Interview with Pico Iyer, author of The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
Pico Iyer, author of The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise recommends a super set of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Pico's book:
Review from Book Depository:
One of our most perceptive travel writers embarks on an exploration of the world's holiest places and where we might find paradise on Earth.
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The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise
It's so easy, I thought, to place Paradise in the past or the future - anywhere but here.
After half a century of travel, from Ethiopia to Tibet, from Belfast to Jerusalem, Pico Iyer asks himself what kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of unceasing conflict. In a spectacular journey, both inward and outward, Iyer roams from crowded mosques in Iran to a film studio in North Korea, from a holy mountain in Japan to the sometimes spooky emptiness of the Australian outback.
At every stop, he makes connections with unexpected strangers - mystics and taxi drivers and fellow travellers - and draws on his own memories, of time spent in a Benedictine monastery high above the Pacific, of regular travels with the Dalai Lama, of hearing his late mother speak of sunlit moments in pre-Partition India.
By the end, he has upended many of our expectations and dared to suggest that we can find paradise right in the heart of our angry, confused and divided world.
Buy On:
Easons €23.80
Book Depository €16.62
Waterstones £16.99
Wordery $18.00
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
The Brain-Dead Megaphone, by George Saunders. Saunders is rightly celebrated as a master of fiction, always original, startling and deeply compassionate. But his book of essays from 15 years ago is not only a perfect guide to the modern world, as seen by an uncommonly kind and open-minded soul, but most of all a defense of reading and a reminder of how and why smart-thinking books are the only way in which we can bring intimacy, attentiveness, nuance—and soul—into our short-attention lives.
Review From Book Depository
In this, his first collection of essays, Saunders trains his eye on the real world rather than the fictional and reveals it to be brimming with wonderful, marvellous strangeness. As he faces a political and cultural reality saturated with lazy media, false promises and political doublespeak, Saunders invokes the wisdom of American literary heroes Twain, Vonnegut and Barthelme and inspires us to re-examine our assumptions about the world we live in, as we struggle to discover what is really there.
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The Brain-Dead Megaphone
Buy On:
Easons €15.39
Book Depository €10.21
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $11.99
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Burning Man, by Frances Wilson, is a dazzlingly wild, penetrating and often crazy meditation on D.H. Lawrence, as impenitently all-over-the-place as its subject and unremittingly witty and wise. I fell completely under its grip until reading it became an experience of almost delirious joy.
Review From Book Depository:
D H Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be, or even how to describe him.
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Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence
History has remembered him, and not always flatteringly, as a nostalgic modernist, a sexually liberator, a misogynist, a critic of genius, and a sceptic who told us not to look in his novels for 'the old stable ego', yet pioneered the genre we now celebrate as auto-fiction. But where is the real Lawrence in all of this, and how - one hundred years after the publication of Women in Love - can we hear his voice above the noise?
Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson's triptych of biographical tales present a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever.
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Book Depository €28.76
Waterstones £12.99
Wordery $14.99
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
My hero for many years was Paddington Bear, and I never get tired of reading his well-mannered and always well-intentioned adventures. A few years later I came under the spell of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy, and I would recommend those graceful and deeply classical wisdom tales to anyone of any age.
Review From Book Depository
Ged is but a goatherd on the island of Gont when he comes by his strange powers over nature. Sent to the School of Wizards on Roke, he learns the true way of magic and proves himself a powerful magician.
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Earthsea: The First Four Books
And it is as the Archmage Sparrowhawk that he helps the High Priestess Tenar escape the labyrinth of darkness. But over the years, Ged witnesses true magic and the ancient ways submit to the forces of evil and death. Will he too succumb, or can he hold them back?
Buy On:
Easons €16.80
Book Depository €14.33
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $16.45
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I’m afraid I can read only on paper. To me listening to an audio-book is like hearing about a painting; it engages with exactly the wrong part of my brain.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I have too many. But wonderful Chaucer’s in Santa Barbara, California has sustained me for almost half a century, I always love Elliott Bay in Seattle and on my current book I’m visiting such irreplaceable Californian temples of words as Vroman’s in Pasadena, Kepler’s in Menlo Park and Book Passage in Corte Madera. Growing up in Oxford, of course I bowed daily before the incomparable Blackwell’s.
Many thanks to Pico for recommending a super set of books! Please don't forget to check out The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (The Half Known Life, The Brain-Dead Megaphone, Burning Man), Penguin Books Ltd (Earthsea).
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