Tag Archives for Buddhism

Books Bought, Books Read: June 2011 Edition (So Far)

OK, decided to re-up a meme. The idea is pilfered from Nick Hornby’s wonderful book about the joys of reading and acquiring books The Pollysyllabic Spree.

Books Bought thru June 1–June 20, 2011

  • Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
  • Minority Report by Philip K. Dick
  • Embassytown by China Mieville
  • The City & The City by China Mieville
  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Halting State by Charles Stross

Books Read, June 1–June 20, 2011

  • The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick’s kind of become an obsession. Also trying to read and collect the SF Masterworks  (the photo link is not my collection, but I wish it was ) put out by Gollancz (Oh, by the way, I have a birthday coming up in July. Hint, hint).

Also, I’m not being a good Buddhist at all (not that I’ve ever declared myself a Buddhist officially), given I’ve skipped meditation a few times lately, have imbibed some intoxicating drinks in recent days, and find myself too deeply attached to reading and acquiring books to ever renounce this particular form of sweet suffering.

Booking Through Thursday: The New, The Old, The Really Old

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Do you prefer reading current books? Or older ones? Or outright old ones? (As in, yes, there’s a difference between a book from 10 years ago and, say, Charles Dickens or Plato.)

About an hour ago I finished a draft of a book review for a novel slated to come out next month. I’ll leave the title and author a mystery; I hope you’ll read my review when it comes out. That particular book, along withPeep Show by Joshua Braff and Solar by Ian McEwan, I read because I was assigned reviews.

But often I don’t necessarily seek out new books when I read. If I read a review of a new book and it interests me, I’ll read it. I’ll also read new stuff by favorite writers.

Of course, my usual problem with new books is that so many come out that I want to read they quickly become old books. Some currents I would like to read are David Shields’ Reality Hunger, because I want to know what all the fuss is really about, and John McPhee’s Silk Parachute, because McPhee is a favorite. By the time I get around to reading these books, though, they may be old.

As far as “old” books go, I’m currently reading what may be considered “old,” though it was published a little more than a decade ago (1997 to be precise): Dinty Moore’s spiritual autobiography/memoir The Accidental Buddhist. I picked this book for several reasons. It’s an example of creative nonfiction, an genre I’m interested in as a writer. It’s also about Buddhism, a topic I have a general interest in.

But, I chiefly picked up the book to see if it might answer or give me insight into my own spiritual interests and questions: So far, it has.

I have, for instance, this morning been contemplating my attitude toward money and people with money, an attitude that shares similarities with Linsi Deyo, a Buddhist that Moore meets and interviews, who, with her husband Patrick, runs a business making zafus, or meditation cushions. Deyo was taught that people with money were bad, a belief I was taught, too, and, in turn that having money, at least a lot of it, was bad.

I feel I have an intimate relationship with that book. I can relate to Moore’s own spiritual quest, for instance. It too shares similarities with my own, a quest for me that extends at least formally to philosophy class in college.

I think readers read any book, new, old, ancient because they develop an intimate relationship with the book: The best ones hit them in the solar plexus; the book’s world becomes your own, a powerful communication between writer and reader.

Sunday Salon: Write Free: Attracting the Creative Life

The Sunday Salon.com At one time early in my writing life I was told by a school acquaintance and writer that writers essentially had to be unhappy in order to write. Depression and vast quantities of booze, rather than being detriments to writing, were supposed to fuel it.

Of course, literary history seems to support the howling-mad and sometimes drunken genius — Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, etc. Analytical studies of creativity — a favorite is Donald W. Goodwin’s Alcohol and the Writer — also seem to suggest at least some validity to the idea that art’s inspiration often lurks within the dark tea-time of the soul.

With so much evidence at hand, and a natural predisposition to brooding, I felt drawn toward the murk. And while I’ve had a relatively successful career as a newspaperman, and have had some successes publishing fiction and with freelance writing, I’ve also wallowed in a mire of negativity.

Last year, however, at a moment when the mire was pulling me deeper into its darkness, and all my entanglements providing little to show as a writer, I checked out from the library Henriette Anne Klauser’s Write it Down, Make it Happen. I felt strangely pulled to this book, as if — agnostic that I am — a magnetic force were drawing me to the book.

The jaded skeptic kept wrestling with the open-minded reader, saying this book was just a bunch of New-Age hooey. Still, I read the book, or most of it, because, at the same time, my interest in Buddhism (not as a religion, but as way to change my attitude about life) had led me to read about Buddhism’s principles, and some of what I was reading in Klauser’s book seemed marked with Buddhist thought. And things were, indeed, happening — arguably coincidental — as I wrote through some of Klauser’s exercises, especially things on the goal list that I first wrote down: moving and marriage, for instance.

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