2021 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. Mediocre race-baiting technothriller nonsense. Not so much a "disturbingly plausible" and "chillingly authentic geopol2021 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. Mediocre race-baiting technothriller nonsense. Not so much a "disturbingly plausible" and "chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller" like the dust jacket declares, but more a cartoonishly unrealistic and childishly written war-hawk wet dream, in which an all-ascendent Chinese military ten years from now deliberately triggers a world war by deploying technology so advanced it might as well be magic spells by Hogwarts students. How do you know the Asians are the baddies? Why, their military leader menacingly eats M&Ms on the front porch of the White House right at the 10 percent mark! Ouch, stop hitting me directly on the nose so hard, Ackerman and Stavridis! If you listen closely, you can hear Tom Clancy spinning in his grave, which is perhaps this book's greatest crime, far beyond its attempt to justify its ugly racism -- of insulting the very audience it's supposed to be geared towards. As more informed reviewers at Goodreads have pointed out, this book doesn't get even the first thing right about China's military structure or cultural norms, which is the most obvious sign of the authors' contempt for their readers; say what you will about Clancy, but he at least respected the Soviets enough to make them the kind of smart and rational villain that can truly drive political thrillers like these. Ackerman and Stavridis have no such respect for their own villains, making this book a disappointment to all but the most hardcore Tr*mp-loving, gun-toting xenophobes, just itching for an excuse to shoot up some Asian-Americans and destined to use this plodding, nonsensical novel as their excuse for doing so. ("Dem chin-chins were gonna blow up all our cellphones with their magic lasers, and dem libtards were gonna let 'em! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!") Avoid at all costs; or better yet, boycott your local bookstore for even carrying it, as well as the now fully fallen and currently morally bankrupt Wired magazine for giving the book all its original hype. Fuck you, Penguin Press; do better than this. ...more
When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew had at least a couple of James A. Michener's humongous historical-fiction tomes in their bookshelves, and it always made me curious to take some of them on once I got old enough and became a good enough reader to do so; but now that I have gotten old enough, Michener has profoundly fallen out of favor, and in the 2020s I doubt you'll find even one young person out of ten who has even heard of him. That's a shame, I discovered after finally reading my very first book of his, which happens to be the very first book he wrote, 1947's Tales of the South Pacific; because despite the daunting reputation of his books' page counts, this turned out to be one of the more pleasantly readable books I've taken on in the last year, a much more poetic and emotionally moving manuscript than I was expecting from Michener's reputation as "King of the Overlong Exposition."
Michener's one and only Pulitzer win of the over 50 books he published, and the source material for the Broadway musical of the same name, this is even more surprising when you realize that he was a simple high-school teacher with no publishing credits in the years leading up to World War Two, and that he only wrote this book in a personal attempt to capture all the crazy stories he witnessed as a Navy journalist during the war (a position he volunteered for because of otherwise being a pacifist Quaker, and a position only given to him because his commanding officers mistakenly thought he was the son of Admiral Marc Mitscher, and therefore needed to be handled with kid gloves). But once you read it, you immediately understand why the wartime Pulitzer committee would consider this irresistible catnip; because much like John Hersey's fellow Pulitzer-winning A Bell for Adano two years previously, Michener's main point here is to show how the benefits of a capitalist democracy like the US provided the exact entrepreneurial skills and "can-do attitude" that allowed the US to be the decisive factor in the Allies winning the war in the first place, a sort of paean to the kinds of quick thinking, solutions on the fly, and dogged persistence that allowed the American military to finally overcome a vastly superior Japanese force, one that already knew the tiny hidden islands of the Pacific Ocean with a kind of intimacy and mastery that the US still hasn't acquired even 80 years later.
But what sets this apart from previous wartime books -- and what truly made it so beloved when it first came out -- is that Michener digs down to find the beating heartbeat of humanity that lurks within these stories of battleship maneuvers and bombing raids, excelling at showing just how much downtime there is between battles in war, and the various good, bad, serious and silly ways the soldiers involved deal with these anxious downtimes. And in this, Michener is surprisingly critical of the very soldiers he means to champion, not shying away at all from the acknowledgement that alcoholism was rampant among the US military during the war, that there were many soldiers who used fascism as a convenient excuse to line their own pockets, and that American nurses had to be stationed literally on islands by themselves with no male soldiers in sight, for fear of otherwise being the perpetual victims of sexual assault the entire time they were there. It's the back-and-forth between this idealistic heroism and the sometimes ugly realities of human nature that provides the frisson that makes this book so readable, and it pretty much draws a line in the sand that demarks the way that all military stories were told before it, and the way all such stories were permanently changed after it.
Nonetheless, I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5, mostly as a way of acknowledging that younger readers and especially readers of color will find every single problematic element that's almost always found in books this old; for despite Michener's relatively progressive stance here that "rape is bad," he still loads this manuscript up with so many awkward cultural statements about race and gender as to give heart palpitations to any good Woke. I personally wasn't that particularly bothered by it; but with every passing year, I feel more and more compelled to follow up such statements with an acknowledgement that I'm a 51-year-old straight white male, so of course I wasn't that particularly bothered by it, but that others with different backgrounds than mine will find this a much more troubling book than I did. (And of course, the less said about the musical adaptation's "There's Nothin' Like a Dame," in which Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lighthearted joke about these soldiers' predelection for serially raping any woman who comes within grabbing distance of them [actual lyrics: "We feel as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Riding Hood"], the better.)
