In this blog, I will discuss two types of literature I find particularly interesting:  books about Americans in foreign places, and books about spiritual awakening or self-realization or, at least, deepening into oneself.  Sometimes these themes overlap in a given book, and then we have a real home run!  Some of the books I review will be fiction, some memoirs, occasionally they will be another type of non-fiction,such as interviews.

I am also a co-editor of a blog on Buddhist fiction, and to some extent the books discussed here may overlap with those on that blog.  But there are many books in which the authors write of their spiritual development which are not explicitly, or even implicitly, Buddhist, and there are many which are not fiction.  Thus, this blog is both more comprehensive and more idiosyncratic than that one.

In the coming days, I will be posting reviews of books that fit into the categories described above that I have reviewed over the past year.  I am also hoping that if anyone knows of any such books, or is interested in learning about them, he or she will join the conversation!