Thirteen (Mostly Buddhist) Books I Spent My Fall Reading

My mother attended a reading by literary fantasist Salman Rushdie and afterward sent me an autographed copy of his latest novel, Quichotte. I've read almost all of Rushdie's work and, as a fan, would've loved to say that this book blew me away. Unfortunately, familiarity is exactly what limited my enjoyment of it. Quichotte is a twenty-first-century Don Quixote remix. His previous novels — particularly The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which played on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and The Satanic Verses, which infamously riffed on Islam — both rejiggered old legends to greater effect.

Among the many books that @Free_Byron_Case follower Punker Bee surprised me with this year, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire: A Novel was the best so far. A 999-line poem and accompanying "notes" are the form taken by this very quirky story of political intrigue that builds to a very satisfying surprise ending.

Somewhat less satisfying was the dystopian science fiction novel Pure, by Julianna Baggott. Its protagonist is a girl with a doll's head for a hand, who lives with her aging uncle and a tiny mechanical bug in the post-apocalyptic wastes and crafts delicate butterflies out of scrap metal. I should've known, by this description alone, that this was not he novel for me. Worse yet, it's final words were "The End of Part One" — a cliffhanger. I just let go.

The Wings to Awakening is Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation of various Buddhist texts dealing with the Buddha's core teachings. All are taken from the Pali Canon, the oldest known texts of Buddhist thought still in existence. Like everything from the Pali Canon, it makes for seriously dry, repetitive reading. I have no designs on becoming a monk, which would require me to take a vow to live by a truly epic set of precepts, but my friend Luke is a Theravada Buddhism practitioner and therefore believes that exhaustive study is just as important as — if not more important than — meditation, so this is the kind of book he'll be shoving my direction pretty frequently as we travel along the path of dharma practice.

The Thai dharma teacher Dr. Thynn Thynn wrote Living Meditation, Living Insight to be much more accessible. It's conversational in style because this book is made up of essays responding to questions from the members of Dr. Thynn's dharma group. Accordingly, it dispenses with the theoretical and helpfully deals in practical day-to-day concerns from a general Buddhist perspective.

Similarly, the former Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor's excellent Buddhism without Belief uses only straightforward language. Batchelor shows the reader Buddhism through the eyes of what might be called an originalist, arguing that the historical Buddha wasn't some superpowered divinity but just a man, whose enlightenment experience resulted in the codification of what we now call the dharma, and that those teachings have value irrespective of a practitioner's belief in supernatural phenomena like reincarnation and prayer. Batchelor's suggestion is that Buddhists embrace a stance of studious agnosticism in order to better live in open-mindedness, practicing nondualistic thought. I can dig it.

For my birthday, my mother got me a couple of books from my Amazon wish list. (Thank you so much, Mum!) The first was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, an experimental fantasy of Kublai Kahn being regaled with Marco Polo's tales of far-off lands — cities with skyscrapers, cities on stilts, cities with dirigibles drifting overhead, cities of the dead.... It's a gorgeous little book, the stuff of dreams.

The other book I received from Mum was Writing in Flow, by Susan K. Perry, PhD. It's an expansion of a study that Perry did for her doctoral dissertation on so-called flow experiences — mental states in which the person experiencing them undergoes a voluntary shift into a state of intense concentration, trying to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile. Writers, athletes, painters, gamers, adept conversationalists — people from all walks of life experience flow at least once in a while. This book analyzes seventy-odd writers' unique descriptions of flow, then offers suggestions for how a reader might engineer conditions to more reliably enter flow whenever they sat down to write. True, Writing in Flow probably sounds like it's of much less interest to you than it was to me, but you're perusing the reading list of an atypically literate prisoner, so I'm not quite sure what you expected.

D.T. Suzuki wrote the essays that comprise Zen Buddhism in the 1950s, just when Buddhism was first making inroads into America. Some of them feel sixty years old. Nevertheless, this collection offered a lot of fascinating (probably true) history, so I don't regret checking it out from ERDCC's chapel library. Ditto for The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra, by noted Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, a short, beautiful little book containing not just a twenty-first-century translation of the Heart Sutra, Buddhism's most cherished, most oft-repeated text, but also the master's wonderful commentaries on it.