So all in all, like most books of this type, caution and an open mind is required when approaching Tales of the South Pacific here 74 years after its initial publication; but if you're able to do so, you'll find a surprisingly enjoyable, surprisingly sophisticated record of both the highs and lows of the so-called "Greatest Generation," and I have to admit that this did nothing but even further solidify my interest in reading yet more by Michener. (For those who don't know, by the '70s Michener had become much more famous for outputting enormous 1,500-page novels every few years about such specific subjects as the history of Poland, the founding of Judaism, and the establishment of America's space program, gaining accolades worldwide for his meticulous research and even-handed overviews; so there's a big part of me that feels like I haven't "truly experienced" Michener until I take on at least one of these.) That probably won't be coming until another year from now, though, so I hope you'll join me again in late autumn 2021 for that! ...more
This is the second volume of Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy which started with the much more famous The Three-Body Problem; and I'vThis is the second volume of Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy which started with the much more famous The Three-Body Problem; and I've already done a long write-up of that book, so I recommend checking that out if you want to see my thoughts on the overall themes and concepts of the entire trilogy. Much has been made about these books being the centerpiece of what a growing amount of people are calling the "Golden Age of Chinese Science-Fiction" currently transpiring as we speak, with Liu and his peers having a reputation among native Asians that roughly corresponds to how we Americans think of the Holy Trinity of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein back in our own country's golden age of the 1950s.
But there's a big problem with these so-called golden-age authors, which is that in their zeal to legitimize a genre that at the time had virtually no respect, these often self-taught writers (and very often full-time scientists, who did creative writing simply as a hobby) leaned way too heavily into the goal of introducing realistic hard science into their fictional stories, at the expense of ignoring much more basic literary issues that are required to make for actual good fiction stories, such as realistic and complex characters, a well established three-act plot that moves not too fast and not too slow, and dialogue that sounds like it came out of the mouths of actual human beings, and not space aliens who are just taking blind guesses at what humans actually sound like when they talk to each other. And yes, you've probably guessed by now that this is the exact problem with The Dark Forest; now that Liu has already set up the fascinating concepts that allowed the first book to glide so smoothly despite its faults, his creaky Heinlein-like basic literary problems are much more noticeable here in the second book, which like most second volumes of a trilogy is much more devoted to ploddingly putting the pieces into place for the coming third volume, and not nearly as much to luxuriating in the complex, fascinating world-building details that made the first book such a success. (But for another recent example, see my review last week at Letterboxd.com about recently rewatching all four "Hunger Games" movies, a story series that suffers from this exact same problem.) And this is not to mention another similar problem as the work of Asimov and Heinlein, which is the growing complaints about the undisguised sexism and lack of female-character agency in this book, best explained here in this review by The Book Smugglers.
This may fly with Chinese audiences, whose authoritarian government as recently as the 1990s had banned all contemporary American genre writers newer than Asimov and Heinlein in the first place, thus providing an explanation for why this kind of clunky, mediocre prose has exploded in popularity there (and the fact that the country's sci-fi authors seem to be getting away with more openly criticizing the government than mainstream writers I'm sure doesn't hurt). But here in the US, we've already gone through not one, not two, but three entire generations of subsequent SF literary developments since the popular height of our own golden age (including the "New Wave" of the '60s and '70s, typified by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick; the "Cyberpunk" era of the '80s and '90s, led by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson; and the "Singularity/New Weird" writers of the '00s and '10s like Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and China Mieville); and not only that, we're currently in the middle of our fourth new generation of post-golden-age genre writing, the so-called "Woke Age" best typified by unprecedented threepeat Hugo winner N.K. Jesmin.
I know this is going to sound arrogant, but 70 years of subsequent progression and complexity in this genre, under a democratic government that's not allowed to just blanket-hide entire sections of the library from its citizens, simply makes American sci-fi readers more sophisticated in 2020 than their Chinese counterparts; and that makes books like The Dark Forest simply more problematic for readers like us, a novel I found intriguing but unfortunately just not very good, and with all its seams and holes openly showing now that it doesn't have the admittedly fascinating concepts from the first book to hide them. It makes for a book I want to root for (I'm as much for the increasing diversity of this genre as anyone else), but unfortunately can't, and calls into serious question now whether I'll actually read the concluding volume Death's End (to say nothing of the author-approved fan-fiction fourth novel, one-named author Baoshu's 2019 The Redemption of Time). If you're to read it at all, it's best approached in a similar way, with low expectations and patience for its problems, certainly not the kind of grand follow-up to the much more riveting The Three-Body Problem I was expecting....more
I had heard about this science-fiction novel here and there over the last several years, after its 2015 English translation officially became the first book in history to garner a Hugo Award for a native Asian author, and kicked off the whole meme about how we're currently living through the so-called "Golden Age of Chinese Sci-Fi;" but after Netflix recently announced a few weeks ago that they're making a brand-new high-profile adaptation of the entire "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy (being co-produced by no less than the showrunners of Game of Thrones, Brad Pitt, Rian Johnson, and Rosamund Pike), I thought it was finally time for me to read at least the first book of the trilogy myself and see if it's deserving of all its hype. And the answer, thankfully, is yes, yes it is!
