a good book

As it happens two of my favourite books are the ones I have read randomly, out of sequence. and this is the blogpost to talk about both of them!
The first one is the Bhagvad Gita, what a wonderful wonderful book it is - when you are not actually listening to it (as i do, with Swami Nikhilananda's commentary like an audio book) it is difficult to believe that it actually exists - that these thoughts have been thought and not just that, (because on reading Ralph Waldo Emerson and similar thinkers and you realise a lot of people have stumbled upon similar truths) that they have been put in sequence in the most wonderful logical way. The Bhagvad Gita, famously, has eighteen chapters - and I am currently listening to the thirteenth chapter. It is the most out-of-this-world kind of a joy to hear it, like someone for the first time told you the structure of the atom - and you realise that everything solid is, in fact, not actually solid; or you looked at the stars and realised that space is never ending and woh-wait-for-this that we too are made of the same stuff; or perhaps the first time I heard about death and realised that these are precious few moments and we must do nothing but good and always be happy?* But you see, when you move away, the realisation is so mind boggling that you forget and hence I forget the beauty that this wonderful book contains, till I hear it again. But what makes the Gita go those stratospheres above the rest of the texts and thoughts and memoirs and all is that it doesn't just <i>suggest</i> the mind-boggling-mind-surpassing brilliance; it tells you the way to make this brilliance rooted in your experience, how to braid it in your life, or even better soak your life in that, to absorb it, so that you act from that place - you know, like, if you were able to behave in this world from a position where your knowledge of the structure of the atom, or the universe, or the fact of death actually impacted how you behave. To live in a way that integrated your knowledge and your experience and your behaviour completely - that is what the Gita does, it takes you there. 

*is that too controversial?
PS: there were two books I were to speak about, but how can speak of anything in the same breath as the Gita?