I shrink from the task of picking favorite books generally, so here are the five best books I've read so far this year:

Fr. Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. This meditation on the parable of the prodigal son is so excellent that I made dinner for a half-dozen of my friends in order to bribe them into reading and discussing it with me. Nouwen's thoughtful look at each of the three figures in the story makes for a great examen of my spiritual life.

Helen MacDonald. H is for Hawk. Training a goshawk is the strangest approach to grief I've ever encountered. I kept reading excerpts from this memoir to my mother while we were traveling together until she got her own copy and started reading passages back at me.

Judy Melinek, Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner. Another death-haunted memoir (sorry!). Death tends to be carefully segregated from normal life, so I appreciated getting to see how Melinek cares for the dead in autopsies. Warning: I didn't realize when I picked up the book that the author worked on identifying remains at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and I wound up crying on public transportation when I hit that chapter.

Dona M. Wong, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures.If you'd rather laugh than cry on subways, I suppose. I read this for work, and I loved getting to see how good graphics work (and how I can be misled by bad ones). Plus, the author has a pretty snarky tone when covering the "Don'ts."

Christopher Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage. This book is a genealogy of the theology of sexual difference, which turned out to be just the format I needed. It helped me a lot to get to see how early theologians addressed this questions, the blind alleys people went down (hi St. Gregory of Nyssa!), in order to see how we wound up at our current understanding of the significance of gender.

Leah Libresco writes about the news for FiveThirtyEight and about religion for Patheos at Unequally Yoked. Her first book, Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer, explains how she learned to pray after converting to Catholicism.