I already addressed volume three of The Mahabharata in another post, so I'll skip it here. I had a re-read this month, Erling Kagge's Walking: One Step at a Time. Kagge is a renowned explorer and avid walker. He's Norwegian, and Norway (along with many European countries) has enviable pedestrian infrastructure. Don't worry, I'm going to save my ranting about car dependency for another time. This little volume is a meditation on the act of walking, which is probably one of the best things people can do for themselves, assuming the ability to do so. Wow that sentence was awkward, sorry 'bout that.
If you find you do some of your best thinking, relaxing, or imagining while on a walk, it's not just you. Kagge's other works are worth seeking out as well - I also enjoyed Silence and Philosophy for Polar Explorers.
Italo Calvino came to my attention recently and I acquired a few of his novels. But first up I read The Complete Cosmicomics, a broad collection of short stories based on scientific ideas and discoveries. Calvino was watching the Space Race of the 1960s with great attention, and loved reading about theories and discoveries relating to outer space, so many of these stories feature an apparently immortal being named Qwfwq, who narrates tales about gravity, black holes, moons, and even the Big Bang. These are not LOL-funny comic stories, but are more wry. Enjoyable but I am passing this book on because I doubt I'll read it again.
Related to The Mahabharata, I also read The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das. I have been much more familiar with the term "dharma" from a Buddhist perspective, where it means truth or teaching. Here, it means something a bit different, and the best explanation I came across was "the dharma of fire is to burn." Your dharma is your path in life, the choices you make, the attitudes you have. A kshatriya fulfills their dharma by leading the people and fighting to protect them. A bramanha does so by conducting sacrifices. Etc. The Mahabharata can be looked at as chiefly a tale about dharma and goodness, or how one should conduct one's life. A handful of characters are exmined one at a time, specifically from the point of view of their dharma and behavior. Even Krishna is looked at this way - in this human incarnation, he is an advisor to the Pandhavas, but also sort of a trickster, in that he keeps finding loopholes in dharma and advising people to "fudge" their actions.
The problem is that dharma is often "subtle." The answers are rarely clear cut, and often there are many considerations at play. The Bhagavad Gita, which is coming up pretty shortly in volume five, opens with Arjuna entangled in exactly one of these dharmic messes - on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, realizing he will either have to kill his own kin or put down his arms and dishonor his role as a warrior. Neither option is a good one.
So that was four books completed, for a total of 28 this year.
If you find you do some of your best thinking, relaxing, or imagining while on a walk, it's not just you. Kagge's other works are worth seeking out as well - I also enjoyed Silence and Philosophy for Polar Explorers.
Italo Calvino came to my attention recently and I acquired a few of his novels. But first up I read The Complete Cosmicomics, a broad collection of short stories based on scientific ideas and discoveries. Calvino was watching the Space Race of the 1960s with great attention, and loved reading about theories and discoveries relating to outer space, so many of these stories feature an apparently immortal being named Qwfwq, who narrates tales about gravity, black holes, moons, and even the Big Bang. These are not LOL-funny comic stories, but are more wry. Enjoyable but I am passing this book on because I doubt I'll read it again.
Related to The Mahabharata, I also read The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das. I have been much more familiar with the term "dharma" from a Buddhist perspective, where it means truth or teaching. Here, it means something a bit different, and the best explanation I came across was "the dharma of fire is to burn." Your dharma is your path in life, the choices you make, the attitudes you have. A kshatriya fulfills their dharma by leading the people and fighting to protect them. A bramanha does so by conducting sacrifices. Etc. The Mahabharata can be looked at as chiefly a tale about dharma and goodness, or how one should conduct one's life. A handful of characters are exmined one at a time, specifically from the point of view of their dharma and behavior. Even Krishna is looked at this way - in this human incarnation, he is an advisor to the Pandhavas, but also sort of a trickster, in that he keeps finding loopholes in dharma and advising people to "fudge" their actions.
The problem is that dharma is often "subtle." The answers are rarely clear cut, and often there are many considerations at play. The Bhagavad Gita, which is coming up pretty shortly in volume five, opens with Arjuna entangled in exactly one of these dharmic messes - on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, realizing he will either have to kill his own kin or put down his arms and dishonor his role as a warrior. Neither option is a good one.
So that was four books completed, for a total of 28 this year.