Five Books I Read This Fall

Pagan Virtues: Poems is the 2020 collection by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn, as well as the first book of poetry I've read in a while. It opens with an older poem, "A Postmortem Guide (1)," containing these resonant lines: I learned to live without hope / as well as I could, almost happily, / in the despoiled and radiant now."

Who alive today doesn't understand what Dunn's scratching at here? (Or, to paraphrase another of his poems, published elsewhere, who isn't one, once?) What I like most about Dunn's work is its quality of everydayness. It's the work of a poet who's most interested in getting by. If poetry is an act of bearing witness, then Dunn succeed in what seems to be the most unobtrusive way possible, with quiet observations on moral positions, political alignments, our motivations to work, and other seeming mundanities. This isn't to say that he's dull or wishy-washy. Rather, Dunn at his best gives voice to our frequently inarticulate confusion and frustration with our "despoiled and radiant now."

That phrase expresses a very Buddhist sentiment, recognizing the beauty in what Zen master John Daido Loori called "the whole catastrophe"—i.e., life, the universe, and everything. Daido Roshi isn't featured in the Lion's Roar publication Deep Dive into Zen, but Norman Fischer, Guo Gu, Joan Sutherland, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Josh Bartok, Shinshu Roberts, Stephen Batchelor, and Judy Roitman are. Their writings on Zen Buddhism encompass the history, practices, and quirks of this 1,500-year-old lineage, and make this free e-book an engaging read for the practitioner or the curious reader alike.

The poet and writer Kapka Kassabova wrote three other titles about her travels throughout eastern Europe's Balkan region before Anima: A Wild Pastoral. I didn't read them. For that matter, I'd never heard of her before encountering a New York Review of Books piece about Anima, the last title in her so-called Balkans quartet about the hardscrabble livelihoods of rural people and the animals they live with in southeastern Europe. I'm not ordinarily one to seek out what one might call "adventure writing," but the review intrigued me. Anima seemed like something greater.

The book opens with Kassabova seemingly in search of some je ne sais quoi, hoping to inject more meaning into her existence. She anticipates fulfilling this quest by taking up with nomadic sheepherders in a high village "long, scattered, and empty," called Orelek. (Because, you know, she was in the neighborhood anyway.) Her description of the forbidding, mountain road to town—"hostile, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it to bar entrance—reads like a passage from a Gothic novel. It's a potent start. Kassabova writes a beautiful reverie, and Anima is replete with examples of that talent.

One thing that becomes clear from the start is that she's an incurably restless sort, peripatetic and prone to a poet's romanticization of hard living. This isn't to say that she seems to fetishize the dark-skinned shepherd, Sásho, with his sad history as a feral child, his "surprisingly good smoker's teeth," and his drunken bouts of grownup depression. The two of them share '80s comedies on a smartphone screen in a pasture and fall almost inevitably in love. It does sometimes feel like a fetish, though. More than once, I shook free of her captivating spell to consider how much of the book felt like an account, however beautiful, of the author's slumming?

The reader just has to remember that she's the medium through which this account reaches us, not the story itself. Anima is about humankind's relationship with nature and the poetry of living in balance. The mesmeric love that Kassabova has for the concept of equilibrium shows where her heart truly is, not with the ruggedly handsome Sásho but with the earth itself, with its incomprehensibly complex interconnectedness, with the often amazing simplicity of the lives led in harmony with it.

Early in his life, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh made interdependence a major focus of his teaching. He just called it by a different name. Interbeing: The 14 Mindfulness Trainings of Engaged Buddhism is his book outlining the tenets of the Order of Interbeing, which he founded after the Vietnam War, to strive for social justice in his homeland and beyond.

What he called "mindfulness trainings" were teachings compiled from multiple traditional sources in his effort to renew Buddhism for a new age. These fourteen precepts represent an expansion of the five vows that Buddhist laypeople sometimes take—to refrain from killing, from taking what isn't given, from speaking what isn't true and good, from ingesting intoxicants, and from committing sexual misconduct. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings incorporate not only precepts followed by Buddhist monks and nuns, but also the traditional Bodhisattva precepts undertaken by practitioners all over the world who want to transform suffering and injustice into peace and equity.

