Discoveries

Talking to God

Personal Prayers for Times

of Joy, Sadness, Struggle,

and Celebration

Naomi Levy

Alfred A. Knopf: 264 pp., $19.95

You may not like the idea of having someone else write your prayers for you, but Naomi Levy, the first female Conservative rabbi to lead a congregation on the West Coast, is very convincing when it comes to the idea of personal hotlines to God. “Prayer,” she believes, “is ultimately an experience, not a request.”

Here are prayers for unfaithfulness, sleeplessness, pregnancy, miscarriage, addiction, integrity at work, suicide, procrastination and other modern-day afflictions and celebrations. Levy even includes a prayer for gossips. Apparently, no subject is too small for God’s ear.

“It is remarkable,” Levy writes, “to see what can emerge from us when we stop trying to pray to God and start talking to God instead.”

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Bill Bryson’s

African Diary

Bill Bryson

Broadway Books: 64 pp., $12

Last fall, Bill Bryson was asked by CARE International to go to Kenya for eight days and write an essay about what he saw there. The proceeds would go to CARE. Apart from “the diseases and the bandits and the railway from Nairobi to Mombasa, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” his guides assure him, but the emotional distance between his world and the slums of Kenya proves to be profound. Bryson is particularly unprepared for Kibera, the largest slum, with one-fifth of its 700,000 inhabitants diagnosed with AIDS. They visit a refugee camp on the northeastern border, where the school does not even have the paper, books and pencils to help the children pass to the next level of education. “You mean you have no hope at all?” Bryson asks one student. “ ‘Not much,’ he said, and gave me a heartbreakingly shy smile.” That smile, you can picture it. It makes the essay worth owning.

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God’s Mountain

Erri De Luca

Translated from the Italian

by Michael Moore

Riverhead: 168 pp.,

$12.95 paper

“God’s Mountain” is Erri De Luca’s simple tale of a 13-year-old boy growing up in Naples, Italy, and the summer he left childhood behind. In a series of seemingly random events, his father gives him a boomerang, which he practices throwing for months before actually throwing it. His mother dies. The girl upstairs becomes his first love. An old hunchback carpenter claims to have wings under the hump that will soon spread and allow him to fly away.

From the narrator’s rooftop, the boy can see all of his town, Montedidio, or God’s Mountain. It is where he and Maria meet at the end of their day to kiss and talk, and it is one of the most vividly drawn in literary memory. Together they look at all the lights and stars; all the other rooftops and beyond. “In the peacefulness of a summer day, when the sun was down, we’d stand there wordlessly, close to each other .... Until last year I was still a child.”

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My Mistress,

Humanity

Chuck Rosenthal

Hollyridge Press: 256 pp.,

$17.95 paper

Chuck Rosenthal hides out in the Santa Monica Mountains, brewing concoctions like this novel, a tale of the future, just close enough to us (2016) to make us afraid and just far enough away to set us at ease. The Earth has finally suffered enough climatic meddling and is rent with cataclysm. Cities are destroyed by earthquakes and volcanoes. A dragon, released from the center of the Earth, threatens humanity, while a Nobel laureate tries to save it. “I want mankind to learn to live within itself,” he tells the dragon. “But now, is this for all mankind?” she asks. “Is it for womankind, too? And the other animals of the planet? ... Do you think the worst human being is more valuable than the worst dog?”

Rosenthal has stepped out on a limb with this novel, and after “Elena of the Stars,” an earlier book, I am willing to go out on it with him.