The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

Very well done. I wouldn't say I read it in a white-hot heat, but in this small volume Gottschall manages to pack in a lot: dreams, identity, online fantasy worlds, Wagner/Hitler and that most destructive of myths which resulted, the real nightmare quality of children at play. There was something mildly depressing about the whole enterprise, story as a concept reduced in parts to a balm we slather over ourselves in order to get through life. Story is something else for me, as I suspect it is with most writers. Story hums with life, especially when it comes unbidden to the writing mind, transporting the soul to someplace altogether bigger, realer, weightier than the shell which normally houses us and our day-to-day experiences. Definitely worth one's time though, this book. Just don't expect a paean to escapism.

This book does a good job of explaining just how fundamental being social and telling stories is to being human.