Trish J. MacGregor was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. She has always been interested in the hidden, the mysterious, the unseen, and in her latest novel, Esperanza, was able to combine this interest with her love of Ecuador.A few days ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:
It seems that my reading time has diminished over the years. So I’ve recently started taking a book with me to the gym and read while on the tread mill. Right now, I’ve got two books in progress: Biocentrism, by physician Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, and Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.Visit Trish J. MacGregor's website and blog.
The first is a fascinating perspective about how everything in reality originates in the mind, in consciousness. Without consciousness, Lanza contends, there’s nothing. Just a void. He makes a convincing case for his argument, beginning with one of the great Zen koans: “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound?” From here, he takes usthrough various theories in quantum physics – what is time? What is space? The mysteries of consciousness – and then all the way to death and beyond. The book is infinitely readable and Lanza has a quirky sense of humor. But more than that, this book has such a human side to it that I just can’t stop reading.
The Pillars of the Earth is a grand, sweeping epic that centers around the building of a cathedral in the Middle Ages. It was recently an eight-hour TV mini-series that was a visual feast, but the book is filled with the sort of details about life then that only a master novelist can pull off. Every writer should read this novel as a study in pacing, characters, plot, and epic themes.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
