Category Archives: Books

STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

Posted on by

I’ve only read a handful of history books (crime fiction is my passion) but they’ve all be great reads. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civ89l War Era; Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869; and Wires West: The Story of the Talking Wires. I’m currently reading STALINGRAD The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor.

(Wikipedia) “Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. The book starts with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the subsequent drive into the Soviet Union. Its main focus is the Battle of Stalingrad, in particular the period from the initial German attack to Operation Uranus and the Soviet victory.” Continue reading →

The Other Side of Nothing

Posted on by

(Amazon) “In the West, Zen Buddhism has a reputation for paradoxes that defy logic. In particular, the Buddhist concept of nonduality — the realization that everything in the universe forms a single, integrated whole — is especially difficult to grasp. In The Other Side of Nothing, Zen teacher Brad Warner untangles the mystery and explains nonduality in plain English. To Warner, this is not just a philosophical problem: nonduality forms the bedrock of Zen ethics, and once we comprehend it, many of the perplexing aspects of Zen suddenly make sense.”

We are not individual beings but components of an infinite reality that is just one single entity.

Zen Buddhists are Buddhists whose main thing is meditation. […] A way to learn to clearly see what reality actually is, beyond all dogmas and beliefs.

In everything in the world there exists nothing besides illusions. […] We can’t see the true nature of reality, but we can discover it. […] No explanation can ever match the reality it’s trying to describe.

In one sense, God created us. In another sense we are continuously creating God.

“Our life and our surroundings are part of a single continuum.” […] “Action and the place in which it occurs are indivisible.” — Nishijima Roshi

Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing.

When we stop wanting things to be different from how they actually are, we stop suffering.

The truest thing you can ever say is, “I don’t know.”

The body exists within awareness rather than awareness being something that occurs inside the body or even inside the mind. The body is inside me rather than me being inside the body. […] The body is a manifestation of consciousness or of mind.

“Zazen is good for nothing!” — Kodo Sawaki

Whatever the particular thing is that you think is the worst thing in the world, it is part of you. Continue reading →

The Order of Time

Posted on by

“The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but becoming. He says, “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have limited duration.” He gives a rock as an example of a thing, as contrasted with an event. But, he says, “On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most ‘thinglike’ are nothing more than long events.” A rock isn’t a rock forever — even though it might seem like that to us humans. It starts off as a bunch of sand, gets compressed and melted, exists as a rock for a while, and eventually wears away into sand again. Even to say it started off as sand is wrong, because the sand wasn’t always sand either. The molecules that make up each grain of sand have their own complicated history. Therefore, any given rock’s existence as a rock is an event within the long, long history of its constituent, parts.”

— The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (quoted in The Other Side of Nothing by Brad Warner)

Pop Music

Posted on by

“It crept into you like mist under an ill-fitting door, until words you didn’t know you knew had taken up residence–words like love, heartbreak, forever. People her age spent years having poetry hammered into them at school, and emerged without a couplet intact. But each and every one knew what followed “I’ll never dance with another.”

— The Last Voice You Hear (Mick Herron)

Room for more books

Posted on by

I love books. Real, paper books. I love the feel of the paper, the weight on my chest, the smell… I purchase books to support the authors and so I can make notes in the margins and underline passages. I only keep the books I might read again and donate the others to local library.

With the recent discovery of some new (to me) authors (Robert Crais, Walter Mosley, Mick Herron, Don Winslow), I was out of room. Stacks of books everywhere. So time for more bookshelves. I can almost hear them sigh.

Living your back-up plan

Posted on by

“He wondered now how many people there were […] living their back-up plan; who were office drones or office cleaners, teachers, plumbers, shop assistants, IT mavens, priests and accountants only because rock and roll, football, movies and authordom hadn’t panned out. And decided that the answer was everyone. Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn’t appreciate it much.”

— Slow Horses (Mick Herron)

Emptiness

Posted on by

“Pike was good at waiting, which was why he excelled in the Marines and other things. He could wait for days without moving and without being bored because he did not believe in time. Time was what filled your moments, so if your moments were empty, time had no meaning. Emptiness did not flow or pass; it simply was. Letting himself be empty was like
putting himself in neutral: Pike was.”

— The Last Detective (Robert Crais)

LibraryThing

Posted on by

LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers. It went live on August 29, 2005 and has 2,600,000 users and over 155 million books catalogued. (Wikipedia)

I started using LibraryThing in September of 2005 and currently have 896 books in the database: 596 fiction, 236 non-fiction… by 336 authors. Some of my favorites:

John Sandford (43)
Michael Connelly (33)
Lawrence Block (31)
Sue Grafton (23)
Elmore Leonard (23)
John D. Macdonald (22)
Robert B. Parker (22)
Ross Thomas (21)
Bill Granger (15)
John Grisham (15)
William Gibson (14)
Carl Hiaasen (13)
Neal Stephenson (13)
Robert K. Tanenbaum (12)
James S. A. Corey (11)
Gregory Mcdonald (11)
Robert Parker (11)
James Patterson (11)
Nelson DeMille (10)

I continue to fine-tune my tags. Still the best snap-shot of my interests.

PS: Amazon says I’ve purchased more than 700 books starting in 1998.