Four Books I Spent My Spring Reading

When the time came to choose what to read next, our book club facilitator suggested we pick up Alice McDermott's novel After This. He was teaching a course on Catholic literature at Saint Louis University and, with characteristic forthrightness, begged our mercy in selecting a book he was already teaching, rather than adding another book to his literary load. After This is a book he loves, he said, which sounded promising enough. Then he went on to say that it was the one book from the course that his students suggested he remove from next semester's syllabus. "They think it's boring," he said. Being the type of readers for whom such warnings arouse curiosity, we assented almost immediately.

This was my first encounter with McDermott. She writes beautifully at the level of the sentence, with prose rich in meaning without ever being ponderous. Plotwise, I can see why contemporary college students struggled with this book: they probably couldn't relate to the world it depicted. Spanning a period between the end of two wars, World War Two and Vietnam, After This has at its center an Irish-American family in search not of happiness—because wanting happiness, in these characters' deeply Catholic mindset, would constitute a kind of unseemly greed—but of simple contentedness. Just to be okay with how their lives are going seems to be their aim. Their saga unfolds episodically, in a series of vignettes, with years disappearing easily between sections. Its 277 pages flip past with almost a breeze.

Freed in May from an onerous work schedule, I did my best to make up for lost reading time, leaping straight into several books at once. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a collection of Zen and pre-Zen writings compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki in 1957. It includes texts previously published as 101 Zen Stories, The Gateless Gate (called Mumonkon in the original Japanese), 10 Bulls (maybe better known as the ox-herding pictures), and an ancient Sanskrit text entitled Centering that emerged in India 4,000 years ago, more than two millennia before Bodhidharma famously brought Zen teachings to China. Unlike McDermott's novel, I took extra time with this book, ingesting it in small, meditative bites that never overwhelmed my ability to sit awhile with a given story, koan, or passage.

When Freedom Reads visited ERDCC a couple of years ago, I had to know its representatives' answers to two questions. First: what one book each of them read during their imprisonment most resonated with them. Then: what book they recommend for others in these circumstances. One response to the second question was The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writers Life in Prison, edited by Caits Meissner. This essay collection was put out by PEN America a few years ago, forwarding the organization's mission to celebrate and elevate the literature of writers "whose voices have too often gone unheard or been ignored." The Sentences That Create Us collects inspiring pieces by justice-impacted writers—novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, screenwriters, playwrights, memoirists, and everything in between—to reveal how prisoners whose minds remain free can create a different kind of life through their writing.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about Zen the way he taught it: simply and with a directness that matched his subject. His book The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation was probably intended to be an introduction to the practice, for readers who were not yet intimate with the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Five Aggregates, the Paramitas, and other essential Buddhist teachings. Even though I've been practicing this stuff for a while, its good to go back to basics every so often and get a refresher. With straightforward pronouncements like "The person who has no compassion in him cannot be happy," and "Twenty-four hours are a treasure chest of jewels," Thich Nhat Hanh once again proves himself a teacher worthy of his beautiful reputation.

I'm not really sure where my reading will take me next. It's been so long since I had enough downtime from work to read much of anything. A visit to the prison's library is in order—my first in almost three years. Who knows what I might pick up.

Five Books I Spent My Fall Reading

Taking up a new job really changed my reading habits. While it didn't take away so many hours, it did refocus how I spend them. Much of what I read these past three months was computer-coding material for work – dense manuals of instructional, logical language that I picked through intently, deliberately, often doubling back in recursive bouts of questioning, of either the text or of my own coding aptitude.

Besides this, though, there were "real" books. Really good "real" books, even. First was The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion, translated and with commentaries by the beloved Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In its original Sanskrit, this sutra is known as Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita: the Diamond Sutra. It chronicles a discussion by the Buddha about the emptiness of teachings and of concepts in general. Some call the Diamond Sutra confounding. Followers during the Buddha's lifetime were unsettled by the section of the teaching that reads, "Tathagata [the Buddha] means the suchness of all things [dharmas]. Someone would be mistaken to say that the Tathagata has attained the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind, since there is not any highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind to be attained." Referring back to his own teachings, the Buddha went on: "This is why the Tathagata has said, 'All dharmas are, in fact, Buddhadarma.' What are called all dharmas are, in fact, not all dharmas. That is why they are called all dharmas."

