What books are you reading?
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
Odd how this thread hasn't been created yet.
Anyway, this winter I read a non fiction series. It had been a while since I got into one, but it looked like a slower winter, and it was for a couple months. I read the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, it comes up in lots of top 10 fantasy series lists and I think it delivered. I also got Steven Kings Gunslinger series, but have only gotten part way through the first book, it seems good I've just been distracted.
The non fiction books I've read in the past year are, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch which is about the institutions such as journalism, law and academia and the systems and methods they use to establish what is true and what isn't and how they are deteriorating or under attack.
The Cancelling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Riki Schlott. The title is a play on Greg's previous book with Jonathan Haidt, the Coddling of the American Mind, which I read when it came out a few years ago and can also recommend which is about the dangers and harms of "safetyism". Cancelling is similar to the Constitution of Knowledge in that it tackles the deterioration of thought and knowledge production. Even though I think "cancelling" is popularly thought to be a left thing, the right are the original cancellers and the book spends just as much time going into their oppressions on free thought and expression.
At the moment I'm working through Yuval Noah Harari's newest book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks. He goes through human information technologies, from face to face group interaction to the printing press, radio and now the internet and AI and how the changes in technology disrupted social systems and allowed for both positive and negative changes, such as radio allowed for both modern autocratic regimes like USSR and modern democracies with a much greater voter franchise than in their origination. He's fairly pessimistic about the likely changes the internet has brought and the potential of AI, which is different than past techs in that they are more than passive tech, they are agents capable of influence themselves. But he does believe there is a path to a positive future.
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@Tozan started a similar threat back in 2021 @person .
https://newbuddhist.com/discussion/26878/which-book-are-you-reading
Since the last thread, I have joined the library and have a book on Linux out at the mo.
Do not really read anything but the endings, which in this case, has tips on bash/terminal scripting (whatever that is).
Also, have ordered a book by a Tree
Wilding – the Return of Nature to a British Farm ~ Isabella Tree
meanwhile...
https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/the-lotus-library-free-buddhist-ebooks-on-the-internet/
Thanks, I'm going to bump that one up and repost. Please ignore this one, so I don't add unnecessarily to my notifications.
Illustrated Guide To Luxor And The Valley Of The Kings by Kent Weeks
I read a fantasy trilogy about a young soldier Rin in a series of wars in a fantasy setting based on China and Chinese history. The fantasy elements include the protagonist who becomes a martial artist and shaman. Along with other fantasy elements, though the supernatural keep a low profile sort of like vampires in Anne Rice keep a low profile. The wars described are described as horrific rather than glamorized. Written by RF Kuang in her early 20s and found by me in a bookstore.
I think you’re going to have to ask @federica to close this thread…
Yes, if you see this @federica please do close it.
At the moment I'm reading Cittaviveka: Teaching from the Silent Mind. It's a deep, yet simple explanation of the Four Noble Truths. I feel like this is a good read on the subject. I always thought that desire = attachment and as a Buddhist one should be letting go of desires. But here it writes that desires are not good or bad, only the attachment to them is to be let go of and letting go is not the same as ridding oneself of, but patiently spending time with it, observing it, understanding the suffering. It writes about how meditation can be difficult at first, because of all the things we tried to avoid through our lives reappear in our minds and being free means being free of avoiding as well. (I'm obviously paraphrasing, it's my understanding of it, not a word-by-word quote). I'm glad I found this book, hopefully a lot more good reads will follow, Bhikkhu Bodhi's The Noble Eightfold Path was among my favorites from a long time ago as it was a very on-point summary of things most other books would deal with in detail.
I was reading Only Fear Dies by Barry Long. It was an interesting book, the early chapters were about how personality is formed by mimicking the responses of parents in childhood and how emotional pain forms almost a separate kind of body inside one’s energy.
It reminded me a lot of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, which contains a lot of similar ideas, which is not surprising because Eckhart Tolle learnt from Barry Long at one point in his career as a spiritual teacher.
Later chapters in the book contain a history of the world in terms of the mind of unhappiness. Barry holds that primitive man was a lot happier and largely free from likes and dislikes, and that the rational mind evolved almost like a parasite and contains a powerful mechanism taking it towards unhappiness.
