Book Report

All this talk about music and movies and television and video games and sports might lead you to conclude that I don't read books. What kind of philistine must I be if I don't read books?

Well, you'd be partially correct - I don't read nearly as much as I used to.  I don't think anybody does since the rise of the internet.  With all of those other distractions, who has time to read?

The answer is ROMs, among others.  

Generally speaking, I prefer nonfiction to fiction, and for most of the first two decades of this new millennium, I read mostly Zen and Buddhist books, and manged to fill up almost three complete bookshelves with that subject matter.  After a few years, I've come to appreciate anthologies of Zen koans (The Blue Cliff Record, The Gateless Gate, The Book of Equanimity) over modern books that try to "explain" Zen and Buddhism to modern readers, although I still believe that Shunryo Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970) is still the best Zen book originally written in the English language.

For the past couple of years, my interests have been more eclectic, and this year I completed The Righteous Mind by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Demonic Males by primatologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson.  Both good books and recommended reading, by the way.

Right now, I'm working through two books simultaneously - a daytime book kept in the den and a bedside-table, evening book.

The daytime book is How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, a powerful exploration of the everyday, often subconscious, racism present in all of us, including the author, and how simply being "not a racist" is not enough.  Kendi describes a set of ideas and policies that he calls "antiracist" that can dispel and replace entrenched racist policies and ideas and hopefully lead us out of the quagmire of inequality and divisiveness so prevalent in America today. 

The nightime book was lent to me by my daughter, Britney.  Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is a native American poet and botanist, and like its author, the book is a mixture of the poetic and the scientific.  An often lyrical exploration of man's relationship to nature, especially plants, Sweetgrass has given me pause to reflect on how out of touch I've become with nature, living as I do in an cybernetic world of music and movies and television and video games and sports, hating trees for falling in the neighborhood even as I expend no effort in maintaining or cultivating them, or considering how my environment became so out of balance that even hearty trees can't be sustained.

Like my Zen books and like the books completed earlier this year, I endorse both of these and would recommend either of them to those who find the subject matter interesting.