06.27.2025 What I’m Reading This Summer   I love summer, I really do. With its bright, long days and welcoming weather, my world opens up to endless possibilities. Longer nights and earlier mornings allow for days to fill with activities and get-togethers. Weekends become packed with barbecues, road trips, and outdoor adventures. Around the middle of the season, I start to feel my tank becoming empty. I find myself losing steam trying to pack it all in. To prioritize rest in these wonderfully busy months, I always set a lofty reading goal. When the nice weather hits, I tend to shy away from more dense, academic material and gravitate towards the light, inspiring, and heartfelt. I want to read short, devourable stories — as many as possible. “Beach reads,” if you will. Reading fiction, no matter the genre, can be a lesson in deep compassion. While these stories may be products of imagination, their characters and the narratives they live out can hold invaluable teachings that exemplify the principles we aspire to nurture in Buddhist practice. The three pieces below highlight the value in fiction and the impact it can have on our spiritual journey. And if fiction isn’t your thing, you might find something to add to your summer reading list in our July 2025 book briefs. May you be inspired to embrace the joy of reading this summer, and do some beachside contemplation of your own. —Martine Panzica, assistant digital editor, Lion’s Roar The Dharma of Fiction Novels, fables, and plays — they’re stories that are made up, yet they often express deep truths. Five writers and thinkers explore the spiritual teachings they’ve found in fiction. “Our existence, we learn, is suffused with dukkha; every second is touched by its turmoil. It can be subtle, or it can be extreme. But being aware of this is a momentous beginning. A flower finally noticed. I find the dharma most present in the last line of the novel. Mrs. Dalloway steps into the middle of her party, her thoughts silenced for just a moment: ‘There she was.’ I see a woman at peace. Awakened to her life.” ADVERTISEMENT Truth in Fiction Pico Iyer loves reading spiritual books, but he’s found just as much good dharma in the books of three favorite novelists. Why, my friends sometimes ask me, do I say that the Buddhist texts I turn to, repeatedly, are Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard, the pages of Proust and, more and more, George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo? It’s not just because literature is my drug of choice, and I don’t know my way round any other discipline. It’s not just because all of them are written in a language I understand and with a frame of reference that I know. In Proust’s case, they’re clearly not. And it’s not because they offer resolutions, consolations, or explanations, because all of them are saying at heart that all’s not right with the world, and we can’t expect it to be. Confessions of a Zen Novelist When bestselling author Ruth Ozeki becomes a Zen priest, she finds out Zen and novel writing do not easily go hand in hand. We are all the stories we tell ourselves. As the heroes of our own I-novels, we never stop conceiving and reconceiving ourselves and those around us. Ever since I learned to hold a pen­cil, I’ve written myself into being over and over again: I am a novelist. No, I am a priest. Who is this “I” who feels torn between these identities and thinks she can only be one or the other? The problem is clearly one of dualistic thinking, and I don’t have an answer, except to say that by posit­ing these identities in opposition to each other, my relentlessly discursive novelist’s mind (a handicap for a spiritual practitioner) has probably created a problem where none need be. It’s an occupational hazard, since language, the tool of my trade, is also a tool of discriminative thinking and is, by its nature, divisive: it exists in order to distinguish this from that. But language has adhesive proper­ties as well, drawing us together by enabling us to share our stories. And in this regard, I like to think that novels are special. By inviting us into another’s skin, novels encourage us to practice empathy. And good novels celebrate the myriad complexities of individuals by creating ample room for all characters to have a voice.