The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
Something on the order of 15mn copies of this book have been sold and it is indeed a nice little fable of sorts. I liked it. But perhaps the reason so many people loved this book is the spirit which is best summarized I think by the author in an introduction:
"Oscar Wilde said:'each man kills the thing he loves." And its true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either... This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World and you understand why you are here.". I think this is a spirit that is inspiring and attractive.
100 Years Of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I have a bunch of categories for the books I read and this one could have fit into two: mind widening (at least for me) or spiritual --- if I had a category for "mystical" it might have fit better and maybe I could use such a category.
I don't know if I have read a "mystical" book before... I may be forgetting something along the way but I kind of doubt it. There was something in the writing I found mesmerizing almost... The author struck me as one of the most fluid story tellers and for me it provided something to challenge my pedestrian way of thinking about circumstances --- Jose Arcadio Buendia settles a group of people accidentally in a remote place "Macondo" in the Caribbean that takes on a seeming magical quality but across time I sensed that the magic wasn't at all in the place but the way the people thought. Across time life and modernity and the world come to Macondo and the solitude of Macondo is erased.
For generations upon generations there are ancestors that follow many of whom are given a hand-me-down first names -- including 17 illegitimate sons named Aureliano - not to confuse the reader so much (though that happened plenty to me!) but rather I sense as a key vehicle at play constantly to reinforce this mystically generated or interpreted world.
In the end Macondo isn't "special" at all.
What is special IS the interpretation of life and how it is created. There is beauty. There is outrageous joy. There is deep deep deep sorrow. There is insanity. Amidst it all there is a heavy registering of "aliveness" that is inspiring. It is a "place" where I felt drawn to want to actually be in a way that The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is its opposite. In the end Macondo "dies" in a sense while perhaps life begins again in a small way at the end of The Grapes of Wrath.
Without revealing too much, the final paragraph pulled together the entire book in extraordinary fashion and explained the title far better than my lame thoughts might have guessed as I had been reading along.
This is not the final paragraph but it pulls together the "old" Macondo and the emerging one and the growing tensions while highlighting the way of mystic thinking:
"They became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had been victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings.
Another Roadside Attraction
Tom Robbins
read as a key method of bombarding my brain with new ideas and thinking so as to perhaps more and more effectively re mould the software that got a little static through a traditional childhood of sorts. Our view is that there is no "thinking outside the box" but that we can expand the box we have to think with if we work at it... So that's what I do.
This book is a mind expander to be sure and one that I so wish I had somehow gotten to sooner. A wild imagination of a sci-fi writer meets a buddhist thinker... This is farm from dull :-). To put it mildly. I will let you read a review of its storyline elsewhere - it is not meant for kids to be certain and some of the core storyline could very much be considered religously off-color so to speak... So much for Buddhists being boring. I suspect now and again I will go to the Tom Robbins library to inject some different thinking into my repertoire.
A River Sutra
Gita Mehta
Rec from Terry Pearce Comment: I find eastern-based novels helpful in expanding my sense of the world as holistic.. I keep a steady diet since linear thinking doesn't seem to get us very far at all and will likely be further discredited during the next two decades
The Celestine Prophecy
James Redfield
a search for an ancient manuscript leads to a review of sorts of major changes in society and possible changes ahead
The Best Buddhist Writing 2009
Melvin McLeod (Editor)
This is a wonderful collection of 33 stories or ideas that I read one a day to get the impact of a once a day injection of very different thinking. The 2009 version is just as good as the 2008 version and I suspect as much from 2010. Melvin McLeod - the editor-in-chief of Shambala Sun - as picked a wonderful array of greatest hits that touch a wide variety of topics EACH examined in a very non-traditional fashion as so far as "western" culture is concerned.