I don't think it's a spoiler at this point to reveal that the book is centered around the concept of humans learning of the existence of extraterrestrial life for the first time, then quickly realizing that this far-advanced extraterrestrial life is currently on its way to Earth to invade us. But a lot of attention has been given to the conceit here that the first people to learn this information are Chinese scientists in the middle of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, one of the most shameful moments of the entire 20th century outside of the Holocaust itself, and a story concept that should at least inspire you to read the Wikipedia page on the subject, if like me you barely know anything about it. It's there that you'll learn that one of the hallmarks of the Cultural Revolution was that every single subject in human existence was forced to be parsed through the prism of far-left political ideology, so much so that even basic scientific facts were deemed to be "untrue" by Mao's homegrown army of radically liberal teenaged fanatics, since they came from "Western Capitalists" and therefore were inherently "decadent" and could not be trusted (a situation that doesn't remind me of any current American counterpart whatsoever, oh God please don't "re-educate" me, Wokes).
This is what's garnered the book so much attention in Western circles, the mere novelty of imagining a sci-fi story through the kinds of Eastern filters that are so unknown and new to us (including not just Maoist politics but a fair amount of ancient Chinese mythology too); and I was worried that when I read it myself, I was going to learn that this novelty is the one and only thing going for it, with it otherwise being just a so-so genre tale on its own merits. But thankfully this turned out to be much more interesting than that, a story that can hold itself up no matter what its background, because of its dual dedication to hard science and soft sociology. Namely, a huge chunk of this book is dedicated to a logical examination of the physics problem of the book's title, the idea that when three stars of varying sizes are locked in a gravitational orbit around each other, any poor planet that might be stuck between them (such as the homeworld of our invading aliens, for example) would be tossed and turned in such a chaotic and random way that it's virtually impossible for scientists to develop a stable prediction of where it would be knocked around next, leading in their case to a series of deadly hot and deadly cold seasons (some lasting for days, others for centuries) that essentially wipe out the entire "Trisolaran" species over and over and over, leading to a spiritual crisis by the 200th iteration in which they decide that their only remaining option is to abandon the planet for good, and go move permanently to the nearest habitable planet they can find (which unfortunately for us is Earth, located just four light years away).
But then the other big concept that Liu bandies about -- and frankly what I as a non-scientist found much more interesting -- is the way the human race might react if they actually do discover at some point in the future that extraterrestrial life exists. We pretend that it's going to be a unifying moment for all of humankind, either benign (as we collectively sob in awe of the universe's majesty) or malignant (as we collectively build a world army to combat the invaders). But what if it instead unleashes a planet-wide civil war that easily crosses national borders and socioeconomic levels, one that threatens to destroy the human race long before the aliens actually get here? What if millions of defeated, cynical intellectuals and environmentalists react to the news with, "Good, let them invade us, humanity has proven itself to be worthless anyway, so they can't do any worse of a job running this planet than we have"? And what if these defeatists build their own army for the purpose of laying the groundwork for the coming alien invasion, precisely because their technology is so advanced that we can only perceive it through godlike religious terms?
It's essentially Liu taking the old joke of "I for one welcome our new alien overlords" then examining it in the most realistic, most terrifying way possible; and it's actually this development that drives most of the book's plot (or at least the first book; I haven't gotten to the other two yet). When you combine it, then, with this hard-science look at the coming aliens and why they're leaving, and the uniquely Chinese history and culture from which the whole story is filtered and presented, it results in a really unforgettable book, a dense and sometimes hard to follow story that I nonetheless devoured in three days of fevered, almost addicted eight-hour reading sessions. I can see why the Game of Thrones dudes would be interested in this, because Liu presents some really flabbergasting mental images along the way of telling this story; but unlike a lot of Hollywood-friendly sci-fi tales, I can also see why the nerdiest nerds of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (aka "Worldcon") would award this the Hugo, because it's a grand return to the hard-science-based 1950s and '60s novels of such American Silver Age masters as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein (which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of Chinese science-fiction, in which all the way up to the 1990s it was still only these '50s Silver Age authors who were widely available to read in the first place).
I still suspect that this novel's overwhelming love and success is due more to the specific moment in history we're living through, and that writers like Liu and his Chinese peers will come to be thought of in another 20 or 30 years as just another group of interesting but not outstanding genre writers; but as long as we are living through this moment, I encourage Americans to take full advantage of it, and to enjoy this novel for exactly what it is, a chance to read a really ripping genre actioner but told from a cultural standpoint you're never experienced before. It's best thought of in these kinds of terms, as a decent story with a unique perspective instead of a mindblowing story just on its own; and those who can embrace this attitude will find a lot here that's worth your time and attention....more
This is the hot new Japanese hipster literary novel of the moment, with Murata these days regularly being called the next Banana Yoshimoto (essentiallThis is the hot new Japanese hipster literary novel of the moment, with Murata these days regularly being called the next Banana Yoshimoto (essentially one of the only two contemporary Japanese authors Americans know, the other being Haruki Murakami). But although I'm aware that Yoshimoto is loved precisely for her droll, minimalist plotlines (hey, I'm a fan too), Convenience Store Woman is just a little bit too much of that, a storyline that is so aggressively pointless that it sometimes becomes hard to justify why you're bothering to read it in the first place.
Essentially it's a story about a young woman who gets a job at a convenience store in college to make ends meet, but who enjoys the empty routine so much that she's still there at the age of 36, virtually friendless and with no hobbies or romantic partners to speak of (all by choice), until her life is suddenly upended when a loudmouthed, slothful "alt-right" young man also begins to work there, in his case very much against his wishes. It makes subtle but good points about nihilism, autism, sociopathy, the nature of ennui, and the subject of middle-class yearning and how society treats those who fundamentally don't have that yearning; but the problem is that, by its very nature, huge giant sections of the manuscript read literally like a minute-by-minute log of what it's like to work a minimum-wage job at a convenience store, pretty much the opposite of entertaining literature and that would be a book-killing slog if it wasn't for the fact that the entire novel is only 163 pages.
