• King Lear by William Shakespeare (No Fear Shakespeare edition). Bear with me here. For school, Jack was assigned to read the No Fear Shakespeare edition of Julius Caesar. Have you seen these books? Each page has the text of the original play on one page, with a modern English translation on the facing page. You never miss a pun. These books make the Bard accessible to middle-school students and their tired, middle-aged dads. That said, too much checking back and forth can ruin the flow of the language.
  • Justice: What is the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel. Reading this book feels like auditing a great undergrad lecture on political philosophy. Sandel’s use of concrete examples and hypotheticals is just masterful.
  • No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh. A remarkable meditation on the nature of birth and death. Some parts land better than others.
  • The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. This book is bananas–a beautifully written story about working for the Dutch East Indies Company off the coast of Japan at the turn of the 19th century. I’m still not sure how Mitchell made Jacob de Zoet an engaging character because he really should come off as a dick.
  • Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts by Shohaku Okumura. Hilarious title; it’s hard to imagine anything less practical than 256 pages on Zen chants. But if you want some historical context for the Bodhisattva Vows, have at it.
  • Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss. Solid. Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator who largely rejects Getting to Yes on the ground that people are irrational. This book is an engaging outline of his principles of negotiation heavily leavened–overleavened, really–with war stories. Still, the negotiation one-sheet at the end is probably worth the price of the book.
  • Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.  I think I’m supposed to say something about how insightful this book is, but I tried my best and really didn’t get big chunks of it. I guess Steve Jobs liked it?
  • What is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind by Norman Fischer and Susan Moon. This is a much more accessible book, structured as as conversation between Fischer and Moon. Worth reading if you’re curious.
  • Woe is I by Patricia O’Conner. This month’s grammar book? O’Conner tries hard to be funny, sometimes succeeds. I’m going to have to take a break from these for a while.
  • Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison. This collection of three novellas is kind of what you’d get if you crossed Richard Bachman with Cormac McCarthy. I actually liked the first of the three stories in this collection more than the Brad Pitt showpiece, but if I’m being honest, none of them really did much for me.