Ecclesiastes is a good book of the Bible, the Old Testament. That chapter, I understand, had its opponents. No wonder! It says you could be a hero and be forgotten. It says living is in vain, there is no point. The day of death is better than the day of birth. With cheer like that, how can you not be uplifted?
Near the end of that short book of intriguing statements ("All the rivers empty into the sea but the sea is not full") is a statement that rings true in my life today: "Of the making of books, there is no end." (12:12). If the author somewhere between 450 and 180 years before the common era could see that, I wonder what he would think today.
When a friend asked me what I was reading, I was a bit flummoxed. At the time and still, I am flitting back and forth between this book and that. Without the first 2 or 3 pages of my Kindle (14 to 21 titles!), I can't remember just what I have been dipping into, comparing, looking up in Google. Each day, I get two or three emails from Amazon dangling books in front of me. I don't think their choosing mechanism is all that good, but one way or another, I keep learning of a book that does sound very appealing. Why, it might contain the very answer I happen to need just at this moment!
Today, I received a later email that a book I had on my wish list had just been repriced. The current price is $1.99. I immediately bought it, downloaded it and started reading it. It is by Kory Stamper and is called "Word by Word: the Secret Life of Dictionaries". Clever, light, fast reading. Naturally, I looked up her blog, found her on Twitter and started following her.
Right now, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (died in 533 BCE) have my attention. Montaigne is the subject of a book by a modern British librarian, Sarah Bakewell. Her handling of the man's life is in her book "How to Live", where she summarizes 20 answers to that question in the essays of Montaigne. The well-known children's book "A Wrinkle in Time" was written by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin has her own version of Lao Tzu's writings, "Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way". These two men and these two modern women writers make a powerful and pleasing team that presents ideas and insights that are at least temporarily fascinating. I have pondered them both before and I imagine this won't be my last time with them.
