The Gradual Training

Since I got a lot out of Leigh Brasington's two other books, I figured I would see what he had to say about The Gradual Training: The Buddha's Step-by-Step Guide for Awakening.  In the end, this book turned out to be less useful to me than the others, not because it is intrinsically less interesting, but simply because at this point I've already absorbed the overall trajectory of the Buddhist path from all the reading I've done in the past 5 years or so.  Ethics, Concentration, Wisdom.  Of course, the book goes into much more detail with each of these, and contains all sorts of useful advice and reflections on the path.  It also has a particularly detailed Q&A section at the end that deals with common questions and doubts Brasington has addressed in his teaching career.  But the real audience for the book is someone who hasn't seen this type of full outline before, and so, as the preface indicates, thinks of the path as, "... a bunch of post-it notes with all these ideas from Buddhism randomly stuffed into an envelope."  For this person, the book does an admirable and efficient job of telling you where you can stick these.

Empire of the Summer Moon

I picked up S.C. Gwynne's story of "Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History" at the suggestion of my esteemed colleague from Texas.  Since the subtitle leaves little to the imagination, about the only thing I need to add is that it is also, as a sort of byproduct, an interesting history of Texas from the Mexican period up through the Reconstruction era.  Learning more about this wild and wooly history of early Texas actually makes it pretty obvious why Texans are so weird (aforementioned esteemed colleague excepted).  If I had lived the bloody history of this contested frontier -- constantly forced to defend itself from the Mexicans on one side and the Comanches on the other, as well as equally constant witness to the clueless incompetence of the US Federal government's interventions -- I'd probably also want to solve every problem by picking up a gun and doing it myself.  

That was some traumatic shit out there!  The book is filled with horrifically detailed stories of just how nasty, brutish, and short life could be on the edge of the empire -- regardless of which side of the edge one was on.  Obviously we're not surprised to discover that in the end the whale wins and the Comanches are almost completely wiped out.  But the way their culture of extreme violence towards the settlers and other Native American tribes allowed them to survive many decades against overwhelming odds is pretty impressive from a military perspective.  Beyond this perhaps over elaborately described military history, the book also tells the story of some of the human beings who lived all this trauma.  The most compelling character is of course right there in the subtitle.  Quanah Parker was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a settler captured as a girl and raised as a Comanche, and who, as a grown woman, famously showed no interest in returning to white society.  Quanah begins his career as a rabidly anti-white Comanche war chief and ends it, after his people have been confined to the reservation, as an optimistic voice of modernization and adaptation.  It's hard to imagine a more surprising second act in life.

The New York Trilogy

While I've heard the name of Paul Auster kicked around for years, I don't recall what prompted me to finally pick up The New York Trilogy.  I'm grateful to whatever it was because I really enjoyed these postmodern deconstructions of the detective novel.  The Trilogy contains three short novels that appear unrelated until one arrives at the final pages of the third.  While the plot of each of those is relatively simple and easy to follow, and the writing soberly realistic, their strange and almost spooky atmosphere turns them into haunting parables.  As with Kafka though, it's hard to say what they're parables about, unless it would be the tortured process of writing them.