Posted inBooks

Book recommendation: “A Walk in the Park” by Kevin Fedarko

I read a lot of books. They're a mixture of nonfiction and fiction. But I'm not into "literary" versions of these genres. I buy nonfiction in order to learn something. I buy fiction in order to entertain myself, usually in the spy/thriller/espionage sort of writings.  (The Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva that I enjoy a lot comes closest to literary fiction, being very well written; however, I doubt Silva's books truly qualify as literary fiction.) However, near the end of 2024 I saw a list of 100 recommended nonfiction books published last year. I figured I needed to broaden…
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Posted inBooks Growing older

Oh, no! Just learned that yuppies were baby boomers. I’m crushed.

Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation. And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am. What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy Science

I don’t believe in free will. Here’s why.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will. This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion. I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. To give you a feel for his general view…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

Caste is a marvelous book about our racial divisions

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn't heard of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, until I read a fairly recent TIME cover story by Wilkerson that provided an overview of Caste. Somehow I'd missed the publication of the book in 2020. Making up for lost time, I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon. It took me a while to finish Caste. For even though Wilkerson is a terrific writer with a smooth style that makes reading her a pleasure, her subject matter isn't cheery. So I'd read a short chapter on most days, rather…
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Posted inBooks

My unusual joy in reading a big thick novel, The Magus

A few days ago I felt the satisfaction of climbing a large mountain. Exhausted. Exhilarated. Satisfied. Except my mountain was a big thick book, The Magus by John Fowles. It isn't that I'm unacquainted with big thick books. They're just usually non-fiction. It'd been a long time since I'd tackled a literary novel like this one. I'm not sure how The Magus ended up on a shelf where my unread books resided. I recall hearing that it was a classic thriller of sorts. This is the Amazon description. Widely considered John Fowles's masterpiece, The Magus is "a dynamo of suspense…
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Posted inBooks

Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series is so good, I’m marrying it

At the (very real) risk of sounding like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, I'm announcing some Breaking News, Happening Now. After my many years of passionate dalliances with other writers of spy novels -- notably the Gray Man and Mitch Rapp series -- I've decided to commit to a literary marriage to Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series. I discovered Silva in 2018 after making the mistake of buying the book Bill Clinton wrote with novelist James Patterson, "The President Is Missing."  The book was bad. Not the worst I've ever read, but poorly written with shallow characters. After buying it, I read…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

“Woke Racism” is a great book

Today I finished reading John McWhorter's terrific book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. McWhorter is black. He teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He's appalled at the excessive wokeness of both blacks and whites who inhabit the far left side of the political spectrum and view race relations through a biased perspective. Many people will agree with what he writes in Woke Racism. I do. Others will disagree with him. That's fine also. My goal is sharing these excerpts from the book is to encourage people to buy the book and…
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Posted inBooks Salem

Five reasons to buy Kelly Williams Brown’s new book

I buy and read lots of books. So many, I deserve a bookaholic diagnosis. But at first I had some reservations about getting a new book by Kelly Williams Brown, the Salem author who wrote Adulting (about becoming a grown-up) and Gracious (a modern etiquette book of sorts). Even though I admired the writing Brown did when she was a Statesman Journal reporter, I figured that regarding Adulting, I was already so grown-up I have one foot in the grave, and regarding Gracious, I'm at the age when you just feel entitled to act however you damn well please --…
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Posted inBooks Family

My mother lives on in the back of my books

OK, let me make this clear right off the bat. Notwithstanding the title of this blog post, I don't believe my mother exists as an ethereal presence in my books -- even though she also was a huge book lover, so if she had a choice of an afterlife, this notion would have appealed to her. My mother has been dead and gone since 1985. However, in a very real sense she does indeed live on in the back of my books. I'll explain. Carolyn Lewis Hines My mother was fond of writing notes in the back of books. After…
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Posted inBooks

The Unwinding of the Miracle — a marvelous book about cancer and courage

At age 37, Julie Yip-Williams was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, a very rare disease for someone her age. It took me a long time to finish reading the book she wrote about her journey from diagnosis to death, The Unwinding of the Miracle. I'm not sure why. Maybe because... i have a fear of death; I have my own chronic medical problem, albeit much milder and not fatal;  her blunt honesty was both appealing and appalling, given that I, or anyone, could fall prey to a fatal diagnosis at any time. At any rate, after I finished the…
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Posted inBooks

Self-publishing, like me? Check out ebookpbook.

I've written four books. Three have been self-published. Or, to use the term Amazon has on my Break Free of Dogma listing, "independently published."  Last year I praised ebookpbook after this firm ably prepared for just $79 an electronic/Kindle version of a previous book I wrote. See: "If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook." That book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, cost a lot for the paperback interior and cover design. Wanting to support a local graphic design firm, I paid them $3,000. That may seem like a lot, but it was in line with what…
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Posted inBooks Home life

My book is a worst-seller. I’m fine with that.