I finished reading The Way of the Bodhisattva. It had some good descriptions, I especially liked the chapter on Patience. It's not too hard to comprehend with a rational mind, but I assume it's quite challenging to live. I don't think this book is ideal for complete beginners, it has several statements that could easily scare people off who need to unlearn a few concepts before engaging with new ones. It's very strict about some things, Hell for example is constantly brought up and it could be confusing to many who can only imagine it from a Christian point of view. I too struggle sometimes to decide how I should think of it in a Buddhist context, people who talk about failing to walk the path of the Dharma will result in you going to Hell still give me the creeps. It's hard to feel someone has your best interest in mind if they visualize extreme suffering for you and if they don't have my best interest in mind how are they to show me the way? Perhaps through failing to show me the way, they show me the way. But you get it, don't you? You can't expect random westerner laypeople's minds to just throw learned concepts away without understanding the differences between those and the "new ones". It's an intermediate book in my opinion (not a gateway book, but for those already actively seeking Buddhist wisdom) I don't think it's the right book for me either in this specific stage of my life, but I can imagine re-reading it and finding more and more to utilize from it some 10-20 years later.
My adult response to any mention of Hell is that it is not realistic for such a place to exist, anywhere. I tend to view it as a manipulative way to compel adherence to a religion, and it tends to lead me to discard such beliefs.
I just finished reading Buddha, Socrates and Us, by Stephen Batchelor. Some interesting material on Socrates and other Greek philosophers and playwrights, plus the author's thoughts on Secular Buddhism, with which I was already familiar, and with which I do not disagree.
I am now reading Is A River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane. It introduced me to the rights of nature movement, something I was only vaguely aware of previously, and got me so wound up I registered with the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature organization without a second thought.
The book is basically a narrative of the author's visits to three rivers, one in the cloud forests of Ecuador, one in India, one in Canada. MacFarlane is a damn fine writer.
I’ve started reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, mainly because it was recommended to me and I’m not that familiar with the Russians. I’m about 20 pages in, and I am wondering whether to continue because it frankly is quite tedious, lots of long descriptions of characters history and circumstances.
If I compare it for example to ‘Bleak House’ by Charles Dickens, then the latter is far more lively, varied and interesting, at least judging by the opening chapters that I read not long ago.
I’ve been following a video podcast called The Book Club, which is a series of book analyses which I’m finding very good so far. Recommended!
I just finished The Goldfinch and it hit me on multiple levels. It's good but also fairly depressing. I want to say more but I don't have the bandwidth as I also just came back from a funeral so I'm emotionally all over the place.
I’ve given up on The Brothers Karamazov, found it too boring. I have retreated to reading The Hobbit, which I haven’t read for 30 years. I now have a very beautiful edition illustrated by Alan Lee, which I am very much enjoying.
Your words wound me. lol
An interesting opinion from Nabokov and Proust, “reading is re-reading.”
I was just following The Book Club on The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, and it seems such an archetypal book of childhood that I’m amazed I haven’t read it. It’s been called a foundational classic of English reading… I think I’m going to have to get a copy, preferably a nicely bound illustrated edition.
THE QUANTUM REVELATION By Paul Levy
THE OPENING OF THE EYES (1) and (2) From The Writings of NICHIREN DAISHONIN
One is a discussion addressed to the non-scietific populus.
One is a 57 page missive to one of his ley disciples.
Curious Poses ~ Lucy Greaves
Tips and interesting facts about selected Asana
For example a reverse of the child pose (actually made up) but makes perfect sense
Happy Baby Pose
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/curious-poses-9781399426565/
I've also heard of happy baby pose referred to as dead bug pose by one of the yoga instructors I follow.
What do you all think about books which glorify the wicked? I was thinking about The Secret History by Donna Tart, or the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, in which murderers and vampires respectively are portrayed as ‘cool’. These books (and films) are incredibly popular, spawning vast cult followings.
I feel in a way these books become less worthwhile as reading material, whatever their literary and entertainment merits may be. Even if they inherit the trappings of Greek tragedy and give their antihero’s their just desserts, I feel if a book doesn’t say something about how to live a good and worthwhile life it is somewhat missing the point.
