The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

[Drunk Monk]

It also reminded me that I used to enjoy the I Ching, although I never learned to do it with the sticks. I'm sure there are newer (maybe more faithful?) translations now, but the old Wilhelm-Baynes text has a lot of power to it.

I threw coins for a spell, mostly to get a sense of what it might be about. 

Honestly, I'm not sure the faithfulness of the translation helps. For one thing, it's very bound in the characters, and those being logographic, have an entirely different level of meaning that just doesn't translate into an alphabetical way of thinking. The other thing is there's so much power in the abstractness, especially with a forecasting device. When I helped translate horoscopes for the mag (20 years on task, believe it or not!) I often worked to preserve those translation ambiguities for exactly this reason. Our copy editor (cf) wasn't always keen on that and sent back the occasional 'does not grok' comments, which were totally fair, but we eventually found a happy medium. 

I watched an ep or two of the new show version of TMitHC, but it didn't grab me. After the horror clown, it became clear that even though they lost, the nazis are doing fine. I guess I see enough of that in the real world so it didn't work as escapist fare for me. 

Why don't we remake Hogan's Heroes now?