No matter when you’re reading this, it’s time for Dinner! Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo is Algonquin’s long-awaited follow-up to Breakfast with Buddha — one of our best-loved “word of mouth” bestsellers.

Have no reservations about digging into Dinner with Buddha. (Reservations, dinner — get it? Heehee.) We find Otto Ringling and Mongolian monk Volya Rinpoche on another unexpected road trip of discovery. And this is no standard spiritual journey, as Roland explains here:

“Dinner with Buddha is a road-trip book. A funny road-trip book, I hope. I don’t really like the word spiritual, but I guess it should also be called a funny road-trip book with spiritual questions at its core.

“What I don’t like about the word is that it can sound exclusive, as if certain special people are spiritual, and the rest of humanity is not. Clearly, some people behave much better than others, and some moments and places are more conducive to contemplation, but I don’t like a narrow definition of spirituality. To me, planting a garden is a spiritual act. Playing golf, spending time with my children, lovemaking, building a deck, driving my ninety-one-year-old mother to the store, reading, listening to people sing — all these are spiritual activities, and I believe that every human being, believer or not, evildoer or saint, walks a long and crooked path toward greater understanding.”

Read more from Roland about how he came to write Dinner with Buddha