My younger son, the youngest of our children, remarks from time to time, that it must surely depress me, my constant choice of literature.  He recommends reading books that are more upbeat, while still being informative.  My husband and our granddaughter too have remarked on occasion about the tenor of the books I read.  And I sometimes wonder myself.  But I am drawn to these books.

This month I have finally read Frank McCourt's memoir of his childhood, Angela's Ashes, I have read and appreciated also Khaled Hosseini's excellent and tragic novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, and I have just completed reading yet another tragedy, a memoir by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate - a Gaza doctor's journey.

All of them through their portrayal of real-life events sketch out in harrowing detail - in the case of Frank McCourt, leavened with a grim humour - the misfortune of self-defeating emotions and propensities that nature has bequeathed to us through her original and somewhat flawed formula in constructing us human beings.

Our penchant for acting out the lesser of our free choices, and corrosive effects of our biological imperative to survive, which includes both tribal negatives of suspicion, blame, hatred and strife, and our instinct to replicate ourselves through time immemorial.  We succumb to all the miseries that circumstances and our own frail emotions impose upon us, making life tawdry, miserable and misunderstood.  While claiming love for our children we expose them to all the extremes that misfortune can thrust upon them.  Sometimes they survive their personal ordeals, sometimes they do not.

Humankind is endowed with charitable impulses, but mostly directed toward those we consider sharing elements of primary existence; extended family, tribe, culture, heritage - and express animus toward all others.  We are at once inclusive and exclusive.  We are capable of great kindnesses to one another on a one-on-one basis, and exhibit psychological disorders and violent physical acts on one another through the lens of clan psychosis.

While reading of such affirmations of the condition of humankind one learns a great deal to complement what life's experiences have already taught.  That can be both a positive and a negative.  The negative lies in despairing that the human animal will ever come to terms with its potential.  And no one can possibly understand what that potential could possibly represent.