Hello, TBR Pile Challengers!
Yahoo! It’s time for our very first Checkpoint (with mini-challenge #1 — see below). As a reminder, the deadline to sign-up for this challenge is January 31st, so if you know of someone who would love to join and/or if you have been trying to make up your mind, here’s your chance P.S. This also means currently registered participants should feel free to make a change, up to January 31st, provided the link leads to an updated list as of that date.
So far, I’ve read 1 of my 12 required books. I’ll take it! This puts me at 100% on pace, technically, since reading one book per month for the challenge means completing the challenge by year’s end; however, I really do hope to read my two alternates as well, so that means I’ll need to squeeze in a second challenge book in at least two of these twelve months (I’m guessing that’s going to have to be during the summer months, but we’ll see!).
The next book scheduled from my challenge list is When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz.
Books read:
Below, you’re going to find the infamous Mr. Linky widget. If you read and review any challenge books this month, please link-up on the widget below. This Mr. Linky will be re-posted every month so that we can compile a large list of all that we’re reading and reviewing together this year. Each review that is linked-up on this widget throughout the year may also earn you entries into future related giveaways, so don’t forget to keep this updated!
As I mentioned in the Announcement post, there are four mini-challenges planned for this year. Our first checkpoint also brings with it the first mini-challenge!
Here’s the plan: Visit this link to see the list of linked-up participants. Travel around and leave a comment (or two, or five) with some encouragement for this new year and new challenge. Then, when you’re done, come on back to this post and comment with a link to the blog where you left your encouragement.
Everyone who spreads a little cheer and positivity to another challenger’s post(s) will be entered to win a book of choice, up to $15 USD, from The Book Depository! Comments need to be posted and linked-up here by the end of January and the winner, drawn randomly from the collection of comments, will be announced in the February checkpoint post. Only those who registered for the 2022 TBR Pile Challenge by January 31st are eligible to participate in these challenges and/or to win any of the TBR Pile prizes.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a philosophical memoir based on the life of its author, Robert M. Pirsig. In it, the protagonist and his son set out on a cross-country road trip, from Illinois through the great plains, up into the pacific northwest, and down through California. This is the primary, or surface, plot, but this primary journey is supported by a second plot, that of a man named Phaedrus who, through the voice of our narrator, recounts a philosophical journey that leads to psychological break causing him to be institutionalized. As the story unfolds, these two journeys come together, culminating in a synthesizing of the two men and a reconciliation between father and son.
Although the book was published in the 1970s, its ideas remain relevant today, particularly the protagonist’s ruminations on technology and the investigations into the self. Many readers have taken umbrage with two things about this book. First, that the protagonist seems to go off into the weeds about motorcycle maintenance/technology, to the point of exhaustion. It can be difficult to get through these parts of the text, but what helps is to remember that this is metaphor for the philosophical position Pirsig is trying to convey. When the narrator describes care for his motorcycle, what he’s really talking about is his main thesis, “Quality,” and how any person can pursue Quality in anything in their life, especially the things that matters to them. For Pirsig, this is his motorcycle, but I could just as easily substitute writing or photography into these sections and make it more relevant to myself.
The second issue many readers take with the book is that Pirsig seems to be arguing that the right way to live—his idea of authenticity—is to be completely self-involved and self-centered. I do see where this interpretation comes from, and I think it’s an unfortunate misstep on the part of the writer (something he tried to correct in the forward to his anniversary edition.) At the end of the book, we’ve seen Phaedrus elevated to “right livelihood,” but everything we see about Phaedrus, through the narrator’s memories, is mostly unpleasant. His intellectual curiosity is admirable, sure, and the fact that he wanted to serve his students fully and authentically, rather than subjecting them to rote pedagogy simply because it was the accepted form. Yet, in the end, this Phaedrus just comes across as arrogant, cruel, and rather cold. I don’t think this is what Pirsig intended. Indeed, if we look to what the narrator’s son says about him near the end of their journey, we see that Phaedrus was the one of these two personalities who was more interesting, pleasant, and involved with his family. (His son, Chris, remarks that his father used to be fun, used to make them laugh, etc.) This, unfortunately, doesn’t come across because there’s very little—indeed none—of that part of Phaedrus’s former life presented to the reader. We only know it was true because of one line from the son to his father, right near the end of the tale.
Personally, since I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy in the last half-decade or so, I found much to appreciate in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That said, I can understand the criticisms, and I do think those unfamiliar with the philosophical perspective he’s championing, here, will simply not understand what he’s trying to get at, and that’s not the readers’ fault.
