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2025

  • Daphne du Maurier: The King's General
  • Deborah Lawrenson: The Secretary
  • Richard Cohen: How to Write like Tolstoy
  • Adrian Tinniswood: Noble Ambitions
  • Adrian Tinniswood: The Power and the Glory
  • Martin Williams: The King is Dead, Long Live the King
  • Gavin Plumley: A Home for all Seasons
  • Robert Harris: Precipice
  • Nigel Slater: A Thousand Feasts
  • Joan Aiken: Tales of London Town
  • Alan Connor: 188 Words for Rain
  • Ben Robinson: English Villages: An Extraordinary Journey through Time

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Cornflower book group

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Toffeeapple

I like the sound of the book but knowing my capacity scattiness it might be a waste of money!

Cornflower

You're right - it's one thing to read and appreciate something useful or wise, another thing to remember to practise it!

Dark Puss

Intrigued by the potential simplicity of existence since to my mind existence is extraordinarily complex and not potentially simple in the slightest other than in the extreme reductionism of physicists perhaps. Which of the many very different cultural wisdoms available to us are the ones to practice? How did you decide on these from Japan.

Cornflower

A little more on zazen to, hopefully, clarify:
in the face of distractions, tumult, and confusion, the mind can be calmed by the practice which involves sitting "to ponder and to try to reach a state of egolessness ... to do this you should suspend all judgmental thinking, letting words, images, ideas and thoughts pass by and through you without getting caught up in their complications; focus instead on your body and your breath ..."
I can't speak to zazen specifically, but I have practised transcendental meditation twice daily for the last year, almost, and I have found it to be of enormous value in stilling and refreshing the mind and increasing resilience to cope with stress. I would strongly recommend it or something similar.
As to wisdom from other cultures, the trend - exemplified by the likes of hygge, lagom, even the Scottish coorie, lately - has been for something more superficial than this book represents, and it was the greater depth of the concepts presented here that drew me to it.

Dark Puss

Thank you! Peter x

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