This is the twelfth of the Alan Watts' books I've read. The final chapter, "The Practice of Meditation," reproduced Watts' own caligraphy (he did this very well it seems) and was interesting enough to read, but the rest of the book covered pretty much the same thing from the same perspective as the first eleven books I read by him. Book by book, he is getting less interesting and more predictable. On page 27, in the "Play and Survival" chapter, he quotes Albert Camus in "The Myth of Sisyphus": "The only real philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide." Well, I would expect that from Camus and his ilk. There are many many other legitimate philosophical questions besides that one, ones more interesting and beneficial than that. But it does seem to fit in with Watts' perspective on life. The darkness descends. One more book by him and then my reading project will be finished.

In 'The Way of Liberation', Alan Watts offers a "rich selection of literay works and transcribed lectures", according to his son Mark Watts. Chapter 1, The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism, is an essay written in 1955 which was prior to his extensive work, The Way of Zen. Following this is Play and Survival: Are they in Necessary Contradiction? Watts offers much playful synthesis of philosophical insight and gives us some idea of how his 'thought evolved through all that followed.' With Chapter 3, The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy, Watts discusses the fundamental questions posed by Eastern Religions to Westerners of Christian background. After 'Suspension of Judgement', we get an interesting section on Chuang-tzu, a Chinese philosopher who Watts states is "one of the only philosophers from the whole of antiquity who has any real humour, and therefore, he is an immensely encouraging person to read." The book ends with 'The Practice of Meditation' which is delightfully written in his own calligraphy and stands as a fantastic essay for beginners. Quotes from mindful individuals like Bodhidharma, Mumonkan, Rinzai Roku, and Zenrin Ruiju give this book high markings. Much talk on Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and the essence of liberation within those faiths. Mark Watts gives a special thanks to Rebecca Shrophire George Ingles. Dedicated 'to our fathers and our mothers.'

This book really sparked the interest of my preschooler (age three). He enjoys rhyming books and was very interested at the different activities of this baby (who is actually an older toddler). Pretty, soft pictures made it enjoyable to read aloud each night. I recommend for any new baby gift, as the rhyming words would make a soothing story for an infant and the child will grow with the book.

My daughter, age 21 months, loves this book. The illustrations are beautiful and reinforce loving family relationships. The rhyming story is just the right length for a toddler.

This book enabled me to take a hard look at my relationship and identify the source of my unhappiness. I could start to see how I was partially responsible for the bad treatment I had been getting from my husband by not putting my foot down. As I woman, I think we all have a tendency to just hope our mate will understand why we're not happy. This helped to me to articulate the problems to my spouse and not be a particpant in my own victimization. Also it gave me a better undestanding of how relationships can suffer from mismanaged anger, fear, and power.

I have to say that this is one of my most treasured books. It's insight is direct, and very sensible. If you have a relationship that you have trouble understanding, I am sure this book will help you understand it. It has greatly helped my relationship with my wife. If you are seeing a marriage counselor, you must have this book (and a highlighter!) I still refer to parts of it after having it for two months. It is well written, It does not beat around the bush, it is not frilly, it is very meaty and will not leave you pondering about what the author is trying to tell you. I am in control of my feelings, and this book greatly helps me in maintaining that. Jade Clayton Author- McGraw-Hill Illustrated Telecom Dictionary

If anyone is curious to see what the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument looks like, Anselm Spring's photos are terrific! However, Mark Taylor is a pretentious Edward Abbey wannabe. All in all, a nice coffee table book though.

Unlike the previous review, the book contains excellent photographs but superb essays by Taylor. Taylor is no Abbey wannabe, in his own right he is a more accomplished essayist, book author and magazine editor. The essays are personal, intimate and written by someone who knows the land better than 99% of reviewers. His book sandstone sunsets won critics acclaim and was named best contemporary non fiction book of the year by the Western Writers of America.