It's about the idea of a thing versus the thing itself, not mistaking the map for the destination, and not getting all tangled up in motives... I think. Anyway, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion might not be a thick book, but this essential Buddhist text packs a lifetime's worth of teachings into its few pages.

The debut novel of Dutch poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, in a very different way, has a lot to say. The Discomfort of Evening won the 2020 International Booker Prize. A preteen farm girl's depression and desperation in the wake of her younger brother's death held some interest for me, but the Booker Prize-win attracted me more than the novel's synopsis did. Booker winners are typically excellent. The Discomfort of Evening is a very good, very dark book about the ways in which repression and isolation ruin lives.

Susanna Clarke's amazing first novel, the fully realized fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, with its historical richness and intricacy, blew me away. I looked forward to buying and reading her next, but nothing else by the reclusive British author seemed forthcoming. A profile of Clarke I read this year in The New Yorker revealed that she suffers from a mysterious condition and spends days at a time shut away in a dark bedroom. Nevertheless, a new book was finally coming: Piranesi, Clarke's first novel in sixteen years. I mentioned the New Yorker article to several people and, without telling me beforehand, the generous Emily C. made Piranesi a surprise gift. (Thank you, Emily!) And what a gift! Mysterious, magical, startlingly funny, and somehow both simple and labyrinthine at once, the novel held me rapt from start to finish – well worth the wait.

Then came my birthday, when even more books flew in. For three of them I have my mother to thank. (Thank you so much, Mum!) The first of those was a book-length philosophical essay by John Gray, entitled The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom. In well under 200 pages, Gray traipses through subjects as seemingly diverse as Jewish mythology, the novels of Philip K. Dick, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Aztec history, prison, reality television (which Gray describes as its own sort of prison), Gnosticism, AI, and the surveillance state – all in service of his wildly entertaining, thought-provoking discussion of whether or not humankind has free will. No spoilers!

Also from Mum was Hermann Hesse's classic Steppenwolf, which had been on my list for a decade. Maybe because of my own Buddhist studies, I spotted shadows of the dharma in the Eastern philosophies vaguely espoused by the author. Only shadows, though. Hesse's book is a novel, not a 2,500-year-old sutra. As a general rule, a person should avoid works of fiction whose purpose is purely to preach (the Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, or anything by Ayn Rand), and, unfortunately, what Hesse seems to have attempted with Steppenwolf was less to tell the semi-autobiographical story of sad old Harry Haller than to promote a particular way of living.

A tantalizing Murakami novel still sits waiting for me. I've already started reading the long-awaited Sandman Omnibus, Volume III, as well as a fat collection of various writings by Montaigne. When these appear in my next reading post, three months from now, they're all but certain to get rave reviews.

Thirteen (Mostly Buddhist) Books I Spent My Fall Reading

My mother attended a reading by literary fantasist Salman Rushdie and afterward sent me an autographed copy of his latest novel, Quichotte. I've read almost all of Rushdie's work and, as a fan, would've loved to say that this book blew me away. Unfortunately, familiarity is exactly what limited my enjoyment of it. Quichotte is a twenty-first-century Don Quixote remix. His previous novels — particularly The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which played on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and The Satanic Verses, which infamously riffed on Islam — both rejiggered old legends to greater effect.

Among the many books that @Free_Byron_Case follower Punker Bee surprised me with this year, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire: A Novel was the best so far. A 999-line poem and accompanying "notes" are the form taken by this very quirky story of political intrigue that builds to a very satisfying surprise ending.

Somewhat less satisfying was the dystopian science fiction novel Pure, by Julianna Baggott. Its protagonist is a girl with a doll's head for a hand, who lives with her aging uncle and a tiny mechanical bug in the post-apocalyptic wastes and crafts delicate butterflies out of scrap metal. I should've known, by this description alone, that this was not he novel for me. Worse yet, it's final words were "The End of Part One" — a cliffhanger. I just let go.