It's enjoyable for what it is, but one of those books that kind of came and went from my life without making any dent, and I doubt I would've bothered if it wasn't for the massive amount of hype that's come with its American release. There are much better contemporary Asian novelists to read, and I would encourage you to do so; but this isn't exactly terrible either, so it won't hurt you to pick this up as well....more
Now that I've read what is arguably Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro's most famous novel, 1989's The Remains of the Day, it was fascinating to go back and read the book he wrote right before it, 1986's An Artist of the Floating World, because at their hearts they're both about the same thing -- namely, milquetoast everyman characters living through the events of World War Two in the 1940s, who both unthinkingly adopted attitudes about the war that they naively thought made them good citizens, but only afterwards realized made them one of the millions that allowed for monstrous fascism to run unchecked in their countries at the time (in the case of Remains, in pre-war Britain, where a butler is forced to reconcile his experiences of working for a blue-blood lord who was a gleeful Nazi appeaser before the war officially began, and who thought it would be a great idea for the UK to ship all their Jews off to concentration camps too).
The big difference here, though, is that the protagonist of Floating World is Japanese, a respected fine-art painter before the war who happily commits himself to propaganda posters during the conflict, then must learn how to live with his actions in a post-war world of Western influence, where the generation after him embrace cowboy movies and Coca-Cola, and bitterly blame him and his peers for causing the near-destruction of their nation to begin with. But the book is about more than that, too, alluded to by the novel's title; for "the floating world" refers not just to the style of delicate painting that our anti-villain Ono embraced before the war (just to then controversially dump it in favor of the bold art-deco look of war propaganda), but also as a slang term for the "red-light districts" that were a regular part of most cities in pre-war Europe and Asia, a sort of perpetual-twilight dreamland of drugs and sex where Ono and his friends spent their time before the war, drinking and arguing philosophy inside a bar that eventually became famous because of their association.
That makes this book the usual bag of Ishiguro tricks like his others, as he very slyly examines subjects like groupthink, morality, loyalty and family, precisely by sliding up to the topics sideways before you've even had a chance to notice; but in other ways this makes the book very different than his most famous titles, in that this is also a very specific look at Japanese customs and rituals, from the strict mentor/apprentice approach to the arts that had an ironclad lock on their society's arts all the way into the 1960s, to the frustrations of a younger generation trying to corral their parents' wayward opinions within a society where it was still a deep taboo to raise one's voice in argument against an elder. After all, Ishiguro is famously a Japanese immigrant who has lived in England all his life, and it's my understanding that several of his first books are set in an Asia he only knew theoretically; he seems to have gotten that out of his system early in his career, in that all his later novels are thoroughly Western in approach and setting, but it still makes these early books fascinating to read and ponder.
Although I can state with authority that I liked The Remains of the Day better -- Ishiguro simply handles the subject with more finesse and subtlety in that particular book, and sets it in an environment that Westerners are much more familiar with, making the subversion of its subject matter even more powerful -- anyone who is a fan of that book is strongly encouraged to read this unofficial companion volume too, a one-two punch that collectively is one of the most devastating looks at the rise of 20th century fascism ever written. Next up: 1995's The Unconsoled, which I've been warned is a sprawling, linguistically dense 500-page headscratcher that received almost all negative reviews when first published, but that has since been reappraised as one of the best British novels of the late 20th century. Should be interesting!
Kazuo Ishiguro books being reviewed in this series: A Pale View of the Hills (1982) | An Artist of the Floating World (1986) | The Remains of the Day (1989) | The Unconsoled (1995) | When We Were Orphans (2000) | Never Let Me Go (2005) | The Buried Giant (2015) | Klara and the Sun (2021)...more
Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018.Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018....more
(As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction (As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction listing there.)
So why should a serious book collector pay any attention to a volume that's less than ten years old, by an author who has otherwise not proven that she has any lasting power within the literary industry? Because Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love may in fact turn out to be the absolute perfect book to chronicle for future historians exactly what it was like to be a middle-class white suburban American female in the years following 9/11, a period that is bound to become a point of obsession for those in the future studying the US's rise and fall as a global superpower. A reluctant suburbanite who had just gone through a bitter divorce, the mid-thirties Gilbert found herself in the early 2000s mentally adrift, a confessed "self-help junkie" who was trying every gimmicky piece of advice that landed her way, being force-fed a diet of anti-depressive medication against her wishes but too afraid of the alternative to stop them. Within such a moment of mid-life crisis, then, she made the radical decision to sell all her things, get rid of her New York apartment, and spend a year doing nothing but traveling to what she called the "three I's" -- Italy (to indulge a random desire to learn the language), India (to delve more seriously into her recent conversion to Hinduism), and Indonesia (specifically to Bali, to spend four months as the personal assistant to a "village elder" she previously met during her job as a globe-trotting magazine journalist).
