Boston Marathon bombings: 5 books to read in the aftermath

In times of national crisis such as the bombings at the Boston Marathon, does reading for pleasure do any good? The great food writer MFK Fisher provided an answer of sorts during World War II when she produced a cookbook, “How to Cook a Wolf,” aimed at teaching Americans how to continue eating delicious meals even in the face of wartime shortages. She knew that readers might wonder why she was focused on such a thing at a time of national trial.

But affirming the best qualities of civilization is the best way to answer the worst qualities in human nature, Fisher told her readers several years after the war. “Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us,” she wrote.

Surely, good books rank with good food and good music as important ways to nourish our souls when times are bad.

Here are five books that offer special comfort in the wake of tragedies like the Boston bombings.

1. 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey,' by Thornton Wilder

First published in 1927, Wilder’s novel tells the story of a bridge collapse in Peru in 1714, using the tragedy to explore the cruel acts of timing that allow some to be spared from harm and others to lose their lives. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted from the book to honor the attack’s victims, saying, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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