The heart of the message is to be true to oneself, to think for oneself, and to respect both the universal oneness that makes us all the same while searching for and adhering to Quality as we understand it. It’s an interesting message of independence and collectivism.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is Book 1 of 12 for my #TBR2022RBR Challenge.
The Goal: To finally read 12 books from your “to be read” pile (within 12 months).
About: I am pleased to announce that Roof Beam Reader’s official TBR Pile Challenge is back for its NINTH YEAR! This challenge started when I realized I had some MAJOR issues with buying books but never reading them (not because I don’t read – but because I have such a book buying problem!) Year after year, books would sit on my shelf untouched, and I would end up reading newer ones first. I realized I was missing out on a lot of great books because I let them sit there gathering dust instead of reading them as I bought them.
Specifics:
1. Each of these 12 books must have been on your bookshelf or “To Be Read” list for AT LEAST one full year. This means the book cannot have a publication date of 1/1/2021 or later (any book published in the year 2020 or earlier qualifies, as long as it has been on your TBR pile). Caveat: Two (2) alternates are allowed, just in case one or two of the books ends up in the “did not finish (DNF)” pile.
2. To be eligible, you must sign-up with the Mr. Linky below. Link to your list (so create it ahead of time!) and add updated links to each book’s review. Books must be read and must be reviewed (doesn’t have to be too fancy) in order to count as completed. You can participate via blog, Instagram, Goodreads, Tumblr, etc.
3. The link you post in the Mr. Linky below must be to your “master list” (see mine below). This is where you will keep track of your books completed, crossing them out and/or dating them as you go along, and updating the list with the links to each review (so there’s one easy, convenient way to find your list and all your reviews for the challenge). See THIS LINK for an idea of what I mean. Your complete and final list must be posted by January 31st, 2022.
4. Leave comments on this post as you go along, to update us on your status. Come back here if/when you complete this challenge and leave a comment indicating that you CONQUERED YOUR 2022 TBR LIST! Every person who successfully reads their 12 books and/or alternates (and who provides a working link to their list, which has links to the review locations) will be entered to win a $50 gift card from Amazon.com or The Book Depository!
5. Crossovers from other challenges are totally acceptable, as long as you have never read the book before, and it was published in 2020 or earlier!
*Note: You can read the books on your list in any order; they do not need to be read in the order you have them listed. Audiobooks count. Graphic novels count. Poetry collections? Essay collections? All good! As you complete a book – review it, go to your original list and turn that title into a link to the review. This will keep the comments section here from getting ridiculously cluttered. For an example of what I mean, Click Here.
Monthly Check-Ins: On the 15th of each month, I’m going to post a “TBR Pile Check-In.” This will allow participants to link-up their reviews from the past month and get some recognition for their progress. There will also be small mini-challenges and giveaways to go along with these posts (Such As: Read 6 books by the June Check-in and be entered to win a book of your choice!) I’m hoping this will help to keep us all on track and make the challenge a bit more engaging/interactive. I started these mini-challenges in 2014, and I think they were a great success, so I am continuing them this year!
Chat: On Social Media, please use #TBR2022RBR
My 2022 TBR Pile Challenge List:
Alternates:
At the end of last year/beginning of this year, I told myself that I was going to slow everything down. I made plans to do another themed reading for the year, as I usually do, and maybe work on some of my Classics Club list. But that was it. I wanted to savor my reading slowly instead of rushing through. But, as it turns out, 2021 ended up being the year in which I read the greatest number of books I’ve ever recorded, at least since 2009 (the founding of Goodreads, which made keeping track of it all so very easy). Here’s how things went:
So, that’s it, my year in reading was really a grand success, and I’m not sure how I was able to do this much, except for the fact that, of course, I was basically stuck at home again all year. I think there was only one week where I didn’t read anything, and that’s when I went home to visit friends and family. Every other week, I read one or two books.
How was your reading year? Please share your favorites in the comments or let me know if any books in my review have sparked your interest.
Happy New Year!
In Search of the Divine: My Year of Reading Religiously
Merry Christmas, dear readers, and Happy Holidays! Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanza, a Festive Festivus, and a Sensational Solstice, too. Whatever you celebrate, or whatever you don’t, I hope the end of the year finds you happy, healthy, and rested.
It’s been some time since I’ve posted anything to the blog, and I apologize for that. It’s a combination of things that have kept me away, from simply being too busy, to being too tired, to being on a bizarre journey that took me to all sorts of unexpected places—spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. It’s this last bit I want to share about today. (Don’t worry! I’ll be back again in a few days with my annual “Big Book Survey” to end the year.)
Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, or at least for the last year, know that I generally establish a themed reading event every year, and the theme for 2021 was “World Religions.” The plan was to read six formative texts from six different major religions, and to post about them every month or two. I did the reading, plus lots more, but I only posted here about the first few texts, and there’s a reason for that. I could blame it on this second pandemic year and all its craziness, or on being too busy from picking up overloads at school due to faculty illnesses, and etc., but the truth is, the journey got a little bit personal. Since the plan was to read these texts from an historical and literary perspective, I wasn’t expecting it to take me offroad and into a spiritual place, a place of deep introspection and reflection, but that’s exactly what happened. And I wasn’t sure how to pivot my checkpoint posts into that kind of discussion, so I stepped away entirely. I do apologize to anyone who was following along and wondering what happened.
That being said, here’s what happened.
I’ve never been a religious person. Even as a child growing up in the Lutheran Church and going to Lutheran schools until the fourth grade, I knew it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t the spiritual side of things, per se, that bothered me, but the dogma, the prejudice against inquiry, the “blind faith,” that is valued in the Christian faith in particular, and the decidedly un-Christlike manner in which most people at those churches and schools treated me and my family. It all seemed so very hypocritical, and it turned me off, for a very long time, from wanting to know anything about anything to do with god, religion, spirituality, faith, and the like.
The thing is, though, I’ve always been a spiritual person. Despite my lack of trust in any organized religion—a feeling I maintain to this day, even after this remarkable year of discovery—I have known that there’s something more to this experience we call life than what can be seen on the surface. I spent years studying Humanism, then years studying Stoicism, followed by the last couple years studying Buddhism. George Harrison said once that we’re all living in the “material world,” and unlike Madonna, he didn’t just mean this world of things, but our own corporeal existence. This state of being in a body, with its senses, all of which are there to help us experience what it is to be human, to be alive. After this year reading from Christianity, Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, Hinduism, and Atheism (or Humanism, as it turned out), I’ve come to align myself rather closely with Harrison’s interpretation. In fact, I might go so far as to see he’s become a kind of ancestor guru for me.
Here’s what I mean. This year, I re-read the New Testament, which I’ve read many, many times, and the Qur’an, Buddhist scriptures, Tao Te Ching, the Analects of Confucius, the Analects of Zhuangzi, the Holy Vedas (as well as an ancient Indian epic called The Ramayana), the Talmud, and Religion for Atheists, which turned out to be a kind of humanist perspective. I also added A Brief History of Thought, which turned out to be another advocate for humanism, as well as George Harrison on George Harrison, which of course relayed much of Harrison’s spiritual beliefs that center on Hinduism, though he wasn’t exclusive. In fact, after my year of reading religiously, I was shocked by the serendipitous conclusion he and I both seemed to come to about these great world religions in general, which is that they’re all the same. Really. At the core of each of their messages is a simple concept: Love. They’ve just tried to explain it in different ways.
I used to be obsessed with kindness. I spent much of my college years, and beyond, trying to get to the root of kindness, trying to understand why some folks are kind and others aren’t, why some are naturally compassionate, and others seem to lack empathy altogether. After this year of deep reading and reflection on spirituality, I’ve come to think that compassion, and kindness, come both from a person’s current life experiences and those they’ve built up from experiences past. In a way, I guess that means I believe in reincarnation of a sort, which brings me close to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. They each argue that reincarnation is fact, though Hinduism and Buddhism suggest that it’s the spirit, only, that experiences many lives, while each body only lives once. Christianity, on the other hand, suggests that each person lives just one life on Earth—body and spirit—and then, if they’re a true believer, their body and spirit will be resurrected in Heaven.
I don’t follow that last logic, as I don’t believe that Christ’s resurrection was a literal one. To me, the resurrection story reads like a beautiful metaphor. Instead of Christ dying for our sins, which in my opinion lets people off the hook a bit too easily, I believe Christ’s sacrifice is the lesson. He dies for love. He is willing to give up his earthly body and all its senses and experiences, to ensure that love will continue, that the message of love lives on and inspires others. In this way, I think it comes incredibly close to the concepts of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Humanism, which suggest that we are all part of the same grand oneness, that there is divinity inside every one of us, and it is this which we recognize in one another. There’s a related mantra that suggests, “the way out is in,” which means that if we can touch the divine inside of us, we will learn to see it in others, and we will ultimately make our way out of this human condition and into the freedom of pure spiritual existence. Therein lies the road to love, to peace, and to ultimate transcendence, in whatever form you want to imagine it (heaven, nirvana, etc.)
