I'll start with the Five Best Books I Read This Summer (or at least my favorites) in no particular order.
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson. More ideas per page than any book I've read in a few decades, it's one of those books that you can't explain what it's about without either missing the point or copying out the whole thing. This is the novel from which I was most likely to read passages aloud to my wife (who's a mathematician, which matters in this case). Carrying this enormous tome around for three weeks also did wonders for my upper-body strength. It's about seeking the truth even when it contradicts everything you've been told. It's about the way ideas affect our world in a direct way, even physically.
- The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. Man, this novel was a surprise. This is the book that was most likely to send me running to the library/book store to find everything else by the author. A gory, violent, book about love, forgiveness and redemption. A story about a sad young man who takes a job with an outfit that cleans up after bad things happen to people. He is transformed by the power of love, both his own love and the love of others. Totally life-affirming. Lots of violence, however, so not for the squeamish. Oh, and it's a comedy.
- The Lazarus Project by Aleksandr Hemon. Last year, I read Hemon's exceptional Nowhere Man and felt blessed by every page. His troublesome, partly autobiographical prose can make you mad sometimes and at other times ecstatic, but at all times, you know the characters that make up his novels are fully human. This book is an interesting reminder that what we know as "The War on Terror" is not new to the 21st century, nor is it the first time powerful people misused civic fear. Being married to someone who is from the same region as Hemon, and who experienced many of the same things coming to America, makes this book resonate all the more with me. I feel like I know these characters (and the author).
- Sinister Forces - The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft by Peter Levenda. The book most likely to keep me awake at night, not reading, but just thinking. Levenda is a talented historian of great precision and wit, and sources his books thorouhgly and solidly. But sometimes, you wish he hadn't done such a great job of showing what's underneath our civil society. His sections about the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century and the unbelievable group known as "The Nine" formed in the 20th by one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory still raise the hairs on my arms. This was a hard book to find and I'm still looking for the second and third books of the trilogy. I've just started Levenda's great new book, Stairway to Heaven: Chinese Alchemists, Jewish Kabbalists, and the Art of Spiritual Transformation. If any of you are history buffs, I highly recommend his famous 1994 book, Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement With the Occult. (I guess Levenda just likes long titles.)
- Taoist Yoga: Alchemy & Immortality by Charles Luk and Lu K'uan Yu. The breath, or "Qi" (Chi) heats a furnace in your belly (dantien) which then heats the distillation flask in your solar plexus (upper dantien) and the result of that distillation is a golden elixer which rises to a space behind your eyeballs that then is radiates to heaven. When I was in California this summer, I read a few pages of this book every night before I went to sleep. The concepts seem to stick with me when I practice my taichi. I'm not sure about the immortality part, but there's something going on when I practice these techniques and it sure feels good.