Most maps are very useful. There are a couple muskie waters that, while included, do not contain depths, indication of bottom, etc. Individual articles are written by seasoned professionals and are sure to be appreciated by the beginning or experienced angler.

i believe that this book covered almost all of the main muskie lakes in wisconsin. Of those lakes it gave great advice on how to fish the lake for a beginner. I am not a beggining muskie hunter but i use the book as my first reference when i'm going to a new lake that i have not fished yet. This book tells me what kind of structure that the lakes muskie key in on at certain times of the year. It also tells fisherman what baits seem to work better on the lakes and what is the muskies main forage. this will then allow the fisherman to try and match their lure colors to the forage fish. I have read the book many times and have been able to match up a strategy from a lake that i have not even fished to the lake that i am going to fish. This book has allowed me to catch a good number of muskie that i don't think i would have caught. Thanks!

matt

As a source for personal spiritual exploration or leadership of public worship, "Worldwide Worship" stretches the boundaries. It is an early venture into what is destined to be a network of religious ideas spread across world cultures by instant communication. I wonder about some of the choices - a sign of the effectiveness of the format. It causes one to consider the reasons why this choice was made and what causes my reaction. A dialogue takes place that broadens ones perceptions and gives greater depth to ones own chosen faith. All for the good in one world of many faiths.

The prayers, songs and poetry presented in Worldwide Worship are drawn from classical and religious texts as well as the works of poets. This examines worship traditions in many different religions, illustrating common qualities in worldwide worship and including a rich blend of prayer, song, and poetry reflecting religious appreciation and celebration. A fine inclusion for any religious library.

This attractive and well designed book is filled with wonderful, insightful, and heartful lessons. It is a definite stocking stuffer.

What a delightful book! Filled with aphorisms, tried-and-true maxims and humor -- especially humor! -- there's something for everyone, whether or not alcoholism has invaded your life or that of a loved one. They may be short, but it can take a lifetime to fully probe and put into practice the wisdom of some of these sayings. Best of all, it can be enjoyed on many levels. Pick it up for a minute or spend an hour delving into its humor and wisdom; breeze through it or ponder a personally meaningful truism; or find those that will have you nodding with a knowing smile.

The teenager Jubilee's life turns inside out and upside down when she learns that she is a mutant. In short order, she is pursued by a Sentinel, and rescued by the X-Men. The X-Men realize that the Mutant Control Agency is feeding information to the Sentinels, and they must act quickly to protect the hundreds of mutants already registered. But, this attack may cost the X-Men more than they ever dreamed...

My eight-year-old son purchased this book all by himself. He is growing more interested in comic books, and leapt at this book. It looks to me like no more than what would be in a standard comic book (complete with cliff-hanger ending), but without all of the advertisements and so forth. He is glad he bought the book, and rates it quite highly.

I liked the book because it had good action. It explained the characters well by telling us who everybody was.

This is a fun thriller. It's not particularly original, and it doesn't experiment. The only real envelope it pushes is that of how explicitly derivitive a book can be of other works of literature. Is this a justified part of the pomo/metafiction gimmick/theme? Perhaps. But regurgitating previously used ideas (in abundance) as main themes allows Danielewski to look much more clever and creative than he actually is. Want spatial paradoxes? Houses with impossible rooms? Obscure old scholars who appear only as secondary sources and in bizarre, extensive footnotes? Read The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien. All those elements are there, in one book, written around 1940. Then of course there's the content borrowings from Borges (the ruminations on labyrinths and the minotaur, the character of Pierre Menard) and Lovecraft (the book that drives you nutty), and style borrowings from many others, as mentioned in a few previous reviews.

To those who are impressed by the innovative ideas and style of this book, really, I suggest you look into the literature that it's being compared to. There's a lot of great stuff out there, done better. And you'll be a little surprised at how faithfully a lot of it is reproduced in "House of Leaves."

All that said, though, the book's not bad for a light thriller.

Ignore the four stars. I don't know how to rate this book. I finished it and put it down a week ago, and it still hasn't put me down. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I can't say I was spooked by the spooky parts, but it keeps echoing and reverberating and suggesting new ways of looking at itself. A single review can hardly scratch the surface.

Ostensibly it's "about" an orphaned California slacker named Johnny Truant, who discovers a trunkful of notes in the apartment of a blind, ominously dead recluse named Zampano. The notes are for a commentary on a film documentary called The Navidson Record. The documentary records photojournalist Will Navidson's attempts to explore an expandable, collapsible, freakily infinite hallway that appears in his suburban Virginia home. Navidson's *h*o*u*s*e* (read that as blue text, please) is a heart of darkness, terrifying in its otherness, its vast inexplicability, its emptiness, its death-in-life.