This reminds me of that belief I mentioned above about compassion and kindness coming from a place of lived experiences in our current and past lives. It seems to me that the sensitive ones, the compassionate ones, those who hurt when others hurt and who literally cannot bring themselves to do harm to others, are the ones who have come closest to that state of ultimate transcendence, because they’ve experienced what they need to, to understand the divine and what it means to be human. What separates us from every other living creature on the planet, and what connects us to one another. All life is sacred; all are equal.
George Harrison said, and I’m paraphrasing, that “I am not Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Jewish, I am all of these.” It’s true. All of these are trying to get to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the matter is you and me. God, if that’s what you want to call it, is not, for me, a single entity, a deity in the classical sense, watching over us and making judgements, or even meting out karma (one of many places where I diverge from Buddhism and Hinduism, though I find much of their belief systems amenable). It’s that divine spark inside of us that feeds our conscience, that teaches us joy and how to give it, that lets us know what a smile is for and when to share it.
Thomas Paine wrote, “the world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” There are lessons in so many religious texts about the dangers of false idols, though I think we’ve sometimes mistaken those lessons as advocating for competition among religions or the various gods. There’s only one god—one essence of divinity, I mean—which is everyone, and it’s lost when we play the game of favorites. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh puts it this way, “We are all the branches of the same tree. We are all the waves of one sea.” To me, the road to joy is found by honoring the essential sameness in every one of us, that sacredness that makes it profane to harm, hinder, ignore, enslave, or take advantage of another. We can find that road by doing away with false idols; I don’t mean the golden calves of the Old Testament, but the other things we hold up as sacred that divide us—flags and nations, political parties, and yes, religious affiliations.
“I am he / As you are he / As you are me / And we are all together.” It’s a simple kind of message the Beatles were trying to get across, and one that is shared by virtually all the major religions of the world. It was remarkable to me to read, this year, how very close—sometimes literally down to the characters and narratives—these supposedly diverse theologies are to one another, and it was reassuring. After all, if over the course of thousands of years, all the worlds’ greatest thinkers, from virtually every region and religion on the planet, have come to the same conclusion, that love is the way, then I feel remarkably good about being a disciple of love.
It’s because of love, I think, that I’m filled with spirit every Christmas season, despite not being “a Christian” (but, like Harrison, I am that, and all the rest too, and none of them at all.) I’ve adored Christmas music and Christmas movies and all the warmth of the season for as long as I can remember, and not because I feel particularly connected to the birth of Christ (Christos; Krishna…how about that, eh?), though I’ll be the first to admit that I am in many ways a follower of Christ; who wouldn’t be, when it gets down to the philosophy of it all? It’s not nostalgia, either, which is what I assumed for most of my adult life that it must be. It’s the connective sensation of it all. The “vibrations,” as some have put it.
This connective sensation is something I’m starting to understand much better, now. This idea of the divine in all of us, and how it’s worth seeing—it needs to be seen, and I need to see it. It’s love, these connections, whether we call it friendship or nostalgia, or warm memories, or whatever. “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John 13:34 KJV) The way out is in, but that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to isolate ourselves. We need to reach in and touch that divine essence inside ourselves so that we can know it, and love it, and learn how to share it. That’s why, when we see it in others, we feel good. Less lonely. A little bit fuller. And when we all get to that place inside ourselves, we can start making better choices, especially about how we treat others, which might be the only thing that will lead someone else to change for the better, too.
The more we can do this, the closer we come to the divine. The more of us do this, the closer we bring all of us to peace. Heaven, Nirvana… these concepts of attainment that require, first, a soul that is at peace, having thought, spoken, and acted rightly. It’s not given to us by anyone, as far as I’m concerned. Christ dying on the cross was not a gift, in my mind, it was an instruction. If you want your soul—your energy, your spirit, your essence—to live forever, you must give your all to that which is good and right, always and no matter what.
The magic of Christmas is that it reminds me of all this, every year. I’ve always felt it, but it wasn’t until this year’s journey through world religions, and into the depths of my inner self, that I began to wonder about what I was feeling and where it was coming from, and why. My answer might be convoluted, it might even be wrong, but it leads me to love. And love is the only place worth being.
“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies . . . you’ve got to be kind.” – Kurt Vonnegut
2021 Religious Works Read and Consulted