Book Review: The Raft Is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan

It’s true. The same person whose last two book reviews were on Crazy Rich Asians and Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, now presents you with her thoughts on … a conversation about political activism in the context of Buddhist-Christian awareness?!?

TNH

Continue reading “Book Review: The Raft Is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan”

Whatever Wednesday: Stacks o’ Books 2015

My traditional goal is to read 24 books per year. Two a month seems ambitious but totally doable to me. I realized though that I’ve been adding books to my library faster than I can read them, and that I’m now on a cycle of starting books and not finishing them. It’s just…So.Many.Books. Check out our office library.

Library

Awesome, right? There are two more bookshelves behind me, as well as boxes of books in the garage. Hence, it’s easy for me to lose a book that I am dying to read, or forget which book I really really wanted to read next, in these shelves. Being a goal-oriented person, I decided to select and set aside the bulk of what I most want to read this year. At this time, anyway. After all, I don’t want to spend another year missing out on reading In Search of Lost Time. Ha.

I tried to make the winning group 50-50 as far as fiction and non-fiction. Once chosen, I put them on my bedframe right above my head…and next to the emergency dark chocolate.

Books

Some are book club selections (#1, 13, and 19); one is inspired by a Beyonce song (#7), another is reading for an upcoming trip (#14), and the fat one came out of what happened in Ferguson over the summer (#16). Number 5 is the latest addition to the pile. I wasn’t planning on reading it again anytime soon, but with the news of the impending release of Harper Lee’s sequel, I was inspired to re-read the classic sooner rather than later. My guilty pleasure is selection 10. I’m not too much of a mystery person, but I’ve read all of the Agatha Raisin mysteries and, as noted in my bio, I have a strange fascination with reading about bad food in the English countryside, so this series feeds into my obsession. Lastly, I found no. 8 via a random post on my cousin’s Facebook wall. It reminded me of the Dobermans my lola (Filipino for grandma) had, which went missing and were later found on a spit to be eaten by squatters. Poverty sucks.

As of today, here’s the list, obviously subject to change and in no particular order:

  1. The Magus – John Fowles
  2. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
  3. The Dud Avocado – Elaine Dundy
  4. The Street of Crocodiles – Bruno Schulz
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  6. Eleonor & Park – Rainbow Rowell
  7. Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  8. Dogeaters – Jessica Hagedorn
  9. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
  10. Something Borrowed, Someone Dead: An Agatha Raisin Mystery – M.C. Beaton
  11. The New Capitalist Manifesto – Umair Haque
  12. The Overachievers – Alexandra Robbins
  13. Yes Please – Amy Poehler
  14. The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba – Julia Cooke
  15. The Raft is not the Shore – Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan
  16. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 – Taylor Branch
  17. Knowledge, Power, and Black Politics – Mack Jones
  18. The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  19. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail – Cheryl Strayed

I’d ask you what you all are reading, but I fear I’d run out of shelf space. So excited to dig in!
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