I was supposed to get back to the gym this morning, but couldn’t because I stayed at Kelly’s last night and we normally don’t leave her house until about 8 AM (whereas I leave my house at 5 AM). The reason I stayed at Kelly’s last night, when I had been planning to head home…
Reading the chapter on Confucius, I came across the most remarkable passage, attributed to the sage. It is a passage that from the ground up, instructs a nation to be a nation of highest virtue. What it all seems to come down to, according to Confucius, is knowledge. Why is the question for knowledge so…
A few minutes ago, I left India behind (after a fascinating chapter on Gandhi, written, remember, back in the early 1930s) and I’m about to dive into the history of China (and then Japan) and I’ve been really looking forward to these.
I just finished a scalding hot shower. There’s nothing like a hot shower to warm you up on a cold, cold day. And now, finally, I’ve crawled into be with my book and a tall glass of chocolate milk. A very pleasant evening to you all!
I mentioned earlier in the month how 2007 was my worst year for reading since I started keeping track way back in 1996. While I don’t, as a rule, make Resolutions, I am trying to turn the reading trend around this year by reading Will (and Ariel) Durant’s Story of Civilization. There are 11 books…
Kelly and I went to see The Bucket List this afternoon, even after reading reviews that were, in general, not good. But you know what, screw the reviewers and let us make our own judgments. And a good thing that, because we both liked the movie quite a bit. Roger Ebert, with whom I usually…
Last night was another early-to-bed evening. I think I was in bed sometime after 6 PM, but read until just about 8 PM. (At present I’m 516 pages into Our Oriental Heritage, deeply immersed in Hinduism.) I fell into a deep sleep until nearly 2 AM. Then I felt like I was wide awake, so…
How does one go about accumulating 12,000 wives, as did King Krishna Raya during India’s middle ages? (They are listed among his “modest” possessions.) I did the math. To sleep once with each wife, assuming a different wife every night would take more than 32 years!
Here’s a quirky think about me when I read non-fiction. I love footnotes. Not the kinds that merely cite a reference, but the kind that contain nuggets of information, like gold, somehow related to what you are reading. When I look at a page and see a footnote, I get excited, the way I used…
In rather sharp contrast to the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Jews and Persians, this, which reminds me of something that several of us might have heard in Ray Linn’s 12th grade philosophy class: Out of the aphorisms of Brihaspati came a whole school of Hindu materialists, named after one of them, Charvakas. They laughed at the…
After turning out the lights at around 9:30 PM and falling fast asleep, I woke up at 12:55 AM and have been unable to get back to sleep since then. I finally gave up, turned on the light and I plan on reading until either (a) I get tired again or (b) it’s time to…
First of all, I slept in pretty late. Granted, we didn’t get back from poker until after 1 AM. But I still managed to sleep in until nearly 10 AM. Kelly had gone to the gym and returned by the time I got up this morning. I headed home around 11 AM and went straight…