Learning to Bend Ben Sollee Singer-songwriter-cellist Ben Sollee, 24, is at the beginning of what promises to be a very interesting American roots music career. Yes, you read that right—“cellist” and “roots music” in the same sentence. You hear “cello” and you think chamber music?

Bread Body SpiritEdited and with introductions by Alice Peck (Skylights Path Publishing, 2008) This is a book that will make you hungry. You’ll be hungry for the rich curried vegetable soup in the chapter entitled “The Parable of the Squash,” and you’ll be hungry to take a new, more meaningful look at the meals you serve and eat.

Then She Found Me (THINKFilm, 2008) Are we born into families, or do we fashion them by forging bonds with strangers?

Render Unto Caesar, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput (Doubleday, 2008)

Life Death Love and Freedom, John Mellencamp (Hear Music, 2008)

The Wire, created by David Simon (HBO, 2002-2008)

There is no particular person author Ann Patchett has looked to for inspiration. Instead, she credits her Catholic faith for teaching her a boundless capacity for creativity and appreciation for metaphor. Patchett has harnessed that power to her audience: She is the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize (2002) and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel Bel Canto, which sold more than 1 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 30 languages.

Here are a few books U.S. Catholic editors think are worth adding to your reading list this month

Directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner Brothers, 2008) The truth understood by every 14-year-old comic book fan is that we love superheroes not because they are “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound,” but because these steel-bodied crusaders can beat the living daylights out of the most satanic boogeymen.

Carrie Newcomer (Rounder, 2008) Back when I used to sort my CDs into categories (back when I still bought CDs), one section was devoted to inspirational female artists whose lyrics spoke to my life’s experiences. Too bad I didn’t know about Carrie Newcomer back then. She would have fit in perfectly with the Indigo Girls, Alanis Morissette, and Dar Williams.

By William T. Cavanaugh (Eerdmans, 2008) Luke tells us in Acts 2 that the earliest Christians formed economic communities shaped by the Eucharist, sharing their resources as they broke bread together. William Cavanaugh’s new work on eucharistic economics argues that contemporary Christians should also form their economic lives in light of our eucharistic faith.

By Ron Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) The pivotal moment in Ron Hansen's Exiles comes almost exactly midway through the 225-page book. A fellow Jesuit seminarian scans a poem that Gerard Manley Hopkins is writing about the 1875 shipwreck of the German passenger ship the Deutschland and expresses befuddlement at its odd rhymes and rhythms.

By Andrew Krivak (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) What happens when a young person in a secular age feels God calling him to a decidedly countercultural way of life?

Directed by Noam Murro (Miramax, 2008) In a land where brains and hard work are supposed to produce success and happiness, there are a lot of smart, miserable failures.

By Jim Wallis (HarperOne, 2008) Jim Wallis' prayers seem to have been answered.

Kathy Mattea (R.E.D. Distribution, 2008) Kathy Mattea has always been an odd country music star. She's an environmental activist in a genre that often glorifies gas-guzzling trucks. She's a classically trained singer with folk leanings in a business now dominated by simplistic pop-rock.

By Kathleen Norris (Riverhead, 2008) Did you know there used to be eight deadly sins?

Steve Earle (New West, 2007)Steve Earle is, without question, the most overtly political artist in American popular culture. For a long time his activism (and songwriting) focused on his opposition to the death penalty.

Edited by Angelo Matera (Ave Maria Press, 2008) If the essayists in a new Godspy.com book are living Faith at the Edge, as the book is named, the majority of young adult Catholics I know are falling off the cliff. The book shows that Christianity is about more than morality and getting to heaven, writes Angelo Matera in the introduction.

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (Sony Pictures Classics, 2007) Holocaust films often present concentration camp inmates as if they were only victims, not complex characters with their own unique stories and choices.