TWIB-II 48
Sep. 7th, 2008 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanYes, I'm jumping ahead three weeks, but at least this way I'm back on schedule with Sunday postings. I hope to post TWIB 45-47 sometime after Monday. At any rate, I read three books this past week.
1) Superpowers – David J. Schwartz
Superpowers is a truly mediocre book: it definitely isn't good, but neither is it bad enough that I could enjoy hating it. It's just...a read, which is too bad because there's a lot of potential in its concept (namely, what happens when five college students wake up and discover they have superpowers? Screw the "how did they get them and who are the supervillains?" stuff--what are their moral obligations? Do they tell their families? Help the cops? Are they responsible when they hurt innocent bystanders while aiding others?)
Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talented enough to pull this concept off. The main characters are literally indistinguishable from one another--each has one defining physical and one defining emotional/familial trait, and that's it. I had to bookmark the page where they were introduced in order to remember who was who...and kept referring to it all the way up to the final page of the book. Schwartz also introduces a plethora of secondary and tertiary characters who are even less well-defined than the leads and contribute nothing to the story outside of word count.
Finally, the narrative contains two major flaws. The first is that whenever a hero's family member discovers that he or she has superpowers, said family member comes to terms with it within the space of a sentence or two. Every single time. This is hardly what one would expect from a narrative that bills itself a realistic superhero story, especially one that aims to deal with the personal fallout caused by the possession of superpowers. The second is the truly inexplicable and gratuitous insertion of 9/11 and its aftermath into the final fourth of the novel. It neither forwards the plot nor adds anything to readers' understanding of that day's horrible events.
Schwartz wraps up the narrative in a trite slap-dash fashion that isn't terribly different from the standard superhero narrative he set out not to write. According to the back cover, he's penned several short stories, and I get the feeling that many sections of Superpowes would have worked reasonably well as such, but they don't succeed in novel format. Final verdict: not a horrible book, but not one that contributes anything to the reader for having read it. It'd make a decent book for air travel or daily commuting, but that's about it.
2) Zen Keys – Thich Nhat Hanh
This slim volume is a far cry from the other eight billion cookie cutter books on Zen (of which Thich has written no small number himself). The first third explains—really explains--many elements of Zen practice, most notably koans. Purists may argue that explanations along these lines are not truly Zen and thus should not be offered, but I can't help think that if more books did offer them the world would have far fewer idiots running around spouting off complete nonsense and claiming it's an outward manifestation of their OMG-so-transcendental Zen enlightenment.
The second section is a primer on some early Indian Buddhist schools and how their tenets either anticipated Zen thought or explain it from a more rationalist perspective. It's interesting but quite dense, and I'm not sure how much of it I truly grasped. This section is rounded off with brief explanations of Vietnamese monastic practices.
The third section—a translation of forty-three koans related by Vietnamese emperor Tran Thai Tong, is the volume's weakest section. It suffers first from the fact that it's an English translation of Thich's French translation of 13th century Vietnamese writings, so a lot of noise has been introduced to the original text. Secondly, (and contrary to the earlier two sections) the English translation replaces precious few of the Vietnamese transliterations of Indian and Chinese proper nouns with their original forms, and fails to notate to whom or what the Vietnamese transliterations refer. This makes it difficult to place which koans are Vietnamese and which are variants of those already known to the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean canons. Finally, there's no annotation explaining cultural, linguistic or historical references that are lost on readers unfamiliar with these aspects of Vietnam, again obscuring much of interest in these sections. That said, however, Zen Keys is still worth reading for its two beginning sections.
3) Zen: The Perfect Companion – Seung Sahn
This attractive volume is a collection of 235 koans along with questions and commentary by Seung Sahn, who was one of the first Korean teachers of Zen in America. All the usual suspects (the cypress tree in the garden, 無, Bodhidharma's coming to the east) are present, but the bulk of the volume is comprised of (what will be to most) unfamiliar koans from Seung Sahn's lineage. Aside from a few pages of truly dreadful poetry in the latter half of the volume, these new koans all make for worthwhile reading.
Zen's layout is also lovely: there are full-color photographs, lovely background images, and some nice (albeit poorly rendered) calligraphy on many of the pages. There are several significant errors in the text; mostly misspellings of Chinese, Korean, and Sanskrit proper nouns, but some English misspellings and bad punctuation as well. Luckily, the presentation largely makes up for this fact. All in all, this is an attractive book that will be of interest to readers of Zen literature for its novel content.
That will be all.
