Some books I’m reading (and a few blunders of mine)

I must admit - I’ve been lying to folks. The ‘Currently Reading’ bit in my sidebar is not entirely true. I am in the midst of reading Ringworld, but I’m also reading a lot of other things, too. I haven’t been updating it because it just isn’t very intuitive to do. I’ve got to gather together book images from amazon, as well as links. Then I’ve gotta’ go to the text widget in the presentation tab and edit it. Granted, that’s not overly difficult, but when I’m used to the type-click-publish nature of WordPress.. well, that’s more work than I want to do to change what book(s) are appearing in my sidebar. The fact that I burn through books fairly quickly just exacerbates the problem. We needs a LibraryThing widget, precioussss! We wants it! Or maybe a widget where you can just dump amazon links into it, and the widget does the rest? Actually, that would be pretty sweet…

The ‘Josh Currently’ suffers a similar issue. The reason? I don’t like having to go to the Josh Currently page and update it as new ’stuff’ comes into my consumption machinery. I didn’t really think through the page thing much before creating it; after using it for a while (or not, rather), I’ve come to the conclusion that it was a bad idea. It’d be easier / better / make more sense / etc. to just blog about whatever I’m reading / watching / listening to currently, as opposed to going to the page and editing it all the damn time. After having thought about this ever so briefly, I suppose there’s a reason the Page feature in WordPress is recommended for static stuff. As in, things you don’t want to change often. Dur.

So, what am I really reading? Well, like I said, I’m still reading Ringworld. Admittedly, though, my progress on it hasn’t been overly fast. Most of my reading time has been being eaten up by other things.

I just finished Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising. I read this for a history class I’m taking this quarter at the university. Granted, the class hasn’t even started yet (my first day for it is tomorrow), but the class had two assigned books, so I figured I’d get one out of the way ahead of time.

I just plowed through a good number of books on Buddhism. Here’s a list:

• The Buddha and his Teachings
• An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life
• Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World

I enjoyed all of them, but I liked the first and last ones the most. The Buddha and his Teachings have a variety of essays by various masters, monks, etc. Some of them include the 2nd Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Shunryu Suzuki. It’s a nice sampling of quite a few different traditions of Buddhism.

The last one, Awakening the Buddha Within, obviously from the subtitle, has a decidedly Tibetan bent to it. As an aside it also came across as a bit new agey to me, but I still enjoyed it quite a lot. It covers all of the essentials of Buddhism, with some personal thoughts from the author.

And lastly, I’m currently reading a custom printed version of Understanding Scientific Reasoning. It’s a shortened version, or rather, a full length version, but only the first half of it. I’m reading it for a course I’m taking at the university. The professor requested the custom printed books so we wouldn’t have to pay for the full thing, seeing as we wouldn’t be using all of it. Pretty cool of him, I think.

I’m only about 50 pages into it thus far, but I’m enjoying it. I think it’s helping lower my aversion to science a bit. I doubt I’ll be changing my major any time soon, but I am enjoying the read.