He provides some historic, collective examples of genocide and systematic torture; then he switches to discussing the individual, tracing out the Psychopath, Borderline, Narcissist, and Zero-negative (less common; think Asperger's) types in terms of behavioral, environmental and genetic causes. His goal in writing the book is to suggest the need for a change in the DSM-V, to identify a new category called "Empathy Disorders." He makes a compelling case ... I for one believe we do need more discussion about empathy both in everyday life (as opposed to the shame and blame that have the potential to make us shrivel inside) and in extreme circumstances. Interestingly, though, he brings up how empathy depends upon the ability to keep our own consciousness as well as that of another (akin to two spotlights) in our mind simultaneously; but he never mentions Jessica Benjamin, the profoundly insightful psychoanalyst who wrote about this ability--what she calls "interdependence"--in her book BONDS OF LOVE, decades ago. I was surprised he didn't know it or reference it; seems a very odd oversight.