Book review: Reflections on Silver River

Ken McLeod's Reflections on a Silver River is a good meditation book full of good advice and insights and practices that I will nod along to and place on my shelf and which will nevertheless not deeply affect my life for years.

There are lots of great ideas here — too many to engage with at once with any depth. It's not a long book — it's concise. Getting to even half of it will take years. This is a book I'm going to have to arbitrarily resample when the mood strikes me.

I'm taking away the practice of taking and sending (tonglen) and, if I'm honest, precious little else. Not because there's nothing else useful in the book but because there's too much. This practice is the easiest piece to try on.