Did you know that many Bahá'í books are available for free download onto your computer, smartphone, or e-reader?

• At http://reference.bahai.org you can click on an author's name to see a list of books, including all published translations from the Central Figures, the writings of Shoghi Effendi, and a few other works. To the right of the book title are two small icons that you can click to download that book: one as a Microsoft Word document and another as an adobe PDF document. Both are zip files that require a program like WinZip or 7-Zip to open (newer computers will also have built-in capability to open these zip files).
• Palabra Publications offers many compilations of letters from the House of Justice, as well as books on deepening themes written by Melanie Smith, Paul Lample, and Dr. A.M. Ghadirian. This includes Lample's Creating a New Mind and his new Revelation & Social Reality. Available at http://www.palabrapublications.com/downloads
• The Gutenberg project at http://www.gutenberg.org aims to preserve a digital collection of tens of thousands of public domain books: those whose copyright has expired, or whose authors have placed the books into the public domain. All of the works at reference.bahai.org are also found here. In addition, you can find:
  • Under "Baha'i International Community" as author - Century of Light, One Common Faith, The Prosperity of Humankind, Statement on Baha'u'llah.
  • Under "Baha'i World Centre" - Bahiyyih Khanúm

They are the aliment of imagination,
The wellspring of delight.
They turn stars into heroes,
Bring peace to the night.

Fear they can banish,
And in good measure bestow.
All good stories teach;
Even heroes they bring low.

Words are more than letters,
As letters are more than lines.
In the mirror of darkest tales,
Verily even sorrow shines.

When polished in contemplation,
The reflection you will find,
Far eclipses all that
The narrator had in mind.

Inspired by Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Strange on the surface, but makes deep sense to me: currently reading Darwin's Origin of the Species, and also started reading Stories of Baha'u'llah and Some Notable Early Believers (Baha'u'llah is the prophet-founder of the Baha'i Faith). Social-scientific evolution gives us a Charles Darwin and social-religious evolution/God gives us the Manifestation of the Cause of God for today. One brought us a better understanding of the physical world, and the other a better understanding of the spiritual world – and its implications for how we live out our lives as sentient beings in that physical world. Its implications for how we live amongst each other, for how we treat that Nature, which Darwin so carefully analyzed and loved. For how we reconcile ourselves to the seeming pointlessness of the universe.

As in painting, so in words, there is a power that transcends our experience of life, a power that can doubly lift us to the sacred and mock us for the profane. So it is with Asher Lev.

My Name Is Asher Lev was one of the few works from high school English that I looked back upon fondly. For years my searches through Half Price Books have been surprisingly without reward, but at last I thought simply to borrow a copy.

As with any number of non-fictions books I've read lately, Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God is one I'll have to return to in the future for a detailed skimming. I like taking notes; yet, notetaking requires extra time, and can make it difficult to see the forest for the trees. Thus I've been experimenting with reading all the way through, with an eye to returning soon to skim back over for the most thought-provoking elements. Hasn't happened yet with anything else though =/.

Great works of art leave their audience with some mixture of inspiration, desire to emulate, a deeper understanding of what it is to be human, and, towering over all else — a tremendous sense of pure awe. Salman Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet is such a work, though so incredibly dense and alive that, in the reading, it is sometimes easy to overlook, nay, to become lost in, its grandiosity.

Anyone try out GoodReads.com yet? It is a newish (1 year old) social networking site organized around your reading lists and recommendations. Seems like an interesting way of connecting with people and potentially getting good ideas of where to go with one's reading. I've set up an account and added a few books already. If anyone else is on the site, drop me a comment and maybe we can get connected there.

Bahíyyih Khánum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, daughter of Bahá'u'lláh, can be considered the woman of highest station in her father's faith, and yet the facts about her life are few. Owing primarily to cultural constraints on her sex, the story and character of her outstanding life must be teased out by the biographer through the scattered references of letters, diaries, and recollections. Armed with a mighty assortment of such citations, researcher Janet Khan weaves a moving tapestry of the Greatest Holy Leaf in Prophet's Daughter: The Life and Legacy of Bahíyyih Khánum, Outstanding Heroine of the Bahá'í Faith.

J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, p498:

Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.