A few years back I was on a ship in the Persian Gulf (it was of the pre-blog era). I didn't really love this ship except for one thing...every month they got a box of books. The books were completely random which meant that you got a little of everything each month. At the very end of my six month hitch a book showed up that perked me up. I started reading it - and it was GOOD but, then it was time for me to go home and I felt really bad taking the book with me because I thought it should remain aboard.

I've thought of this book often over the years and have always wanted to pick it back up.

Without further ado, I'm pleased to announce February's Book Selection!

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East By Sandy Tolan

Here's what Amazon has to say:

In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Ashkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next thirty-five years in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Based on extensive research, and springing from his enormously resonant documentary that aired on NPR's Fresh Airin 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation.

I know what you're thinking: Why are you making me read another hard book? I get it. I'd feel like that too.

It just seems to me that there is so much conflict in the world....that I don't understand. I want to understand.

Mid-month I'll be providing a book club alternative. An easy, light hearted read....just in case you're just in dire need of some feel good.