Christmas Books: Patricia Anderson

Being mistrustful of “best sellers” I gave Jonathan  Franzen’s The Corrections a big miss all those years ago. Big mistake.

What a miraculously wise and engaging book. The modern world in all of its savage complexities is revealed with Dickensian thoroughness. And his recent Freedom is even better. The kind of book you ration yourself reading, so it doesn’t finish too quickly. The search is on now to find three of his earlier publications: Strong Motion, The Discomfort Zone and The Twenty-Seventh City.

And from fiction to fact. The Human Story: Our History from the Stone Age to Today was riveting — a reminder that although we negotiate a high-tech world — day in, day out — we are still driven by stone-age feelings.