Title: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
Author: John Elder Robison
Genre: Memoir

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought I was going to. That’s not the author’s fault it’s mine for having very specific expectations. This book is about someone who had a really dreadful childhood as much as it’s about his “life with Asperger’s.” And, perhaps it’s wrong of me to admit this, but I was looking forward to reading a work that was primarily focused on how Asperger’s impacted a person’s life and their place in and interaction with society. Yes this book addressed those things and focused on them to a degree but….I’m not explaining this right. OK how about this? It was a perfectly fine book, a perfectly fine memoir, it was just not the book that I wanted to read.

Title: I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology
Author: Abraham Joshua Heschel
Genre: Non-Fiction

While I enjoyed this book and found some really inspirational passages and many thought provoking books I now wish I hadn’t tried to read it from front to back like a normal book. I wish I had read it much more slowly, say over the course of many months or even a year. This collection of Heschel’s work on several different spiritual topics is full of deep meaning and context that I need to process and work through. It would have been better to read one section and at times even one paragraph a day or week and really thought about it and figured out if it had meaning or not to me. And if it had meaning what was it? Only after working all that out should I have moved on. When I re-read this that’s the way I’ll do it.

Title: Jewish Literacy
Author: Joseph Telushkin
Genre: Non-Fiction

It took me so long to read this book I had to re-read the early sections again when I finished it. I’m not even joking. This is a seriously large book with serious information. Skimming wasn’t an option.

I normally don’t record books started in one year and finished in the next, I like to keep my reading list cleaner than that. However this book is so significant there was no way it was going unrecorded. Besides, ending 2008 with The Year of Living Biblically and starting 2009 by finally finishing Jewish Literacy seems appropriate.