Truant soon discovers that the *h*o*u*s*e*, the documentary, and Navidson himself don't seem to exist in (his and the novel's) real world. But as he obsesses over the notes and the horrors they examine, he finds his own reality, or his own mind, disintegrating into ash. His breakdown leads to a nightmarish and quite likely spurious denoument, and finally to the publication by Johnny's faceless editors of the book before us.

All this, including the details of Navidson's polar expeditions into inner space, reads along quite naturally, even though the book sends you hopping from text to footnote to spiralling footnotes nested several levels deep, and through typographic games that sometimes make the reader feel like he's attending a taffy pull, starring as the taffy. I often found these tricks irritating or boring, but that didn't mean I was ever capable of laying the book aside.

If the prose style - actually the two prose styles, the self dramatizing, sometimes slangy and sometimes lushly lyrical, voice of Johhny Truant, and the dryly academic semiotician's voice of Zampano, with its dryly sardonic footnotes mocking every convention of "critical theory" - is nothing to write home about, it's always appropriate to the character delivering it. The massive display of erudition (Danielewski has not merely read Heidegger and Derrida, he has them thoroughly scoped out, and builds their ideas deeply into the warp and woof of his novel) is bound to strike some readers as dreary showing off. But he doesn't just drop names. He makes use of them: he makes his Latin tags and mythological allusions and postmodern cliches bounce off one another, enlarging alarmingly the mental space inhabited by the text. There must be a hundred different ways to think about Danielewski's artifact, a hundred paths into the labyrinth, and at every turning he generously sets up signposts to help willing readers get lost among them.

To follow one main clew: "*H*o*u*s*e* of Leaves" is a book about text, and how text and reality construct one another. The climax of each of the two main stories (and it just may take many readings to figure out how many other stories are camouflaged within them) involves an act of book burning. At the very center of Navidson's life is a still photo, one which won him a Pulitzer Prize - and though Navidson is fictional, the photo and its Pulitzer are real. At the center of Truant's obsessions is a mental movie of the moment a labyrinth of scars was traced across his chest and arms, making a text of his body. So notes of anonymous "editors" wrap around Truant's notes, which wrap around Zampano's notes, which wrap around Zampano's text, which wraps around Navidson's documentary, which wraps around a devastating photograph that really exists in the real reader's world - which wraps around the book. Where in the world or out of it is the center of this elaborate onion?

At one point in the documentary, Navidson speculates that the *h*o*u*s*e* is God. Danielewski isn't explicit, but that offhand remark is probably meant to call to mind the classic image of God in American literature, the fearful blankness, the whiteness, of Ahab's whale. Nicolas of Cusa once defined God as "a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." In this volume, Danielewski has attempted to construct a circularly layered piece of literature which meets those specifications. And I can't swear that he hasn't succeeded.

Once you've followed the twists and turns of all the unheimlich maneuvers in "*H*o*u*s*e* of Leaves", where will you come out? Probably not where I did. As a work of literature, it may be worth anything from two stars to six. But as a work of echoing acoustic architecture, I'd have to say it's without parallel.

I first heard of "House of Leaves" about a year ago on the Internet. Somebody said it was the best new horror novel they had read in years. Then when I started working at a bookstore in town, one of my new friends there told me it was the scariest book he had ever read.

All of this quite intrigued me. So I bought the book and read it over a period of about six months. It's not a quick read, or at least it wasn't for me. I had to have other, more normal, sane books going on at the same time. "House of Leaves" is over seven hundred pages long and it's loaded with literary detour signs, unespected landmines (some duds, some live), and good old "holding the book upside down in a mirror so you can read the words printed that way" fun.

"House of Leaves" is a contortionist's daydream, and a conservative reader's nightmare. I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and found myself admiring the new unhallowed ground Danielewski was breaking, but at other times longing for a more conventional, satisfying structure.

This whole thing is very postmodern. The house is aware of itself as a house, and the book is aware of itself as a book. There is a story of a family moving into a house, trying to sort out its interpersonal demons, and finding that the insides of things (lives, minds, houses) can often be darker, scarier, stranger, and more convoluted than they would appear from the outsides.

