July Book-o-th'-Month

I have a few alternatives for the July book, and was hoping for some feedback before I made my decision. Here are the options I'm considering:

Nudge (Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler)

This sets forth the idea of "libertarian paternalism." The essential idea being not to necessarily heavily regulate things that are bad for us, but to make bad decisions slightly more difficult, thereby nudging people toward good decisions. I'm not a big fan of the concept, but the book is influential (as is Sunstein, who has been a constant counselor to Obama and heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs).

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.

Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new take—from neither the left nor the right—on many hot-button issues, for individuals and governments alike. This is one of the most engaging and provocative books to come along in many years.

Home (Marilynne Robinson)

I read Robinson's Pulitzer-Prize winning Gilead a few years ago and found it very beautiful. Ask me what it's about, and I can't really tell you. Fathers and Sons, I suppose, and multiple generations of mid-West farm stock, religious men. Light on plot, heavy on lyricism. Anyway, Home is evidently a sort of follow-up to the original novel.

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

This is the only one of the three that I've already read. I just finished another of McCarthy's books (Cities of the Plain) and I find him very consistently enjoyable, occasionally thought provoking, with a spare writing style and focus on strength (particularly male strength) that makes him read like a modernized Hemingway. Bonus: this will be released as a feature-length film, starring Viggo Mortensen, later this year, so reading it now will give you water-cooler cred. Also a Pulitzer-prize winner, evidently.

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.