This year's reading so far
January
1. The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Paladin of Souls by the same
3. 1,001 Pearls of Buddhist Wisdom by Desmond Biddulph
4. The Zapruder Film: Reframing the Kennedy Assassination by David R. Wrone
5. Barbarians! by Terry Jones
6. No Horizon Is So Far by Ann Bancroft, Liv Arnesen, et al.
7. On Writing by Stephen King (R)
8. The Writing Diet by Julia Cameron
February
9. The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold
10. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (R)
11. Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center by Michael Downing
I
enjoyed the Chalion series very much; I am finding that Bujold
Satisfies, even when she's not writing about everyone's favorite mercenary admiral ImpSec lieutenant Imperial Auditor and hyperkinetic pain in the ass. I also enjoyed Red Mars, which went down more easily on a second read; I'm working on Green Mars now.
The Zapruder Film and Barbarians! were both interesting historical reads. I undertook the former because I felt perhaps I should be better acquainted with the controversies surrounding JFK's assassination; after reading it, I decided I *shouldn't* become better acquainted, because it's exactly the sort of thing that will eat my brain and give me bad dreams. Sometimes maturity means backing away slowly from what you recognize is harmful to you.
Barbarians! is kind of controversial in its own right. Jones, a former Pythoner turned popular historian, argues that the Romans weren't the great civilizers of the ancient world, but rather the first effective spin doctors of history. By looting tools, technologies, and wealth from the surrounding peoples, whom they defined as worthy of conquest because they were merely Barbarians, they became a superpower and successfully wrote history so that they are the Good Guys, bringing cleanliness, clothing, and culture wherever they went. In fact, archeological discoveries increasingly demonstrate that the bog-trotting Celts actually built sound roads, invented soap, and gave the Romans the swords with which they conquered other peoples. It's a fascinating read that turns most of what we know about the ancient world on its head, including the early history of the Church.
No Horizon Is So Far is an Antarctic book which I read in protest against unseasonably warm weather. [g] It's the account of the two main authors' crossing of the southern continent by ski-sailing, which uses kite-like sails to speed skiing. You can read more about them at the expedition website.
Shoes Outside the Door really deserves a full-length book review, but it might not get one until I've read it again. It's an account of the first major Zen Buddhist center in North America, how it grew, why it blew up in 1983, and what keeps it going. What makes it fascinating is that it's an account written not by a journalist, but by a novelist, and in many ways, it's like reading a novel with a dozen different narrators, all of them unreliable. Other people raced through The Da Vinci Code, but this book, a group memoir of spiritual aspiration and betrayal, was the kind of book *I* can't put down.
