Category: Books & Reviews

Literature, culture, fiction, non-fiction, writers, authors and the craft of writing.

Happiness & Fulfillment

Buddhism / Faith / History & Biography / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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There are ten methods for meditating on the world, begins one scroll in the 1,300-year-old collection of Tang-dynasty sutras from Xian, China, that can lead us to happiness and fulfillment. I realize that sounds like the opening of a New Age piffle book, but the sutras were actually discovered in a cave near a Buddhist monastery, in the far western region of China, in 1900. The scrolls were looted and sold to collectors and academia, and until 1998 were pretty much lost. Now the public can read a few selections from them in the book, The Lost Sutras of Jesus, ……… click below for more ↓

Montaigne and Machiavelli

Philosophy / Politics / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Michel de Montaigne mentioned Machiavelli only twice in his Essays, both in Book Two. This tells us he was aware of the latter, but not whether he was intimately familiar with his works. Nor does it tell us which of Machiavelli’s writings he is referring to (by this date, all of Machiavelli’s major works were in print). Machiavelli himself had died in 1527, some 50 or more years before Montaigne penned this part of his essays (first published in 1580). The first mention is in Chapter XXXIV: OBSERVATION ON THE MEANS TO CARRY ON A WAR ACCORDING TO JULIUS CAESAR ……… click below for more ↓

Montaigne’s words on anger

Philosophy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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“There is no passion that so shakes the clarity of our judgment as anger,” Montaigne wrote in Book II of his Essays (Chapter 31). “It is a passion that takes pleasure in itself and flatters itself.” That strikes me a very Buddhist statement, a comment lifted from the Dhammapada, although Montaigne was a solid Catholic. It certainly has a similar wisdom. I have seen that anger cloud the judgment of people in political debate, on many stages from national to local. It blinds people to the reality of the issues, and carries them on a wave of self-induced pleasure, as ……… click below for more ↓

Montaigne’s library

Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Philosophy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I read yesterday that Montaigne had a library of 1,000 books, of which he was very proud. It was his retreat – the room he went to where he wanted to get away from things and write. Machiavelli, too, had a study with a small collection of books he treasured, albeit a much smaller selection. Both, however, treasured the classic Greek and Roman authors, the wisdom of the ages. One thousand books is a remarkable collection, given that printing was barely a century old, and books were still quite expensive. He would have treasured every volume and known each title ……… click below for more ↓

Finding my muse in Montaigne

Blog & Blogging / Books & Reviews / Culture / Philosophy / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

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Muse: a source of inspiration; especially a guiding genius; the imaginary force thought to provide inspiration to poets, writers, artists, etc. A muse, for modern writers, is that indefinable force that drives us to write. It’s part imagination, part inspiration. I suspect there’s a heady brew of psychology and biology at work, too. Why write instead of, say, paint? Or sculpt? Or compose? I don’t know. It just is, for me, the thing my muse – however you define that – compels me to pursue. It compels others, though in different ways, and many in much more creative and innovative ……… click below for more ↓

Two new books

Books & Reviews / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Yesterday I received two new books from Amazon: The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne translated by Donald Frame, and How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. Montaigne lived and wrote in the 16th century, shortly after Machiavelli, and like the latter developed a new way of writing and seeing things. He might be described as the West’s first blogger in that he wrote about himself in a way that presaged today’s online bloggers. I look forward to reading his works and Bakewell’s biography and critique. I know little ……… click below for more ↓

New post on the Municipal Machiavelli

Books & Reviews / Municipal Politics / PoliticsLeave a comment

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I’ve written a short post that I trust will serve as an introduction to a longer piece I plan to write. It’s on the letter of Quintus Tullius Cicero to his brother on how to win an election (written circa 64 BCE). You can read it here: ianchadwick.com/machiavelli/quintus-ciceros-letter-on-elections/ I will be working on a more in-depth analysis of Cicero’s letter and a comparison with Machiavelli’s works and other political pieces in the near future.

