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See tagged statuses in the local SFBA Book Club community

reviewed Harriet Tubman : Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen

Bob the Drag Queen: Harriet Tubman : Live in Concert (2025, Gallery Books)

Intentional, and entertaining

This was well written and well read by the author. It defines its characters well. And makes them rise out of the page. It knows what it wants to do, it gets to the business of doing it, but doesnt get to heavy on the way of getting there.

A really affecting story of race, queerness, history, and freeing one's self.

CW: US-South slavery, queer outing, alcoholism

#Books #Bookstodon

reviewed Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries by Otto Penzler

Otto Penzler: Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022, Penzler Publishers)

Very good collection of mysteries

An interesting set of locked door mysteries from the Golden Age of detective fiction (roughly the 1920s and 1930s). Fourteen interesting and ingenious tales with unexpected twists and turns along the way. I particularly enjoyed the Ellery Queen's The House of Haunts and C. Daly King’s The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem.

Warning that some of the stories do have dated attitudes, especially towards women (thus dropping the rating to four stars). #Bookstodon

reviewed Vanished from Budapest by David Maughan

David Maughan: Vanished from Budapest (2022, Hulyeseg Inc)

Not very realistic crime mystery

Content warning Spoiler alert...

quoted Golden Road by William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple: Golden Road (2024, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc) No rating

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, …

The first Buddhist art is strikingly different from the pure and philosophically abstracted Buddhism admired around the world today, with its familiar image of the Buddha lost in meditation. Instead, early Buddhist art is aniconic, yet every bit as vibrant, crowded and cacophonous as so much later Buddhist art is still, silent and quietly meditative.

One reason for this is that the art of the first Buddhist monasteries is shot through with the cosmology of ancient animist cults that existed before the arrival of the new teachings. The first Buddhist monks believed that they lived in a spiritually charged landscape, alive with powerful local godlings and spirits - called yakshas when male and yakshis when female - who took up residence in the trees and stones and streams around monasteries.These spirits personified the forces of nature and revealed themselves at will.…

In all this early art, you feel strongly the Buddhist intuition that the natural and animal worlds are closely related to humankind through great cycles of reincarnation: a neglected Elephant Queen in the earliest murals of the Ajanta Caves may be reborn as the Queen of Varanasi, yet she remains the same essence. Animals are therefore depicted with the same love and respect as humans. After all, in a world where trees could be spirits and the waters are alive with sentient beings, ethical living requires treading softly on this earth, guarding the purity of water and preserving the life of both trees and animals.

— Golden Road by 

This is really fascinating. One thing that struck me from my studies of #Buddhism is just how rich the cosmology is. It makes sense that a faith rooted in reincarnation would have a different relationship with the natural world.

#India #Books #Bookstodon #ReadingNow #AncientHistory #VisualArt #Art #Religion @histodon@a.gup.pe @antiquidons@a.gup.pe

quoted How Do You Live? by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman, Genzaburō Yoshino, Bruno Navasky: How Do You Live? (2021, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

First published in 1937, Genzaburō Yoshino’s How Do You Live? has long been acknowledged in …

That is why I think the first, most basic step in these matters is to start with the moments of real feeling in your life, when your heart is truly moved, and to think about the meaning of those. The things that you feel most deeply, from the very bottom of your heart, will never deceive you in the slightest. And so at all times, in all things, whatever feelings you may have, consider these carefully.

If you do this, then someday, somewhere, a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience will leave a deep impression on you, and you will come to understand something that has a meaning that is not just limited to that one moment. That thought will be an idea that is truly your own.

To put it a slightly more difficult way, you must make a habit of thinking honestly, with your own experience as a foundation, and-Copper, this is very important!—if some one fakes this part, no matter what kind of great-sounding things they think or say, they are all lies in the end.

— How Do You Live? by , ,

Moving passage. I think we sometimes forget how much our intuitions and deepest feelings can guide us well if we only listen.

#books #bookstodon #Japan #yanovel

finished reading Castle in the air by Diana Wynne Jones

Diana Wynne Jones: Castle in the air (1991, Greenwillow Books)

Having long indulged himself in daydreams more exciting than his mundane life as a carpet …

5 / 5 stars

A wonderful second book in the series. Abdullah's story slowly builds and reveals his character and wit. When characters from the first Bill finally started appearing I was fully invested in Abdullah's story. It was good to have them but they were incidental to me. #Bookstodon