Some December Reading

December 2001

I found myself with a lot of reading time last month and plowed through a handful of books without taking the time to really write anything about them. I'll attempt here to summarize my thoughts.

Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha

I first read this one some time during my undergrad years and picked it up again to refresh my memory. Siddhartha is a fictional account of the life of an Indian prince who abandons the comforts of royalty to become, by turns, an ascetic, a lover, a father, and a ferryman. His quest runs parallel to that of his friend Govinda, who leaves the palace to become a disciple of Buddha Gotama. Hesse's work, which was published in 1951, is intended to be an allegory of the life of Buddha himself, and marked the beginning of a major era in the influence of Eastern thought on western culture. I say a little more about my experience with the book below.
4 out of 5

Carole Tonkinson, ed: Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation

In keeping with the Eastern theme, I picked up this anthology of Beat poetry that Nisha has borrowed for the poetry unit she's teaching. While this anthology has an Eastern focus in mind, it captures the Beat mentality easily. Among other poets featured are Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Burroughs, and Ferlinghetti. I read the book on our interminable flight to Hawaii for CVPR. Here are the notes I scribbled in my journal along the way (including some thoughts about Siddhartha):

2001 12 08: Flying out of Newark, over adirondacks, browsing Big Sky
Mind and thinking about my own beat trips N years ago.  There is a cat
on the intercom. I'm bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, about to chase the
sun west all the way to Honolulu. Lala land.

When the sun was rising it sliced like a knife through the sky, wedging
under low clouds to reveal the rolling adirondacks below.  Beauty and
mind and body and Nisha was asleep. I kissed her forehead know all way
beautiful and whole.

2001 12 08 (later): Meat cheese coke ranch dressing disgusting says
Nisha as the flagrant dawn (sunset arises out of the west) and we
coast to a brain-dead jet-lagged night (naked) cranky and fruitless.
...
Enjoyed Big Sky Mind much of the day, leaning into Kerouac, but more
so into his nature-muse Snyder living months on end in forest fire
lookouts with his dharma and bears.  Fire ants, too, and Wm. Burroughs
straight from some strange trip.
...
2001 12 09: Boarding flt to Kauai. The weather here is beautiful, to
say the least. I've been putting off any discussion of Siddhartha,
primarily have nothing to say about it. ... I like the book & Herman
Hesse's interpretation of Mahayana Buddhism, but the basic problem is
that I did not read it with any Buddhist sense- plowed right through
it. Not mindful.  I'm having the same problem with Big Sky Mind ... 
...
Beautiful clouds in a blue sky
Why not demons or elephants?
Floating by and telling us each
that not man island is.

Not thinking is hard
as not-thoughts pass
involuntarily through the
orfices of my brain.

First thought best thought
yields raw experience at the 
cost of maladjusted social 
relationships. I fret over
this and wonder if it is not
better to just not think in the
first place.

and that kind of summarizes the book for me. I've always found beat writing inspiring on the level of trying to dig down to the raw words, finding the purest form of expression. The only other writer who does that for me is James Joyce, but his writing is so exhausting by comparison. I'm inspired to pick up the dharma bums for another read.
3 out of 5

Seamus Heaney, tr: Beowulf

And now for something completely different. I scribbled this review into my journal on Dec 28. My apologies for the terse language:

2001 12 28: I picked this one up due to a slashdot review of Heaney's translation. Very easy going modern English translation with the Old English in parallel (fascinating to look @ but otherwise indecipherable to me.) Epic poem of great Scandinavian hero Beowulf, written over 1000 years ago and surely the inspiration for all kinds of modern fantasy. I could immediately recognize elements of Tolkien's style from LOTR and even major plot elements from the Hobbit. Beyond that, the famed war-hero is a familiar archetype (note also very strong parallels to the 13th Warrior, the movie adaptation of Michael Chrichton's Eaters of the Dead). On the whole, a fascinating and enthralling poem and the scenes in which Beowulf does battle with Grendel are fantastic. Note also that the poem is a short light read for the attention-deprived. I highly recommend this translation.
3 of 5

Gabriel Garcia Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera

Márquez' book describes the life-long unrequited love of Florentino Ariza for the beautiful Fermina Daza. It is set in turn of the century Columbia, which was engorged in a series of civil wars and cholera epidemics. Again from my journal:

2001 12 29: Started reading in Hawaii. Márquez' style is rich,
steamy, invariably tropical and dreamlike, in which the suspension of
reality is taken for granted and miracles, passion, fidelity and
infidelity are fraught with a sensuous anticipation. (So many
adjectives!)  Like 100 Years of Solitude, my reading style is too
impatient to absorb, be mindful and digest slowly.  Márquez'
writing is full of incredible beauty and awareness that there is more
to the mundane than meets the eye. I can also appreciate his love for
Columbia, which is both unconditional yet evasive, as if he is
chronicling the history of that country as a history of all of the
Americas, weighed down by both noble and savage events. Now I am
exagerrating.

Ok. What did I mean to say there? Márquez is a dense writer and demands much from his readers. But with the density comes an intense passion for the beauty in even mundane moments. I apologize for the ill-contrived journal entry, but I truly found myself at a loss for the right words to capture the book.
3 of 5

Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

My last book of 2001, A.H.W.O.S.G. is Eggers' heartwrenching memoir of losing both his parents to cancer at the age of 22 and how he carried on with his sister, raising their kid brother Toph. The title is appropriate, and Eggers' writing is completely human, evoking plenty of raw emotion. That being said, it's also hilarious by turns. A genuine Gen-X memoir, describing life in the SF Bay area in the eary nineties, including Eggers' first attempts in the magazine publishing business, occupying office space next to that of the fledgling Wired magazine. While at times the self-consciousness of Egger's writing becomes nearly unbearable, I would still highly recommend this read.
3 of 5