I've written four books. My advice to people who want to ask an author, "How are your book sales going?," is the same advice I'd give to someone who wants to ask a woman how much she weighs. Don't do it! Unless the author is Stephen King. Or the woman is Claudia Schiffer. Five weeks ago I self-published my most recent book, Break Free of Dogma. (Amazon delicately calls it "Independently published," which does have a nicer ring to it.) Currently my book ranks #2,098,091 on the Amazon best-seller list.  At first glance that struck me as pretty damn low.…
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Posted inBooks Home life

I’ve written a new book: “Break Free of Dogma”

It feels great to have my new book go live on Amazon. My views about life, spirituality, God, and other Big Ideas have changed a lot since I wrote my previous three books.  I still agree with much of what I said in them, but some parts make me sort of cringe. Break Free of Dogma is much closer to my current atheist philosophical perspective.  It consists of 93 posts that I selected from the early years of my Church of the Churchless blog, 2004-06. So it was pretty easy to fashion, since I'd already written most of the content. Just…
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Posted inBooks Philosophy

Stuff happens. Things fall apart. Such is life.

Sometimes the most obvious things about life need to be talked about. It's easy to overlook them not in spite of their obviousness, but because the familiar tends to fade into the background, while new stuff grabs our attention. So here's a few obvious truths about life: -- Life is finite. It comes to an end for every living being. Including us humans.-- Life is uncertain. We can hope for the best, but sometimes the worst happens.-- Life is about caring. We care, because what we're concerned about is finite and uncertain. I've been reminded about these truths by reading…
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Posted inBooks Plotinus

My “Return to the One” book gets a pleasing recommendation

I don't often plug my book about Plotinus, the 3nd century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic. Return to the One continues to have slow but steady sales, with good reader reviews on Amazon.  Recently, though, my book got a pleasing recommendation from Christine McGinley, who founded a small book publishing company called Gleam of Light Press. Here's the email message I got from her. Dear Brian,  We want to let you know that the launch of Gleam of Light’s “Other Great Finds” is now up on the website: https://www.gleamoflightpress.com/ and we are pleased and proud to have Return to the…
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Posted inBooks

I wish Bill Clinton had collaborated with Daniel Silva, not James Patterson

I'm a big fan of spy/thriller/espionage/solitary killer novels. Yeah, they fall into the category of "popular fiction" rather than literary fiction, but that's because...duh...they're popular.  I read lots of non-fiction because I want to learn something. I read popular fiction because I want to escape into an entertaining alternative world. Recently I've had two books sitting by my bed for nighttime reading: "The President Is Missing," by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, and "The English Spy" by Daniel Silva.  I tried to alternate reading each book on successive nights. But it didn't take long before I read Silva's book every…
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Posted inBooks

If you’re looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook

If you're an author who is looking for a competent firm to get your book self-published in both electronic and print versions, I highly recommend ebookpbook, and an associated entity, Newgen KnowledgeWorks.  Jason Pearce is the guy I worked with after finding ebookpbook listed as a resource on Amazon's CreateSpace web site. For quite a few years CreateSpace offered interior design and cover design services on a fee basis. But fairly recently CreateSpace stopped doing this, so publishing a book via CreateSpace's print on demand process now requires that an author find a way to get interior design and cover…
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Posted inBooks Current affairs

“How Democracies Die” advises against hardball tactics with Trump

Well, it wasn't the most fun reading I've ever done, not by a long shot, but today I finished "How Democracies Die" by two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. A basic message of the book is summarized in the final chapter: When American democracy has worked, it has relied upon two norms that we often take for granted -- mutual tolerance and institutional forebearance. Treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power and underutilizing one's institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play are not written into the American Constitution. Yet without them, our constitutional checks…
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Posted inBooks Health

“Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved” is a great book

Kate Bowler has written a book about her struggles with several serious health problems, with the worst being a stage 4 colorectal cancer diagnosis. It is funny, sad, moving, inspiring, and so much more. From the first page to the last, I was deeply engrossed in her story.  "Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved" is one of the most moving books I've ever read. Even though I don't believe in God, and Kate Bowler does, I felt wonderfully close to her as I finished her marvelous book in a few transfixed sittings. She and I have much…
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Posted inBooks Salem

Our town’s attractiveness, like perfection, is mostly in the mind

I wish life was perfect. It isn't. The Buddha taught this. Life is suffering. We're born, we grow old, we die. Our goal shouldn't be to try to eliminate suffering in a vain attempt to make life perfect, but rather to look upon things as they imperfectly are without unduly reacting to them with thoughts and feelings of  Ugh! So wrong! Horrible! Can't be! Likewise, the place where we live has to be accepted as a blend of positives and negatives that will forever dance together in an intertwined dance of opposites that both attract and repel. Take our current…
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