1) Superpowers – David J. Schwartz
Superpowers is a truly mediocre book: it definitely isn't good, but neither is it bad enough that I could enjoy hating it. It's just...a read, which is too bad because there's a lot of potential in its concept (namely, what happens when five college students wake up and discover they have superpowers? Screw the "how did they get them and who are the supervillains?" stuff--what are their moral obligations? Do they tell their families? Help the cops? Are they responsible when they hurt innocent bystanders while aiding others?)
Unfortunately, Schwartz is not talented enough to pull this concept off. The main characters are literally indistinguishable from one another--each has one defining physical and one defining emotional/familial trait, and that's it. I had to bookmark the page where they were introduced in order to remember who was who...and kept referring to it all the way up to the final page of the book. Schwartz also introduces a plethora of secondary and tertiary characters who are even less well-defined than the leads and contribute nothing to the story outside of word count.
Finally, the narrative contains two major flaws. The first is that whenever a hero's family member discovers that he or she has superpowers, said family member comes to terms with it within the space of a sentence or two. Every single time. This is hardly what one would expect from a narrative that bills itself a realistic superhero story, especially one that aims to deal with the personal fallout caused by the possession of superpowers. The second is the truly inexplicable and gratuitous insertion of 9/11 and its aftermath into the final fourth of the novel. It neither forwards the plot nor adds anything to readers' understanding of that day's horrible events.
Schwartz wraps up the narrative in a trite slap-dash fashion that isn't terribly different from the standard superhero narrative he set out not to write. According to the back cover, he's penned several short stories, and I get the feeling that many sections of Superpowes would have worked reasonably well as such, but they don't succeed in novel format. Final verdict: not a horrible book, but not one that contributes anything to the reader for having read it. It'd make a decent book for air travel or daily commuting, but that's about it.
2) Zen Keys – Thich Nhat Hanh
This slim volume is a far cry from the other eight billion cookie cutter books on Zen (of which Thich has written no small number himself). The first third explains—really explains--many elements of Zen practice, most notably koans. Purists may argue that explanations along these lines are not truly Zen and thus should not be offered, but I can't help think that if more books did offer them the world would have far fewer idiots running around spouting off complete nonsense and claiming it's an outward manifestation of their OMG-so-transcendental Zen enlightenment.
The second section is a primer on some early Indian Buddhist schools and how their tenets either anticipated Zen thought or explain it from a more rationalist perspective. It's interesting but quite dense, and I'm not sure how much of it I truly grasped. This section is rounded off with brief explanations of Vietnamese monastic practices.
The third section—a translation of forty-three koans related by Vietnamese emperor Tran Thai Tong, is the volume's weakest section. It suffers first from the fact that it's an English translation of Thich's French translation of 13th century Vietnamese writings, so a lot of noise has been introduced to the original text. Secondly, (and contrary to the earlier two sections) the English translation replaces precious few of the Vietnamese transliterations of Indian and Chinese proper nouns with their original forms, and fails to notate to whom or what the Vietnamese transliterations refer. This makes it difficult to place which koans are Vietnamese and which are variants of those already known to the Chinese, Japanese, or Korean canons. Finally, there's no annotation explaining cultural, linguistic or historical references that are lost on readers unfamiliar with these aspects of Vietnam, again obscuring much of interest in these sections. That said, however, Zen Keys is still worth reading for its two beginning sections.
3) Zen: The Perfect Companion – Seung Sahn
This attractive volume is a collection of 235 koans along with questions and commentary by Seung Sahn, who was one of the first Korean teachers of Zen in America. All the usual suspects (the cypress tree in the garden, 無, Bodhidharma's coming to the east) are present, but the bulk of the volume is comprised of (what will be to most) unfamiliar koans from Seung Sahn's lineage. Aside from a few pages of truly dreadful poetry in the latter half of the volume, these new koans all make for worthwhile reading.
Zen's layout is also lovely: there are full-color photographs, lovely background images, and some nice (albeit poorly rendered) calligraphy on many of the pages. There are several significant errors in the text; mostly misspellings of Chinese, Korean, and Sanskrit proper nouns, but some English misspellings and bad punctuation as well. Luckily, the presentation largely makes up for this fact. All in all, this is an attractive book that will be of interest to readers of Zen literature for its novel content.
That will be all.
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may the swartz be with you
on 2008-09-09 09:21 pm (UTC)Re: may the swartz be with you
on 2008-09-10 03:55 am (UTC)Correction
on 2008-09-18 11:14 pm (UTC)