That alone would have made a great book, told with inventive language and a compelling psychological subtext.

But that's just the beginning, the backstory really. "House of Leaves" is a story inside a story inside a story, etc. In fact, it puts the dizzying structure of Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" to shame.

In "House of Leaves," there's a young guy named Johnny Truant who's acting as literary editor, presenting the compelling and disturbing scribblings and ramblings on an old man named Zampano. Zampano's papers, which are presented posthumously, recount, at times blow-for-blow, a documentary film called "The Navidson Record" of a family moving into a house which proves to be larger on the inside than it is on the outside.

There is also another editor above Johnny, who makes comments on top of Johnny's comments. Johnny finds himself wondering if the old man didn't just make up the whole story about the young family moving into the house, because Johnny is unable to find any corroborating scrap of proof that the film exists.

Of course, add into the mix that Johnny is a self-admitted fibber and story teller extroidinaire. He tells us how much fun he has making up completely bogus stories for the benefit of strangers her meets in bars.

Knowing this, the reader has to start to wonder if the old man, Zampano, even exists, or if he's just an invention of Johnny's. And if you follow that line of thinking too far, you might even start to wonder if the heavy black book you're holding exists.

This is the haunted house that's in the film that the old man made up and wrote about as if it were as real as he was, but who was really just a figment of the narrator's fertile imagination, the narrator that doesn't really exist, except on paper and in the reader's mind and imagination...so maybe none of it exists...or all of it does. Maybe the house has turned on its porch lights somewhere deep, deep inside of you, down all those twisting tunnels and swirling, dark echoing caves.

Maybe there's a sign out front. "For Sale By Owner." And under that, in small print, in French, upside down and backwards, "Buyer Beware."

I started this series not too long ago, expecting it to be coming to some kind of close around book 7 or so. As it stands now, it appears that Mr. Jordan has quite a few more plot twists up his sleeve, like Thom and his daggers. I commend the author's character development, but at times it seems like he's doing it for its own sake. This book, in my opinion, was the weakest in the series to date. I'll read any book in the series, of course, but the climactic battles in any of the previous books outdistance the one in this one, by far. I mean, Rand can only use balefire but so many times to destroy one of the Forsaken. And if he can save Mat and Aviendha from death with it, as he did in the previous book, why was Liah not saved from the mist of Shadar Logoth in this one? Jordan could have drawn the battle out to a much more fitting climax, if you ask me. I'm hoping that the next books in the series move a lot quicker than this one did.

This is yet another terrific book in the wheel of time series. I don't think I have ever felt such despair as when I kept seeing the postponed sign next to ACOS. When it finally arrived I finished it in one day. Although it is definitely shorter than the other installments in the series, it is just as gripping as the others. Jordan is the true heir apparent to the Tolkien throne. His characters, plotlines, and cultures are truly seem real due to his fabulous descriptions. Some may call this being too wordy, but in fact it serves to draw us, the readers, into this magical world he has created. ACOS did a good job of keeping the plot going in the direction it will eventually end, I think. However, so many new questions are raised by the various subplots and new characters which arise in this story that it is difficult to envision this series ending any time soon. So, is that good or bad? Good, in that it means that we will get to enjoy Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Egwene for many more pages. And bad, in the sense that we will probably have to wait five more years for the conclusion. An awfully long amount of waiting. Still, it will be worth the wait, and I, for one, can't wait to see the next one. Thanks for sharing your vision with us, Mr. Jordan!

I started reading WoT 12 monts ago but i read books 3-7 in the last month, i just couldnt get enough of this series, ive read a lot of good series in my time like Shannara, Memory Sorrow & thorn,Magic of Recluse , Artifacts of power daughter of the empire etc etc etc but none has ever hooked me like this.

The first book was good but the 2nd & third slowed a bit AcoS was good but it didnt seem like that much was acomplished. I agree that Robert Jordan put a bit too much emphesis on strong female characters, (not that that detracts greatly from the book but its always nice to have a mix with a few more "vulnerable females" the male lead characters also end up acting the fool too often which is ok early in a series but they should become a lot more mature as it continues and by book 7 they should be a lot further along than Rand, Mat and Perrin are. (this is my own opinion, maybe im more into character development then most people but hey, to each his own).