Theology: At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl.

You may already know about the extraordinary and all too brief lives of Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister who sought to resist the Nazi regime along with a few other university students and as a result were arrested and executed. Both the main English study of their lives, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn, and the German film about them, “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” focus on their passion for freedom against fascism and immense courage to speak up for the good in the face of barbarity. But in neither do you get any sense of the profound Christian faith that animated them. In this collection of their letters, though, you get to witness how, after an upbringing at best indifferent to Christianity, a supernova of faith exploded in their hearts. Their wrestling with God in the wake of it is almost unbearably moving, especially because you know what’s going to happen to them. (Read a longer review I wrote of the book here.)

Cookbook: Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss.

I first came across Luisa Weiss while reading through a whole pile of memoirs with recipes to get a sense of the lay of the land for my own memoir with recipes. Her book My Berlin Kitchen was a fine read but nothing remarkable. Then, however, she made good on the promise of her memoir with this fantastic volume of recipes for German baked goods. Anyone who’s traveled in Germany knows that this is where the Germans excel in the culinary arts—as does anyone who, like me, was lucky enough to grow up in a German-American congregation and pine for the next potluck so as to indulge in a huge slice of Butterkuchen. I have been fairly obsessed with this book ever since it came into my hands; it seems inevitable I’ll end up making everything in it sooner or later. (I could also justify my frenetic experiments in the kitchen as “research” for my novel A-Tumblin’ Down, which just so happens to feature a German-American congregation, and that fictional church’s congregational cookbook.) See below for photos of two of my favorites: Rosinenschnecken (“raisin snails”) and a poppy seed streusel cake.

Novel: Gestures by H. S. Bhabra.

I don’t generally look to fiction to lay on the misery; after all, reality does more than its fair share. So a novel has to be pretty damn good for me still to love it if it happens to be, in a word, devastating. This book is devastating, yet absolutely worth reading. The story falls into two parts. The first takes place in Venice in the 1920s during the rise of fascism; the second jumps forward twenty years to Amsterdam during the Second World War. Both parts are told by the narrator-protagonist to show how the terrible events of the former period detonate into something even worse in the latter. This novel is the best portrayal I’ve found of the cost of cowardice—not malice, not wickedness, not bigotry, just the plain unglamorous failure to speak up when you should have.