Since then, I tend to have a pile of books going all at once, and I pick up whichever I have the brain power for. Here are some things in my pile, some psychology-related and some not, that I’ve either just finished or am enjoying enough to tell you about.

A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and Richard Lannon, M.D. (2000).

This book is not about love per se, but rather the neurobiological, physiological, and evolutionary underpinnings of our affiliative needs and attachment behaviors. There are two major problems with this book that were obvious to me within the first ten pages, and they were each frustrating enough to make me want to throw the book across the room and never return. The first is their use of overly poetic language, with statements such as, “Love fits with gliding ease into the heart of the troubadour’s croon or a poet’s couplet." The second shortcoming has to do with the authors’ use of Freud as a straw man: they present simplistic and caricatured readings of his theories in order to knock them over and advance their own arguments. What is frustrating about this is not that the authors are hostile toward Freud, but that they are unaware of how compatible their own ideas are with psychodynamic thinking. The authors describe how, through development and into adulthood, we use social contact and proximity to loved ones to provide a regulating function for our limbic systems. They explore not only the implications of deprivation and inconsistency of social relatedness in childhood for psychopathology, but also how nonverbal regulation plays a profound role in change through psychotherapy. Without ever using these words, they provide a neurobiological model for understanding intersubjectivity, transference and countertransference, and the internalization of object representations. While I didn’t agree with many of the arguments in this book, I feel that the type of work these authors are doing is important to the future of psychoanalysis in that they provide another kind of evidence for analytic theories of psychological processes and treatment.

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present by Howard Zinn (1980).

A classic historical account of our country told from the perspective of poor, disenfranchised, and oppressed Americans. This book is not a light read, a fact that will become obvious in the first seven pages as he describes the frequently overlooked story of Columbus’s conquests resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of native peoples. As I have now slogged through the first third of this very thick book, I have been continually surprised to learn about shocking events in our history about which I had previously only had a glimmer of awareness. Zinn makes the point that history is always told from the perspective of the victor, and as a result the story of the oppressed is often left untold. His intention is not to judge these victors, but to question the assumption that atrocities committed during the rise of our power were a necessary price to pay for the development of the nation. His descriptions of how, throughout history, the people of power have mobilized lower-class energy to their own advantage sound eerily contemporary. While at times this book becomes weighed down by its many sources, his arguments are well researched, clearly stated, and appeal to the bleeding-heart liberal in all of us.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003).

Not in the mood for harrowing accounts of oppression and slaughter? Maybe you’d prefer this light, very quick, and enjoyable read. This book is a mystery told from the perspective of an autistic savant child who investigates the murder of his neighbor’s dog. The author, who had worked with autistic children before writing the book, has an amazing ability to imagine the experience of someone with autism. He portrays with vivid detail the subjective experience of being unable to process social cues, and the rigidity and literalness in interpreting another person’s communications that results. This was illustrated particularly well through his character’s explication of what is supposed to have made a particular joke funny while commenting on his inability to see the humor in it. As I began reading this book I was concerned that the author’s telling of the story from the perspective of an autistic child would become either gimmicky or sentimental, but to his credit it was neither. All this in a book that can be read in three hours – not bad.

White Noise by Don DeLillo (1984).

One of my favorites, I just read this book for the second time. I like to go back to a book sometimes when I say that it is one of my favorites but it’s been too many years to remember why, and this one didn’t disappoint the second time around. This book is told from the perspective of a professor of Hitler Studies in a small college town, who is consumed by fear of his own death. His wife and children also grapple with a fear of dying in their own ways. Sounds heavy? It’s really not. The book’s satire and black humor ensure that it never gets bogged down by its dark subject matter. The dialogue rarely sounds the way people actually talk, but it’s hard to resist the characters’ absurdly postmodern observations about our culture, such as how the buzz of consumerism creates a white noise that allows us to obscure facing our own mortality.