To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
It’s been a year since Thich Nhat Hanh died; in researching how to say his name, I found a documentary made on the anniversary of his death where everyone was calling him by either his nickname or his birth name, so I’ve had to rely on the Wikipedia entry for pronunciation. Not that I’ll ever […]
This book is an actual Buddhist book. Unlike Hanh’s own Peace of Mind, Start Here Now by Susan Piver, or Zen Mind, Beginner Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, this book presents a Buddhist Sutra–a teaching of Buddha–and offers exegesis and commentary on it. The sutra in question is Sutra On Knowing The Better Way To Catch […]
I forgot to bring a magazine with me one day while taking my children to the library, so I picked up this book by a prolific Vietnamese monk. The book focuses on the mindfulness aspect of Buddhist practice. Basically, the book is 150 pages of reminding yourself to take a breath and focus on your […]
So the Springfield-Greene County Library 2023 Winter Reading Challenge has come to an end. In the end, I only read books in 14 of the 15 categories. I did not read a banned book, as I don’t have many banned books easily at hand, and I’ve read most of the ones I own (I think). […]
So we had a little time to kill after going to the Kansas City Renaissance Festival for a bit on Saturday. As we were booked to stay in Overland Park, Kansas, a city of 200,000 people, I hoped we would find some used book stores. But only one, and to be honest, I confused the […]
As I mentioned, I just completed a week-long trip to Wisconsin, featuring the normal pass through the Milwaukee area to visit my father’s grave and see my grandmother, and then onto the Dells. During one of our days at the Dells, we travelled to Baraboo, Wisconsin, and I was pleased to find that the Village […]
I saw this headline, Buddhist monk who brought ‘mindfulness’ to the world dies peacefully aged 95 at Vietnamese temple, and I thought, surely not Thich Nat Hanh, but it was. I’ve read his books Thundering Silence and Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present. I guess I should not have been terribly surprised that he was […]
My beautiful wife gave me this book for Valentine’s Day. I started it in mid-March, using it as my “carry book” when I went to the podiatrist amidst The Pandemic even though this book chonks in at 700+ pages. I mean, I didn’t carry it a lot, and I certainly did not get the chance […]
This book collects some commentary on primary Buddhist texts by an early 20th century Nipponphile. R.H. Blyth was born in London and moved to Japan prior to World War II. He was locked up for the duration of it, but continued to live in Japan afterwords. He became quite the scholar in Buddhism and whatnot. […]
Well, 2017 has drawn to a close, and with it, I’ve closed my annual log of books that I read. In 2017, I read 87 books, ish. As you might know, some of them have been omnibus editions, where three novels or five novels are in a single binding, and I count that as a […]
As I mentioned, this book was my pocket book for quite some time, which explains why the cover looks like it does now compared to how it looked when I bought it in Baraboo in June. As you might know, gentle reader, I’ve been looking to the East like a China Grover the last few […]
As I might have alluded to yesterday, we went to Wisconsin for a week. We stopped in the Milwaukee area for a night and headed out to Wisconsin Dells for a couple of days. However, Monday found the children with too few books to read, so we headed out to the local used book stores […]
This book is a collection of short stories, b-sides really, rushed out probably on the success of Stranger in a Strange Land. It includes the title story and a couple others. Impressions: “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”: An interesting premise: a man doesn’t know what he does during the day, so he hires a […]
Publicist: Ethan Hawke has married girlfriend I’m not sure I’d have my publicist release this if I were Ethan Hawke.