The results of this year-long trek are charming and infectious, and it's no surprise that the book remained on the NYT bestseller list for a whopping 187 weeks straight, later made into a high-profile movie produced by Brad Pitt and starring Julia Roberts. And that's because Gilbert cuts through the usual "chick-lit" filler here, having the courage to take a cruelly hard look at her mistakes and her weaknesses, and showing how spending a year letting go of every expectation she had had about life was ironically the best thing she could've ever done for that life. It's a call for simplicity, spirituality and anti-materialism that resonated profoundly with tens of millions of women in the same position as her, which says a lot about the point of runaway consumerism and moral bankruptcy the US had reached by the beginning of the 21st century; and it doesn't hurt that the book is also laugh-out-loud funny at points, moving sometimes to the point of tears, and just so happens to hit all the usual beats of a typical romantic comedy but this time in real life. A perfect gift for a fan of the book who wants to have a closer relationship with the original text, this first printing in flawless condition is being offered at a price specifically for young beginning collectors, those looking to add important titles to their library now when no one else is thinking of them, to ripen and age like a fine wine into the valuable commodities they'll one day be. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Unbeknownst to readers of this blog, I've been spending this summer tearing through a bunch of books on Buddhism and especially Buddhist meditation; I've started practicing a secular form of meditation in my personal life over the last year, and the insights I've had about my life because of it was recently referred to by a friend as "accidentally Buddhist" in nature, so I thought it'd be interesting to learn a little more about actual Buddhism and to see why my friend made this comment in the first place. The books have generally been hit-and-miss, the natural side-effect of just grabbing a bunch of random titles off the shelf of my neighborhood library; but one of the best writers on the subject of Buddhism in America has turned out to be a local, Columbia College professor Stephen Asma who takes a decidedly blue-collar, rationalist, and no-bullshit approach to his interpretations of these ancient texts, and how they can be applied to the practical lives of contemporary Westerners, without needing all the hippie New Age accoutrements that have typically been carried with them into our country. And thus have I ended up making my way this summer through nearly the entirety of Asma's oeuvre, from practical guides to meditation to a "for dummies" style introduction to the philosophy.
His latest that I've read, though, 2005's The Gods Drink Whiskey, I thought was finally the kind of book that could be justified writing about here at the blog for a general audience; and that's because this is not just a hyper-specialized guide to Buddhism itself, but a sprawling and fascinating look at a year Asma spent in southeast Asia (headquartered in Cambodia but traveling extensively through the rest of the region), where he blends lessons about religion and philosophy with an engaging travelogue, a primer on the politics of these developing nations, and an astute sociological look at how Buddhism has been warped and changed by various local populations in order to fit what they've needed to get out of it. And indeed, by constantly comparing this process to the one Christianity has gone through in the Western world (think of prim Mormons in their Sunday finest, snake handlers in Texas, suburban liberals in New England, and Midwestern fundamentalists flailing about and speaking in tongues, all of whom are supposedly worshipping the same Jesus), Asma makes it easy to understand why there's so many different forms of Buddhism in southeast Asia, why they've been so influenced by the local culture of each area, and why there's so much disagreement between different sects over how to "properly" practice. (Just for one example, and probably the biggest surprise to Americans in the entire book, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism only comprises six percent of all practicing Buddhists worldwide, and is considered by most Buddhists to be an overly fussy, overly ritualistic form of the philosophy that relies way too heavily on mysticism and supernatural elements.)
All this would be interesting enough; but like I said, what makes this book truly spectacular is the way Asma weaves in his personal anecdotes about his travels there, and especially the ironic surrealism of being one of the most experienced veterans at the Cambodian Buddhist Institute where he was hired to teach, which is what brought him over there in the first place. (Although Cambodia is one of the nations where Buddhism was first cultivated thousands of years ago, the monstrous Pol Pot dictatorship of the 1960s and '70s systematically murdered nearly an entire generation of Buddhist teachers and practitioners, leaving an all-consuming gap in expertise after that radical Communist regime was defeated that has forced the nation to do things like hire Americans to come and teach their newest generation of Buddhist youths.) A funny, moving, eye-opening and always informative book, despite this now being a decade old it turned out to be one of the most illuminating and enjoyable travel journals I've read in years, which is why I wanted to do a writeup of it here for the main blog and not just my usual quick mention at Goodreads.com, like I've been doing with all the other Buddhism books I've been reading this summer. It comes very strongly recommended, as does Asma's other books, to anyone looking to get a better sense of what Buddhism is all about as a practical, secular philosophy, apart from the spiritual trappings it's picked up along the way from the various regional communities who have adopted it over the centuries. ...more
For those who need catching up, I'm spending the summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on the subject of Buddhist meditation, aFor those who need catching up, I'm spending the summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on the subject of Buddhist meditation, after starting a secular form of meditation in my own life and having a friend recently remark that my insights about the practice sounded "accidentally Buddhist" to them. (See my review of Start Here Now for the entire backstory.)
This is one of the last books of the reading project -- I've burned through about ten of them now, and I suspect I won't find any other books in other library branches that will be too fundamentally different than the ones I read at mine -- which makes it ironic that this turned out to be the best out of all of them, or at least "best" when it comes to my specific personal goal of finding a book about Buddhism that approaches it from a decidedly secular standpoint that's friendly to atheists like me, and that uses the everyday language and vernacular of contemporary Americans instead of drowning itself in hard-to-pronounce foreign terms from thousands of years ago. A blue-collar Chicagoan professor at Columbia College who unapologetically eats red meat and drinks liquor on a regular basis, Asma in fact seemingly wrote his book specifically with someone like me in mind, a refreshingly down-to-earth look at the philosophical real-world underpinnings behind so many of the most famous concepts in Buddhism, deliberately written with an eye towards how it can practically help in the day-to-day lives of most ordinary people, regardless of whether they're ready to convert to Buddhism or even really have much of a spiritual bent at all.
