Year End Reading Lists

I didn't read much this year, but the things I did read I liked quite a lot: Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus and Seth Fletcher's Bottled Lightning: Super Batteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy.  I recommend both to you highly.

I did run across a nice list elsewhere full of wonderful recommendations for my friend Dwight.  Paul Tremblay, a writer his ownself, provides this list of full of true crime and dark stories that he liked this last year.

Religious Differences

The one course I really wished I had taken in college, and am quite surprised that I didn't given my long and chequered university career, is a comparative religion class. Now that I'm living in a country that is predominantly Islamic, this deficiency is even more apparent. We had a colleague early on who helped us navigate some of the early understanding of the differences between the religion we knew and that of our new friends and co-workers, but everyday something comes up and I wonder just how much I'm missing because, in this culture, I'm culturally offline.

This interview with Stephen Prothero about his new book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter, sounds like it might be helpful, a crash course in the major religions affecting the world today. I'm thinking this might be my first iBook purchase, whenever Apple brings that to the iPhone.