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[AnotherSpin]

Maybe the best book I've read that is thematically connected to India. It's not simply about India in general, but especially about Kolkata, the first city I visited on a journey through India that lasted many years. I was lucky enough to spend some time in Kolkata, and it's a place I'd love to return to.

The feeling of India is something you sense immediately upon arrival, from the very first minute in the country. It's a sensation almost impossible to put into words, yet the author manages to capture it brilliantly. The way Chaudhuri writes is pure magic. How he does it, I honestly don't know. But then, magic isn't really something you're meant to understand, is it? Not with the mind, anyway.

Here the focus falls not on dramatic events but on the seemingly trivial: beads of sweat, the smell of fried rice, street dust, the click of a ceiling fan, the torpor of noon. These details evoke a meditative stillness, not a path to something else but reality itself. The narrative pares back surface layers to arrive at pure presence, nameless and formless.

Watching the family life in Kolkata isn't just the plot, it's like a practice of really seeing. The observer just watches life going on and through that gets closer to this non-dual awareness where the lines between self and others, subject and object, start to blur.

Chaudhuri describes these moments with such intensity that time seems to freeze and they become timeless. City, family, language, customs all come together into this one sense of being. All is one.

[Lisztianwagner]

Cover of the Italian language edition:

Michail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita

[Karl Henning]

I've reached the end of this re-reading of Lord of the Rings. Do I re-read the appendices? I remember still quite vividly how eagerly I ate them up the very first time I read the book(s.) Maybe I shall.

[JBS]

Begun this


Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is one of the most influential and least influential rabbis of the 20th century. That's because people tend to pick and choose what they want from his broad output, and pretend the rest doesn't exist. This book probes some of his newly published writings (90 years after his death there are still some that were never published or only published with cuts and edits intended to hide his more eccentric or controversial views) and some topics he wrote on that were neglected by earlier writers.