This really helped me understand the self-directed insights I've been having this year, after starting to apply daily bouts of mindfulness and "gratitude journaling" into my life (after first learning them in the computer-programming bootcamp I attended last year, of all places); and it's been enlightening (so to speak) to realize that just the natural things I've been noticing about the world and myself because of these new activities actually have deep roots in the very heart of what Buddhism is supposed to be about. This especially applies to what's turned out to be the most beneficial thing that's come out of my mindfulness experiments, the way it helps stabilize my mood and keeps me on an even emotional track no matter how particularly bad or good that particular day went for me; and out of all the books I've read this summer on the subject, Asma was the only one to share a well-known simile about this (the "Six Animals" simile from the Samyutta Nikaya, discussed on page 125 in Asma's book) that made the entire subject just immediately sort of click into deep understanding in my brain.
Although there are of course better books out there for people seeking other things from Buddhist writings than me, I can honestly say that this was the best one specifically for those like me who are not particularly religious, who cast a skeptical eye towards all the New Age hippie baggage that usually come with American Buddhism, and who mostly want to understand this subject in terms of how it can affect just their normal, day-to-day lives out in the secular world. I'm grateful to have finally found a book like this before my summer reading project ended, and it comes strongly recommended to the kinds of people I just described. ...more
To get people caught up who need it, I'm spending this summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on Buddhism and meditation, ever sTo get people caught up who need it, I'm spending this summer reading a bunch of random books from my local library on Buddhism and meditation, ever since starting to practice a secular form of meditation in the last year and recently having a friend remark that my insights about it sounded "surprisingly Buddhist." (See my review of Start Here Now for the full backstory.) That book wasn't so bad, because it was authored by a middle-aged American who only came to Buddhism later in life, and so is written in a plain-spoken style that sounds natural to American ears; but Thich Nhat Hanh, author of today's You Are Here, is an elderly Vietnamese man who's been hardcore into Buddhism since he was a little kid, so his book sounds exactly like you would expect from such an author, containing advice such as to call ourselves "little dear one" when feeling down about ourselves, or to audibly laugh out loud while pouring tea as we exclaim, "I'm pouring tea! I'm pouring tea!" It's cute to picture some wrinkled old Asian man in monk's robes engaging in such behavior, but it's going to seem pretty ludicrous to most random Americans to do so themselves, one of many, many aspects of "Buddhism in practice" versus "Buddhism in theory" that turns so many people off from gleaning what could be some very practical secular life advice that is wrapped within all the rituals and foreign phrases and silly behavior. And of course it doesn't help that Hanh writes in a circular style that tends to repeat the same basic points over and over again, such as this pretty typical example right on page 31:
To be truly here, we have to bring the body back to the mind and the mind back to the body. We have to bring about what is called the unity of body and mind. This is very important in Buddhist meditation. Often, the body and mind go in different directions, and so we are not fully here. Therefore, we have to do what is necessary for them to come back together again.
Ugh, okay, I get it, we have to unite the body and mind! This example is the problem with the entire book in a nutshell, in terms of being just some secular American attempting to learn more about what Buddhist meditation is all about -- Hanh never writes a simple sentence when an entire paragraph of similarly worded simple sentences can be written instead, then does so in a way that makes him sound like that weirdo at the park who all the hippies gaze longingly at while beating on their tabors during their Saturday Drum Circle And Vegan Potluck. I've learned enough about Buddhism now to know that there's all kinds of interesting philosophical lessons to be learned from it, no matter what your particular spiritual leanings or tolerance level for New Age babble; so it's too bad there's so few books on the market that actually cut through this chakra chattel and present such lessons in the kind of casual, stripped-down vernacular that most Americans actually speak in the 2010s. This book is definitely not that, and I suspect will only be of use to existing Buddhists who are already used to this kind of way of speaking, a big reason why it's so hard for me to fully embrace something like Buddhism in the first place. ...more
As part of a big transformation that's been going on in my life over the last year and a half (including going back to school last year at the age of As part of a big transformation that's been going on in my life over the last year and a half (including going back to school last year at the age of 47, so to completely change what I do for a day job), I have started adding several new-agey-sounding things to my regular routine, including now seeing a therapist twice a month, practicing "radical empathy" towards people who piss me off, and doing a daily "gratitude journal" as well as meditating, albeit a completely secular, atheistic form of meditation that's much more akin to medical health advice than to spiritualism. But after recently sharing my insights with a friend about what I've been learning from these new activities, and having that friend remark that it sounded "surprisingly Buddhist," I thought it might be worth it to pick up a handful of completely random books on Buddhist meditation from my local library, just to see what they were talking about and whether it really does jibe with what I've been learning from my secular explorations of meditation (more commonly referred to by us non-religious types as "mindfulness").
This is the first one I read, by a media-savvy Buddhist who's been on Oprah among many other places, and who apparently runs the largest online mindfulness community on the planet, and I have to say it was pretty good; a systematic look at meditation for complete beginners, the eye-rolling language of so many of these kinds of books is kept to a minimum here, with Piver instead talking in a casually conversational and non-pretentious tone about both the "high concepts" of meditation (like the history of Buddhism, its various schools of thought, and how these differing schools will affect the way you meditate based on which you follow), and about the nitty-gritty stuff like literally how you should hold your body while meditating, how long you should do it, what it might mean if you keep falling asleep in the middle of sessions, and a lot more.
