Huffington Post Book Club

In my last blog, I mentioned the prevalence of rakija drinking in Obreht's novel, and my subsequent plan to track some down to sip along with my reading. It didn't take long to find.

For me, The Tiger's Wife is about the stories we tell ourselves to help us understand death, especially when it is pointless, and especially when it is far away.

One thing that has really stuck out at me while reading The Tiger's Wife is the power of the unknown and its effect on people. In Chapter 2, Natalia becomes frustrated when she fails to persuade one of the diggers, Duré, to allow her to treat his children for illness.

In a novel set in an unnamed, war-ravaged Balkan country where the souls of the dead linger on earth for 40 days to "rummage through drawers and peer inside cupboards," there's going to be much that's strange, exotic and foreign.

An open, orthodoxy-free conversation about how we can fix our broken financial system is exactly what we need. Reading The Road From Ruin -- and joining in our month-long discussion about it -- is a great way to start. READ MORE Is Undercover Boss the Most Subversive Show on Television? Undercover Boss is the kind of popular entertainment that can start out as one thing but morph into something that turns a spotlight on just how out of touch America's corporate chiefs are. READ MORE WATCH: Arianna Discusses the Final Push for a Public Option on The Ed Show LISTEN: Arianna Talks About Move Your Money on Public Radio's AirTalk WATCH: Arianna Weighs in on Massa's 'Wasted Hour' with Glenn Beck on AC360

For this month's HuffPost Book Club, I have chosen Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization, which boldly sets out to present nothing less than -- as Rifkin puts it -- "a new rendering of human history."

Did you miss it? We've wrapped up our exploration of Arianna's second book club pick, Janine Wedel's "Shadow Elite". To finish things off, HuffPost W...

What Arianna is reading is not likely on the front tables of your local bookstore, nor is it on any bestseller list.

Public and private are now substantially blurred, as the "transnational" political elites and the financial elites have become literally the same people. It is a condition which leaves the people feeling unrepresented.

Being Arianna's first pick is a tremendous honor. It also serves up a delicious irony. My book is called In Praise of Slowness. Yet HuffPost is a pioneer on the fastest communication platform ever devised. Not exactly a natural fit.

UPDATE So, did you miss it? Thursday, 3pm November 19th? Yes, that was last week, and it was a live video chat with Arianna and Carl Honore, author o...

The modern power elites thrive by forgetting any regrettable past. This amnesia is easy at Harvard, where the legal fiduciaries operate in secret and need not answer for their acts.

My first pick for the HuffPost Book Club is In Praise of Slowness, a terrific book by Carl Honore about the need for a more balanced existence.