Ruthful, funct and doleless

Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / Style & usage / Words & etymologyLeave a comment

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Why can’t someone be clueful, only clueless? Hapful, not simply hapless? Aweless instead of just awful? Ruthful not merely ruthless? Doleless, not just doleful? Gormful, not just gormless? We can be thoughtful or thoughtless, careful or careless, mindful and mindless. Why not ruthful and gormful? Why not the qualities of ruthiness, gormliness and doleliness? Can we be kempt or just unkempt? Couth or just uncouth? Gruntled or just disgruntled? Shevelled or just dishevelled?* Maculate or just immaculate? Domitable, or just indomitable? Ruly or just unruly? Can we come ravelled instead of just unravelled? Can we member a corpse instead of just ……… click below for more ↓

The Lore of Tea

Books & Reviews / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Whoa! Down the rabbit hole I tumbled this week. I started reading about tea in several books I recently purchased. What a story. What a delight! Many hours spent between the pages absorbing culture, history, types, classifications, production, terroirs and marketing.* I’ve read bits and pieces about tea before; mostly history and cultural notes; some tidbits about specific types and specific bits I’ve gleaned from online sources. I never read any significantly detailled work about picking, grading and production previously. Nor was I fully aware of the range and depth of teas, the complex terroir of tea and the variations in ……… click below for more ↓

A Compassionate Buddha?

Books & Reviews / Buddhism / Faith / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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There’s a story in Valerie Roebuck’s translation of the Dhammapada (Penguin Classics, 2010, commentary on verse 6, p 115-116) that caught my eye recently, and it made me wonder what the moral or ethical precept was buried in it. And it makes me question what it says about the supposed compassion of the Buddha and his attitude towards animals.* I have not found online the story exactly as Ms. Roebuck tells it**, but I have found many variations on it. It even has its own holiday: Madhu Purnima. In essence the story goes like this: The Buddha is at the Kosambi ……… click below for more ↓

A Cup of Dragon Well

Books & Reviews / Food & Drink / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

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Legend has it that, in the Qing Dynasty, Qianlong (1711-1799 CE), the grandson of the Emperor Kangxi, went on a holiday to the West Lake district, in the Hangzhou area of Zhejiang province, China. He stopped at the Hu Gong Temple, nestled under the Lion Peak Mountain (Shi Feng Shan). There, he was presented by the monks with a cup of green tea made from the temple’s own tea bushes. He was so impressed with the tea that, when he became Emperor himself, Qianlong gave these 18 tea bushes special imperial status and the tea became “Gong Cha,” or Imperial ……… click below for more ↓

Reading the Dhammapada

Books & Reviews / Buddhism / Faith4 Comments

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One of the most inspirational, moving books in my library is the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, originally from the Pali canon. I’ve had a version of the Dhammapada in my library since the late 1960s, and read it through many times. It’s good to reread it often. My first copy I recall was Irving Babbit’s edition, published by New Directions press in 1965. It may still be hiding on a bookshelf upstairs for all I know. It’s one of my desert island books. You know: one of the list of 10 books you’d want to have ……… click below for more ↓

The Death of Handwriting?

Books & Reviews / Culture / My Writing / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / Writing & cursive2 Comments

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I almost cried in pleasure when I watched this video; the handwriting is so beautiful. Apparently some viewers have, as Jesus Diaz writes. On Gizmodo he says that it’s: …a video that caused many to discover autonomous sensory meridian response, a perceptual phenomenon that gives a pleasing tingling sensation. Some said they got it watching people writing. Well, put your headphones on, because this is the mother of all calligraphy ASMR videos. Okay, maybe it is for me because I was raised with handwriting and still delight in it. Penmanship was taught in school at least for a few years when ……… click below for more ↓

The Strange World of E-Writers

Books & Reviews / E-books & E-readers / Literary pretensions / Technology & GadgetsLeave a comment

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There’s always been a place for amateur or new writers to present their efforts and hope to see print: publications where you could submit your work and hope the editors found it good enough to print in an upcoming issue. That’s how some famous writers got their start, in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 40s: Robert Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov and many more. But all of these depended on getting past the gatekeeper, someone like John Campbell: an editor who set standards – slim as they may sometimes be – and wrangled clumsy prose into shape for ……… click below for more ↓

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