Now, that said, despite Piver insisting that Buddhist meditation is not a "religious practice," it's hard to discuss Buddhism without bringing a lot of spirituality into it, the part of all this stuff that as an atheist always goes south for me; and I have to confess, I also didn't care for the parts about building a little shrine where you meditate, starting your sessions with a "request to the universe for blessings," or any of that other stuff that to my humanist ears starts sounding an awful lot like a Portlandia comedy sketch. Ultimately I like to think of my meditation practice as simply another self-directed step towards better health, much like how I switched several years ago to an all "Mediterranean Diet" eating plan; and just as I'm not actually a North African even though I now often eat like one, I also feel like I can learn beneficial things from Buddhism even while not actually being a Buddhist (specifically in this case, realizing that when I told my friend how meditation has been great for separating whether I feel good or bad about myself on any given day away from any good or bad things that actually happened to me that day, I was pretty much accidentally repeating what Buddhists have to say about non-attachment to suffering). So in that sense, this was a quite worthwhile read, and it's recommended for others who are interested in meditation whether or not they're interested in becoming Buddhists as well. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although there's nothing particularly outstanding about Mike Robbins' The Nine Horizons, travel fans will want to pick up a copy anyway, simply because it's such a solid and strong example of a classic travelogue based on real experiences. Split into nine chapters detailing nine trips the British author made throughout the 1980s and '90s, this has the formal tone of an older travel writer like George Orwell, a certain primness to the proceedings that helps keep the sometimes outrageous stories about exotic locations in check; and I must admit, it's fascinating to read so long after the fact Robbins' political observations about certain areas of the world that were once hotbeds twenty or thirty years ago but no longer are (or are sometimes hot again for entirely different reasons, like his entertaining account of a pre-Arab-Spring Syria). Although not a genre-crossing "must read" even for people who don't particularly like travelogues, it certainly should go in your to-be-read list if you are, an illuminating and well-done series of vignettes that kept me quickly turning pages until I was done.
Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for fans of travel writing ...more
I have to admit, while I was reading Giacomo Lee's Funereal recently, it actually reminded me a lot of a book that CCLaP itself published a couple of I have to admit, while I was reading Giacomo Lee's Funereal recently, it actually reminded me a lot of a book that CCLaP itself published a couple of years ago, Scott Abrahams' Turtle and Dam; not because of any plot similarities (to be clear, the books have very different storylines), but because they're both great examples of white Westerners writing convincingly about young people in contemporary Asia, with Lee's particular story taking place in right-this-second South Korea (or just "Korea" as it's known in the book, an early sign that we are now looking at this country from the standpoint of a local instead of a foreign visitor).
One of those books that seems to touch on every single thing about Asian culture we Americans find strange, at its heart it's the tale of mid-twenties slacker Soobin Shin, a wannabe indie-rock musician and unemployed marketing major currently working at a doughnut shop in a neighborhood in Seoul known specifically for all its plastic surgeons; the story really takes off when she discovers that one of their regular slovenly customers has just started a new business dedicated to "radical psychotherapy," in which despondent and suicidal clients are given an actual funeral with their actual friends in attendance, and where they lie in an actual coffin for hours at a time, under the belief that it will help them understand the true joys of life without the family shame of seeing an actual psychologist.
This is the ingenious joy of this book in a nutshell -- that this odd little detail helps us understand just what a shameful thing it still is in Korea to admit that one is seeing a medical therapist -- and essentially this entire novel is 228 pages of that, strange little stories about Soobin's surreal life as the new marketing director of "OneLife," which each serve as another way for us as Westerners to examine such bizarre (in our eyes) Asian phenomenon as K-pop, doomsday cults, love hotels, sexual submissiveness in corporate culture, karaoke bars as "brothel lite"s, and a lot more. A book that just almost dips into science-fiction at times, although still feeling like we're simply getting a glimpse at the ultra-cutting-edge elements of Korean life that most of us just don't know about, there's a good reason that Lee is getting compared left and right these days to people like David Mitchell and William Gibson (and has become the latest obsession of the brilliantly weird geniuses at Boing Boing, no small feat); and Funereal comes strongly recommended to those who are specifically into these kinds of stories, and especially those who want to understand hipster Asia better precisely through the weird little details that make it seem like some bizarro genre story.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
This book declares right in its subtitle that it's about the journey Marco Polo took from Italy to China back in the Medieval Age, becoming essentially the very first white person in history to give a written account to Europeans of the Far East, but that turns out to be not quite true; only half of this relatively slim book is about that, with the entire second half being a detailed archeological and anthropological guide to emperor Kublai Khan, his summer imperial city Xanadu, and other such details about ancient China that don't really have much to do with Polo or his journey at all. As such, then, although the book itself is certainly well-done, it's still getting some points knocked off today, merely because of false advertising; for I wanted to know a lot more about Polo and his journey itself, the whole reason I picked up this book, while the account given here is not much more than an extra-long Wikipedia entry, a disappointing realization for a book that promotes itself as a 350-page guide to the actual trip. Buyer beware.