In general I think to each their own. Not everything has to be for everyone and I'm not sure I'd want to live in a world where only "good" books are allowed, either legally or socially.
More to the point in my life, I've thought about this more in terms of TV. There's a show called True Blood that's about modern day vampires, werewolves and the like. The writing usually treated the protagonists a bit differently than the antagonist. For the protagonists they were usually struggling with being a vampire like it was an addiction, they were treated more like well meaning addicts than the villainous vampires who liked the killing.
There was another show Sons of Anarchy that had a similar problem with anti heroes. In my opinion the characters had less to look up to than the vampires. Almost to a person there was meanness and betrayal. I found very little redeeming to find in anyone that might have given some meaning in viewing and empathizing with their struggle.
Both show were pretty long running, but I stopped after a few seasons.
You could perhaps contrast those with the show Dexter, one I like more. He's a sympathetic serial killer, the show explains how we became that way due to a horrific experience as a very young child that warped him and how his father seeing that darkness in him gave him a noble code in when and who he could kill.
But that isn’t what I was saying. There is a difference between there not being books about the wicked, and glorifying the wicked. In a way a lot of the early novels exploring this terrain were books like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide, and Frankenstein, and the murder mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes. Those books had a clear sense of good and wicked. But fast forward to the 1990’s and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and suddenly we see the protagonist wanting to be a member of a cool in-crowd of classics students who are also murderers.
I know some of the tv series you mention only from their advertising, but it seems to me a lot of that material is a power fantasy with a thin moralistic veneer. Dexter I know quite well, my father was a fan and so I saw quite a few of the seasons, but there as well I see themes of power over life and death, revenge (on the wicked, of course), the invulnerable protagonist. A lot of it is yet another power fantasy.
Breaking Bad is another one of these tv series in which ordinary people turn to bad, school chemistry teacher to drug dealer in this case, without any sense of what goodness really is or why you should want to pursue it. I’m beginning to think that modern culture spends so much time looking at the wicked that it entirely forgets what good actually means.
My " " around good was meant to say something like not wanting a world where some authority, institutional or cultural force, gets to decide for the world what is allowed, or "good", for the rest of the world.
I think there has been a cultural trend in our lives at first away from the standard knight in shining armor trope to more flawed heroes, which eventually included anti heroes like Walter White or vampires, etc. I've heard some murmurs that the newer generation having grown up on the anti hero wants nobler, more virtuous characters.
The frame I see it in is more generational evolution and movement, more than social decline.
Certainly that’s a gap I see filled by the enduring popularity of The Lord of the Rings and its heroes, and perhaps particularly Aragorn, as well as the range of superheroes from Marvel and DC. I think the cartoon superheroes often say less about what it means to do good than you think, because they all have overwhelming power and an obvious nemesis, neither of which exist in our real world.
When was the last time you saw generosity as the central theme of a movie? Or honest speech? No wait I can recall one, the Jim Carrey comedy Liar Liar. Still these things are core virtues in Buddhism, and the more you embody them the more you are seen as virtuous and good. There are definitely guides to living a good life in Buddhism, yet they rarely get any attention.
Duplicate post
I'm in general agreement on spiritual values not being very represented in media. The occasional popular movie comes along though. Movies like Forest Gump, The Pursuit of Happyness, Inside Out.
I think where I maybe disagree more is in what that means for us individually and society. I'm less concerned about what society does, there are plenty of options for us all to select the media that speaks to us. My mind goes to how many deeply Christian families navigate society, they're selective about what they and their children consume. I think that's the model to replicate, the Christians that go around trying to decide what the rest of society gets to consume bothers me.
This was a funny comedy short I came across recently about Loony Tunes and how looking at it through today's cultural lens makes it look much less enlightened. I think the joke about poking fun at today's parents for choosing to show their kids Bluey to learn about "empathy" is relevant.
To Boldly Go Where No Book Has Gone Before (A joyous journey through all of Science) ~ Luke O'Neil
Fun, informative by a major Irish scientist
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446413/to-boldly-go-where-no-book-has-gone-before-by-oneill-luke/9780241994122