Kevin Wammer

If a book is called “Buddha”, you kind of expect it to be a biography of, well, the Buddha. Karen Armstrong's Buddha looks like a biography of Siddharta Gautama but is rather a retelling of how Buddhism came to be. (To be fair, there doesn't seem to be enough source material to create a complete biography of Gautama Buddha.)

It's still a good book, but not entirely what I expected. For a biography of the Buddha, I preferred Thich Nhat Hanh's “Old Path White Clouds” more, though due to the “no-sources-issue”, it's more a fictional than factual biography.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is obsessed with shadows and writes beautifully about them in this essay. And for me as someone who is into photography and loves how light can interact with a picture, this essay changed how I see the world a little. “We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”

And there I was, convinced that Science Fiction is mostly about spaceships and aliens. This book is fantastic. Every short story is an absolute joy to read, and I can't wait to dive into Chiang's second short story collection [b:Exhalation 41160292 Exhalation Ted Chiang https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1534388394l/41160292.SX50.jpg 64336454].P.S: There is one story about spaceships and aliens, and the movie “Arrival” is based on that one.