Out of 10: 8.0
UPDATE: After a visit to Wikipedia, I've come to learn that Man himself originally titled this book Xanadu, giving a much clearer indication of its contents; but that when HarperCollins acquired it, they were the ones who changed it to Marco Polo: The Journey That Changed the World, so that they could release it at the same time as the Marco Polo Netflix series and pick up some cheap publicity. Shame on you, HarperCollins....more
(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
The CCLaP train continues running at full steam right now, and I'm hap(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
The CCLaP train continues running at full steam right now, and I'm happy to announce our upcoming November release, the hilarious yet deeply sobering dysfunctional-family comedy "The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong" by Brooklyn author Leland Cheuk. A black comedy about family relationships in the style of Jonathan Franzen, it's also an examination of all the real abuses that Asian-Americans have had to endure over the last 200 years, from the railroad-building days of the Victorian Age to the forced settlement camps of World War Two, all of the events seen through the eyes of a series of patriarchs of the terminally doomed Pong family over the generations. At heart a serious look at racial injustices, you nonetheless won't believe how much you'll be laughing all the way through it, with the popular podcaster Cheuk bringing his trademarked left turns and unexpected developments to this full-length literary debut.
As always with CCLaP, we're making the ebook version of "Pong" AVAILABLE FOR FREE TO ANY GOODREADS MEMBER WHO WANTS ONE, so to express an interest just drop me a line at [email protected] or simply send me a message through Goodreads. Word-of-mouth is the number-one way we generate new customers, so your mention of this book here can and does have a huge impact on the total number of copies we eventually sell. The book comes out to the general public on November 16th, but the advance review copy is available as we speak, so don't hesitate to drop me a line if you'd like to read a free sneak-preview copy of this darkly funny, thought-provoking novel!...more
[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.]
There's a common cliché in the world of the literary arts, that says that authors are essentially on a ticking clock of slipping quality that is intricately tied to their age; in other words, that writers are at their most creative at the beginning of their careers, typically when they're young and fresh and haven't actually written out every idea yet that they have in their brain, while by the end of that career they are typically doing not much else than rehashing old concepts and coasting on their reputation as a revered veteran. And unfortunately there's not much better example of this than the Japanese surrealist titan Haruki Murakami, who just turned 65 this year and has now put out close to twenty books; for while I was as big a fan as everyone else during his '80s heyday of such classics as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (still to this day the best novel he's ever written), I have to admit that I've been intensely disappointed by the last three books in a row he's published, not just 2007's After Dark (a.k.a. "Murakami Lite") and 2011's career nadir 1Q84 (what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most overhyped novels of the entire 21st century), but now also his new Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which feels like a book he was excited about starting but then completely lost interest in about halfway through.
A book riddled with the usual Murakami touches (an obsession with Western classical music, a young Japanese male narrator who prefers coffee over tea, a romantic interest with distinctive ears, references to evil spirits who haunt our dreams, etc), Colorless nonetheless starts out looking like something we rarely get from the author, which is a deep character study grounded in the real world with only a light plot skeleton holding it together; it's the story of our eponymous hero, who as a teenager had four best friends who each by coincidence had a color in their last name, until all of them suddenly and angrily rejected him from the group in their twenties for no discernible reason, with Tsukuru only now in his late thirties deciding to track each one down and find out what exactly happened two decades previous, because of a new girlfriend who feels that he needs closure over this part of his life. And for most of the book, this is indeed just enough of a story to make a highly readable and intriguing tale, as Murakami shows us the twisting fates of each of the friends in middle-age, and makes a lot of insightful comments about the slippery nature of memory, the fragile nature of friendship, and the surprises in life that greet all of us as we become older and hopefully wiser people.
The problem, though, is that Murakami never does anything with all this, letting the story peter out into a little nothing whimper by the end; we never learn the answer to the plot's central mystery (or, that is, we learn superficially why the friends rejected Tsukuru, which I'll let remain a surprise, but we never learn why the thing happened that led to the rejection), and our hero never comes to any kind of resolution about it all, simply drifting off into contemplation as a way of unsatisfactorily ending the novel. And in the meanwhile, the book is full of annoying distractions as well that seem to have no purpose: Tsukuru's middle-aged girlfriend turns out to already have a lover, but we never learn why she's dating Tsukuru as well or what she plans to do about it all, plus there's an entire subplot about a male friend Tsukuru has as a twentysomething, who he may or may not have had a homoerotic experience with, which might've instead been an intensely real-seeming dream, and who suddenly disappears before anything else happens and never enters the story again. It all adds up by the end to a reading experience that was never actively horrible, but that left me at the last page scratching my head and thinking, "Why did I even bother reading this?" And the answer is because it's Haruki Murakami, and a man with Haruki Murakmi's reputation gets an automatic read from me no matter what the new book is, even as those books keep becoming more and more dissatisfying with each new title. Granted, at this point I'll probably still keep reading each new one as they come out, but I have officially given up on the idea of this once mighty author ever putting out again anything that comes even close to the amazing, powerful novels of his youth.
CCLaP's newest novel drops on April 14th! This is a highly funny and insightful tale set in contemporaFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
CCLaP's newest novel drops on April 14th! This is a highly funny and insightful tale set in contemporary China, about the tens of millions of young rural farmers who are being turned into the nation's first generation of suburban white-collar workers, and also a "Catch-22" style dark comedy about the pitfalls of being a journalist within a communist country with state-controlled media. Featuring a brilliant ending which makes me laugh every single time I read it, this instructs as much as it entertains, and you will have a whole new view of the "New China" after finishing this charming literary debut of Washington DC financial expert Scott Abrahams.
CCLaP is currently sending out review copies of this book to ANYONE at Goodreads who promises to do a write-up! Just drop me a line at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you're interested....more
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