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John Pendrey

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John’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (71)
currently-reading‎ (51)
read‎ (145)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
poetry‎ (18)
philosophy‎ (17)

nature‎ (15)
fiction‎ (10)
japan‎ (7)
life-and-death‎ (7)
buddhism‎ (4)
fction‎ (4)

anarchy‎ (2)
travel‎ (2)
china-tibet‎ (1)
garden‎ (1)
iran‎ (1)
malasia‎ (1)

never-read‎ (1)
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economics-social-sciences-history‎ (0)
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John is Currently Reading

John Pendrey is currently reading

Autobiographies by Kathleen Raine (2002-05-04)

by Unknown Author

bookshelves: currently-reading

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John Pendrey said: " I came to her through her poems which I find very good and reveal the spiritual world.

She had an interesting life and writes an articulate and revealing Autobiography.

Her concern is largely about her ‘vocation’ as poet/visionary and the conflict with ...more "

Apr 15, 2026 12:23AM · see review

John Pendrey is currently reading

Four Letters of Love

by Niall Williams (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

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John Pendrey said: " p23
I am enjoying the drama balanced by a magical happy world.
Most of all I can escape.

P89
The weather, dark wet and windy have taken me into a world where fiction and reality are one. Now is the darkness before romance:

“Galway city in the winter of I p23
I am enjoying the drama balanced by a magical happy world.
Most of all I can escape.

P89
The weather, dark wet and windy have taken me into a world where fiction and reality are one. Now is the darkness before romance:

“Galway city in the winter of Isabel's eighteenth year was racked with the worst Atlantic weather in memory. Storms sailed in the bay and the sea walks were washed with spray. Whistling gales swept round corners of the narrow streets and the people hurried between pub, shop and home in thick coats, hats and headscarves. Eyes down, and a hand holding the coat tight over their chests, women tilted at an angle into the gusts, bags blown backwards on a trailing arm. The skin of faces was polished clean, ears were bitten off, and Galway eyes watered and blinked at the unbelievable weather that gripped the city for three months. Each day seemed worse than the one before, until a gradual acceptance grew, and every man and woman walking through the city in the January, February and March of that year knew like a sour neighbour the hurtling chill and wet gales that came with hail and rain off the Atlantic.
It was a time of predictions and long memories. It would clear on the second of February, or, when the sleet ripped through that day, on Valentine's Day. In the convent school three nuns died in the same week. The heating was turned up high and the girls moved between the tropical climates of their French, Spanish and geography classes and the brutal cold of the mathematics room where Sister Magdalen had turned off the radiators in a particularly errant moment of vision, believing that Our Lord wanted the purity of the girls' souls to warm them from the inside.
And still the skies stayed broken and black. It came like a sickness off the sea, one storm after the next, clattering the loose sash windows where Isabel sat and read over again the last letter from home. Back on the island they were prisoners of the weather now. The school was closed for a couple of weeks. Her father stayed late in bed, rising in the early afternoon, standing in the kitchen and leaning on the deep stone ledge of the window to look out the thirty or so yards of the visible world. The mainland was lost to them, and the freedom there was on a summer's day in seeing the limitless expanse of a blue sky over a blue sea was inversed now, and the stone walls of the houses and the little fields were the still jails of winter.” ...more "

Jan 15, 2026 12:31AM · see review

John Pendrey is currently reading

The Garden of Evening Mists

by Tan Twan Eng

bookshelves: currently-reading, garden, japan, malasia

Reading for the 3rd time

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John Pendrey said: " Rereading and enchanted. The first time was 2017.
Now reading it together with my wife.

(I remember the garden and gardener.
I have been in Malasia and the jungle
I have been at a tea plantation and factory.
I have visited Mrs Smith’s Rose Garden. She w ...more "

Sep 26, 2025 12:09AM · see review

See all 51 books that John is reading…

John’s Quotes

“We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.”
― Pema Chodron

334 likes

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: writing

1427 likes

“Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.”
― Thomas Merton, Passion for Peace; Reflections on War and Nonviolence

33 likes

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: ambiguity, virtue

6059 likes

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

687 likes

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