“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without the cloud, there can be no rain; without water, the trees cannot grow, and without trees, you cannot make paper. The existence of this page is dependent upon the existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close.” (Thich Nhat Hanh, How to See, 2019).
A couple of weeks ago, I was going through one of our bookcases and discovered a stack of books that I had set aside to read at a later date. I promptly pulled them off the shelf and sat down to become reacquainted with each of them. Hours passed, and before I knew it, the afternoon was gone.
Here are some of the titles that captured my immediate attention, which I will be reading over the spring holiday:
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (📚) recounts the adventures of three incompetent innocents abroad. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (📚) unravels a mysterious search by an unsuspecting bookseller who discovers that someone is systematically destroying every copy of every book by a well-known Barcelona author. Chi Pang-yuan’s The Great Flowing River: A Memoir of China from Manchuria to Taiwan (📚) is a personal account of the author’s childhood in pre-occupation Manchuria, offering an eyewitness perspective on life in China during the war with Japan. Her unexpected journey to Taiwan and her adult life there—as an accomplished and respected educator, scholar, and promoter of Chinese and Taiwanese literature in translation for English readers—illustrates how she embraced a new life away from her homeland due to the turbulent times in which she lived.
Text from Sue
Images from Amazon Books and AI Generated
