Reviews and Comments

This was a really fun book. There's a lot of action, a lot of adventure, and the story's world opens up quite a bit more so we get a better idea of the history leading up to the events in the first book. I'm kind of sad that I read this right when it came out, because I know it's going to be a long wait for the next book in the series to arrive, and I'm excited for it.

I moved this into my "abandoned" shelf. It's too far off from my current mentality for me to derive any sort of benefit from reading it.

This book seems to be really derivative.

Chapter 1 seemed to be a rehash of Heschel's "The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man", a classic book on Jewish Shabbat that I've also read.

He doesn't really provide anything new to the conversation about personal observance of the Sabbath, except that he puts it in terms that someone unfamiliar with Judaism can understand and says that you could observe a Sabbath at any time and while doing things that you find personally meaningful.

Find things that are meaningful to you and dwell on them in a meditative way is how I would sum this up so far, and there's nothing wrong with that I suppose, but the way the author presents it as if he's telling us something new and original, when it's not. He's, so far, simply borrowing from Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism.

I'm still in chapter 1, but this seems like the kind of book that I'd really enjoy. It talks about recognizing deeper meanings in the things that we do and adding an element of ritual to our daily activities to create additional meaning and purpose that nourishes us in ways that traditional religion used to.

So far, I've been really struck by the idea of something like a reading club or CrossFit, or just taking a walk in the woods, becoming a sort of ritualized spiritual experience that can hold value. It rings true.

This reads like the worst part of my childhood. It has all of the hallmarks of Christian fundamentalist thought, including contradictions that completely invalidate a point the author made two pages earlier.

You can clearly see that Tozer has digested the busted idea that a book (the Bible) can be completely contradictory and incoherent and still be a singular and divine narrative, and has applied that ideology to his writing.

Something from the Serial Reader Android app.

This reads like sectarian propaganda pretending to be objective. I think I would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't been so obviously uncritical and adulatory.

This was a very good story. I saw it was available at the NYPL and borrowed it without really looking at what it was about. Thich Nhat Hanh's books are usually short, easy to digest, and leave me feeling a bit more optimistic about life. I was looking for something like that, but this is a much more powerful story and wound up being very inspirational.

Once I was a few chapters in, I thought this was a fictional story that Thich Nhat Hanh had come up with, and I was surprised because that's not his usual style or method for teaching. Instead, "The Novice" is apparently his retelling of a traditional Vietnamese story about a Buddhist novice and the acknowledgment of her status as a bodhisattva after she passed away. The story is very engaging and well worth the time invested in reading it.

I enjoyed this the first time through and expect to read it again. I'm also going to look at a few books that discuss the Tao Te Ching, so I can get a better idea of what's really going on here.

Regarding this translation, it's clear and easy to understand, but Mitchell doesn't hesitate to mention tractors, trucks, and nuclear warheads in the text of the Tao Te Ching, which really threw me off. I understand the motivation behind updating the text to make it relatable to a modern audience, but I think he took a little too much artistic license.

Definitely not as engaging as Meditations, but still interesting, as much for what it reveals about upper class Roman life as it does about Stoicism.

Heated tubs connected to the ocean, criticism of "night owls", debates about real locations of places mentioned in the Odyssey that we're still having today, and people gossiping about Sappho's sex life.

It really makes me feel like not much has changed between now and then other than the technology of distributing information.

This book contains practices and ideas that you can use to improve your life. It's the kind of book that I could read and listen to repeatedly as a way to get my brain started in positive way in the morning.

I think I'll actually buy a copy of this. My copy was from the NYPL.