A History of God
By Karen Armstrong

I had a pretty perfunctory Jewish upbringing and came to adulthood with a lot of questions about religion. A few years ago, Doug Rushkoff, author of Nothing Sacred, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about Judaism that made me understand so much about that faith. We've since become friends, and he recommended this book to me. It traces the way humans have created divine narratives and how the beliefs inspired by those narratives have enabled us to survive. The book takes a lot of the mystery away, but it also helped me put the idea of God into perspective and made me think about my daughter, specifically how I'm going to help this person along in her life.