What I've been reading

The Children of Men
by P. D. James

narrated by Daniel Weyman

"The year is 2021. No child has been born for 25 years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters."

I thought that P. D. James wrote detective mysteries and hadn't realised that this was one of hers - I saw the film that was made of the book, which I seem to remember I thought unremarkable. So is the book, although as usual I read the story as just a story while other deeper messages are probably concealed within it, about the tendency of power to corrupt and the attitude of a population reflecting on its demise. I'm sure I could make some allusion to the current political situation but I can't be bothered and it's all too depressing anyway.

Gautama Buddha: The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One
by Vishvapani Blomfield

"Whilst many accounts of the Buddha's life mix legend and history, this biography discriminates between fact and fiction to reveal Gautama, the remarkable human being behind the myth, and sheds new light on his teachings."

A useful book for me that fills in some of the gaps in my knowledge of the history of Buddhism, but also gives some idea of how accurate the records might be. It also made it clear that also going on was the usual territorial conflict between kings and provinces, the wandering holy men begging for alms, Hinduism and Jainism in the ascendant. And interesting to realise that he probably lived only about a hundred years before Socrates, and it was the time of the Jewish prophets.

Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson

narrated by B. J. Harrison

"Following the demise of bloodthirsty buccaneer Billy Bones, young Jim Hawkins finds himself with the key to a fortune. He has discovered Captain Flint's map, which will lead him to the fabled Treasure Island."

It's been a long time since I read this, and not much to say about it except that I hadn't remembered much more than the bare bones of the story. It was fine.

That Old Ace in the Hole
by Annie Proulx

"Folks in the Texas panhandle do not like hog farms. But Bob Dollar is determined to see his new job as hog site scout for Global Pork Rind through to the end. However he is forced to face the idiosyncratic inhabitants of Woolybucket and to question his own notions of loyalty and home."

What an interesting experience this was. Nothing much seemed to happen for 80 percent of the book, except that she introduces all sorts of characters with really good names (Freda Beautyrooms, Hugh Dough, Ribeye Cluke, Tater Crouch) and describes the scenery, atmosphere and activity of the Texas/Oklahoma 'panhandle' so you can see it and hear it and feel it and smell it. Then at the end she just pulls everything together and ties it up with a bow and it's glorious.

Living with Awareness: A Guide to the Satipatthana Sutta
by Sangharakshita

"The guiding principle of Buddhism is that things change - we change - and that we have the capacity to direct that change towards spiritual growth and development. In being mindful, therefore, we recollect not only the breadth of our current experience, but also our purpose in attending to it."

We were studying this material in the last module I did with my group, but I didn't have the book then - I borrowed it from the Birmingham Centre's library and mostly read it while I was on retreat. The book is perfectly readable but not inspiring, and it would have made much more sense to be reading it while studying instead of a month afterwards...

The Journey and the Guide
by Maitreyabandhu

"The journey starts with our mind, particularly when we begin to look into the truth of things—the truth of the friend in hospital, the coffin we carry to the graveside. What we find in our guide, the Buddha, is a man with a fit, healthy mind. To get fit, we need to work on becoming a happy healthy human being."

This book is aligned with the subject of my recent retreat, so I took it with me alongside the other recommended reading material. I've read the book twice before, once along with other members of my Buddhist group, but this time it seemed like a completely different book. Of course, it's me that's different, but it made so much more sense this time. So the main message I gained from the reading was how I've progressed in my understanding of Buddhism.

The Rainbow Road: From Tooting Broadway to Kalimpong: Memoirs of an English Buddhist
by Sangharakshita

"Long before thousands of Westerners flocked to Asia in search of themselves, Dennis Lingwood set out to search for the Buddha’s teaching in the land that gave birth to Buddhism."

I picked this out of the library at the retreat centre, where luckily we were encouraged to read, albeit with the retreat ethic in mind (i.e. not slasher thrillers). The centre had a really good selection so that when queries came up during discussion they could be investigated without resorting to phones or computers, which would normally be where we look for some obscure Buddhist reference or discover the meaning of 'inchoate' and 'chthonic'. [The retreatants from Poland, Netherlands and Sweden who were in my group did astonishingly well given the level of unnecessarily complex language in the reading material.] Anyway, this book is the first of a number of autobiographical memoirs written by the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and is very readable and completely absorbing. He was wrongly diagnosed with a heart complaint when he was 8 years old and was not allowed to move from his bed or even sit up on his own for 2 years, so that when the diagnosis was questioned and he was released from bed he had to re-learn how to walk. He ended up in the British Army during WWII, was posted to India, Ceylon and Singapore, and when the war ended he didn't come back. With a similarly-minded Indian friend he renounced passport and possessions and travelled around India as a mendicant Buddhist, ending up in Kalimpong, Nepal. I've already borrowed the second volume from the Birmingham Buddhist Centre library.