The Wings to Awakening is Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation of various Buddhist texts dealing with the Buddha's core teachings. All are taken from the Pali Canon, the oldest known texts of Buddhist thought still in existence. Like everything from the Pali Canon, it makes for seriously dry, repetitive reading. I have no designs on becoming a monk, which would require me to take a vow to live by a truly epic set of precepts, but my friend Luke is a Theravada Buddhism practitioner and therefore believes that exhaustive study is just as important as — if not more important than — meditation, so this is the kind of book he'll be shoving my direction pretty frequently as we travel along the path of dharma practice.

The Thai dharma teacher Dr. Thynn Thynn wrote Living Meditation, Living Insight to be much more accessible. It's conversational in style because this book is made up of essays responding to questions from the members of Dr. Thynn's dharma group. Accordingly, it dispenses with the theoretical and helpfully deals in practical day-to-day concerns from a general Buddhist perspective.

Similarly, the former Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor's excellent Buddhism without Belief uses only straightforward language. Batchelor shows the reader Buddhism through the eyes of what might be called an originalist, arguing that the historical Buddha wasn't some superpowered divinity but just a man, whose enlightenment experience resulted in the codification of what we now call the dharma, and that those teachings have value irrespective of a practitioner's belief in supernatural phenomena like reincarnation and prayer. Batchelor's suggestion is that Buddhists embrace a stance of studious agnosticism in order to better live in open-mindedness, practicing nondualistic thought. I can dig it.

For my birthday, my mother got me a couple of books from my Amazon wish list. (Thank you so much, Mum!) The first was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, an experimental fantasy of Kublai Kahn being regaled with Marco Polo's tales of far-off lands — cities with skyscrapers, cities on stilts, cities with dirigibles drifting overhead, cities of the dead.... It's a gorgeous little book, the stuff of dreams.

The other book I received from Mum was Writing in Flow, by Susan K. Perry, PhD. It's an expansion of a study that Perry did for her doctoral dissertation on so-called flow experiences — mental states in which the person experiencing them undergoes a voluntary shift into a state of intense concentration, trying to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile. Writers, athletes, painters, gamers, adept conversationalists — people from all walks of life experience flow at least once in a while. This book analyzes seventy-odd writers' unique descriptions of flow, then offers suggestions for how a reader might engineer conditions to more reliably enter flow whenever they sat down to write. True, Writing in Flow probably sounds like it's of much less interest to you than it was to me, but you're perusing the reading list of an atypically literate prisoner, so I'm not quite sure what you expected.

D.T. Suzuki wrote the essays that comprise Zen Buddhism in the 1950s, just when Buddhism was first making inroads into America. Some of them feel sixty years old. Nevertheless, this collection offered a lot of fascinating (probably true) history, so I don't regret checking it out from ERDCC's chapel library. Ditto for The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra, by noted Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, a short, beautiful little book containing not just a twenty-first-century translation of the Heart Sutra, Buddhism's most cherished, most oft-repeated text, but also the master's wonderful commentaries on it.

Another anthology of texts from the Pali Canon, The Spirit of Buddhist Meditation, by Sarah Shaw , was next, followed by Acharya Buddharakkhita's translation The Dhammapada: The Buddha's Path of Wisdom. The former offers a glimpse into the sutras that address meditation practice in its manifold forms. It reads like a new car manual. The latter is more friendly, which is undoubtedly why tens of thousands of practitioners around the globe meditate on the simple truths contained in its 423 verses. Consider Verse 51: "Like a beautiful flower full of color but without fragrance, even so, fruitless are the fair words of one who does not practice them." Or Verse 125: "Like fine dust thrown against the wind, evil falls back upon that fool who offends an inoffensive, pure and guiltless man." Or Verse 228: "There never was, there never will be, nor is there now, a person who is wholly blamed nor wholly praised." Surely you can see the Dhammapada's appeal.

My autumn reading ended with another Thanissaro Bhikku translation, Poems of the Elders: An Anthology from the Theragatha and Therigatha. The ancient texts known as the Theragatha and Therigatha are collections of enlightenment poems attributed to the earliest orders of Buddhist monks and nuns, respectively. Personal, vivid, and grounded, these poems express the profound joy of enlightenment, in hundreds of different ways, in poems by matriarchs and misanthropes, servants and shopkeepers, harlots and the high-born, robbers and rice farmers — a small sample of the myriad faces of early Buddhism, touchingly illustrating the dharma's unique accessibility to one and all. I found it inspiring.