East Meets West Bookclub: Book One

The first book I would like to examine is a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson called "The Years of Rice and Salt," a book about the consequences and the lives of many people in a world where the Black Plague wiped out most of Europe's population in the fourteenth century.

I am planning to come back in a month to talk about this book and see how much progress has been made. It is a very long book, over 700 pages, so it will take some time to finish this book. I am hoping that this book will open up the eyes of the West to what might have happened with Buddhism and Islam being the major world religions and promulgators of culture, and what it might tell us about what is in store for the West in the future with a greater interaction with Eastern and Middle Eastern philosophies and societies.