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This was a very good story. I saw it was available at the NYPL and borrowed it without really looking at what it was about. Thich Nhat Hanh's books are usually short, easy to digest, and leave me feeling a bit more optimistic about life. I was looking for something like that, but this is a much more powerful story and wound up being very inspirational.

Once I was a few chapters in, I thought this was a fictional story that Thich Nhat Hanh had come up with, and I was surprised because that's not his usual style or method for teaching. Instead, "The Novice" is apparently his retelling of a traditional Vietnamese story about a Buddhist novice and the acknowledgment of her status as a bodhisattva after she passed away. The story is very engaging and well worth the time invested in reading it.

I enjoyed this the first time through and expect to read it again. I'm also going to look at a few books that discuss the Tao Te Ching, so I can get a better idea of what's really going on here.

Regarding this translation, it's clear and easy to understand, but Mitchell doesn't hesitate to mention tractors, trucks, and nuclear warheads in the text of the Tao Te Ching, which really threw me off. I understand the motivation behind updating the text to make it relatable to a modern audience, but I think he took a little too much artistic license.

Definitely not as engaging as Meditations, but still interesting, as much for what it reveals about upper class Roman life as it does about Stoicism.

Heated tubs connected to the ocean, criticism of "night owls", debates about real locations of places mentioned in the Odyssey that we're still having today, and people gossiping about Sappho's sex life.

It really makes me feel like not much has changed between now and then other than the technology of distributing information.