[This funny, accessible human psychology survey is a C4 Great Read.]

Subtitle: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself

Author: David McRaney

2011, Gotham

Filed under: Nonfiction

Freelance journalist David McRaney’s first book is part psychology survey, part self-help guide, and part humor column. McRaney contends that we are all driven by a need to feel awesome and perfect. That’s an evolutionary advantage, because it means that those of us who aren’t very awesome (almost all of us) won’t commit suicide, and the human race can continue. But it also means that we civilians know next to nothing about the real reasons we like and do the things we like and do. Instead, we make up rationales and convince ourselves that our fables are truth.

Each of McRaney’s 48 chapters deals with a different way in which we deceive ourselves—”Self-Fulfilling Prophecies,” “The Bystander Effect,” “Confimartion Bias.” McRaney collects and synthesizes the results from a myriad of psychology studies, and interprets the ramifications with a healthy dose of sarcasm and humor. Here’s the one-paragraph summary:

You are a story you tell yourself. You engage in introspection, and with great confidence you see the history of your life with all the characters and settings—and you at the center as protagonist in the tale of who you are. This is all a great, beautiful confabulation without which you could not function.

The ways this confabulation plays out are often strikingly dramatic.

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[This multi-generation literary family novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Peter Orner

2011, Little, Brown

Filed under: Literary

Love and Shame and Love centers around a Jewish male named Alexander Popper, simply “Popper” as he’s known to almost everyone—I hesitate to describe him more thoroughly, because the book covers nearly his entire life (as well as several other lives). Is it fair to call him a “writer,” or a “Democrat,” or even a “man,” when each of those descriptors will, at some point or other, fail to apply to him?

The first time we see Popper, he’s almost 13, nervously waiting to talk to a local judge in what we’re told is a kind of Bar Mitzvah. Five pages later, Popper’s at college, getting a degree in creative writing and falling in love with Kat, whom he’ll eventually marry. Soon the novel backs up a generation and follows Popper’s parents, Philip and Miriam, detailing how they fell in love and had kids and then, as the title implies, how their love fell apart.

Then it’s back another generation, to detail Popper’s grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, and how their marriage fared before and after WWII.

It takes nearly three hundred pages to get back to Popper and Kat’s life after college, and those pages are a jumble of time periods, perspectives, characters, and relationships, intercut with letters and drawings and epigraphs. Even though Orner’s an excellent writer, this technique has a tendency to underwhelm and confuse, at least for the first half of the novel. The characters are too briefly described, too obliquely set in the chronology of the Popper clan (and more often set along a timeline of Democratic politics, which doesn’t much help). It takes close reading or half the book’s length to sort out exactly who’s who, and whom each section focuses on, because those clues too are well-guarded.

Eventually, though, a rich picture of the Popper clan emerges, and by the end, each tiny moment reveals an intimate, and often heartbreaking glimpse into the core of a life.

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