Another anthology of texts from the Pali Canon, The Spirit of Buddhist Meditation, by Sarah Shaw , was next, followed by Acharya Buddharakkhita's translation The Dhammapada: The Buddha's Path of Wisdom. The former offers a glimpse into the sutras that address meditation practice in its manifold forms. It reads like a new car manual. The latter is more friendly, which is undoubtedly why tens of thousands of practitioners around the globe meditate on the simple truths contained in its 423 verses. Consider Verse 51: "Like a beautiful flower full of color but without fragrance, even so, fruitless are the fair words of one who does not practice them." Or Verse 125: "Like fine dust thrown against the wind, evil falls back upon that fool who offends an inoffensive, pure and guiltless man." Or Verse 228: "There never was, there never will be, nor is there now, a person who is wholly blamed nor wholly praised." Surely you can see the Dhammapada's appeal.

My autumn reading ended with another Thanissaro Bhikku translation, Poems of the Elders: An Anthology from the Theragatha and Therigatha. The ancient texts known as the Theragatha and Therigatha are collections of enlightenment poems attributed to the earliest orders of Buddhist monks and nuns, respectively. Personal, vivid, and grounded, these poems express the profound joy of enlightenment, in hundreds of different ways, in poems by matriarchs and misanthropes, servants and shopkeepers, harlots and the high-born, robbers and rice farmers — a small sample of the myriad faces of early Buddhism, touchingly illustrating the dharma's unique accessibility to one and all. I found it inspiring.

The List: Reading October Through December 2014

Bob Lescaux, Writing

Every so often I stumble into an existential conundrum as a writer. More texts exist than there is time enough in even several lifetimes to read, with more disseminated daily. And that’s just books. Look at the whole textual output of the human race — from the lowliest Justin Bieber fan site to the most well-reasoned, erudite wiki — you might have to ask yourself why anyone in his right mind would willingly drag his sorry ass into the fray by proclaiming himself a writer. It’s a losing proposition. The odds against even minimal success are staggering. Writing doesn’t guarantee publication, publication doesn’t guarantee readers, readers don’t guarantee success, success doesn’t guarantee relevance, relevance doesn’t guarantee a literary legacy. The writer at the table next to you at Starbucks? You‘ll never read his stuff. If you do, it probably says more about your reading habits than about his talent.

So why write? Why fill up page after page with these little squiggly characters, deluded into thinking (for whatever reason) that my particular arrangements of them is special, meriting any attention at all when there’s so much on TV? Why even dream that my abilities to string sentences together into coherent ideas are greater than, or even equal to, those of the millions of others who’ve already done so? What hubris! And then I go and pick up a book that really wows me, and still I have the gall to go on calling myself a writer, thinking that I actually have what it takes to make from this delusion a life.

Some days I feel bad for myself, toiling away like I do, like Sisyphus with his rock. Once in a while I’ll even grow discouraged and, in a masochistic fit, will pick up a good book to read. These past three months have been rough for me, creatively speaking, and I haven’t even read as much as usual. These two facts could, of course, be interconnected. Maybe my creative drive is directly proportionate to the degree of futility I perceive in my labors. Seeing the stone roll down the hill for the umpteenth time, Sisyphus is emboldened and says, “All right, this time I’m gonna get this bastard to the top.” Actually, that could make a pretty great story….

For your outstanding generosity with printed matter this quarter, thank you, Caleb, John A., Jersey, Kat (many times over), Mum, and Tom at Prospero’s Books. The six of you have helped stoke my fire. I’m warmed.

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James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
Does getting older change a person’s language patterns? How do men and women differ in their word usage? What linguistic quirks signify an individual’s social status within a given group? In what ways are thinking styles revealed by word choices? These were my questions. I wanted answers. Although I’m told that I have a keen ear for dialog, the further along I progress with my novel’s loose arc, the less certain I am that its multiple narrative voices are as distinct as they ought to be. The Secret Life of Pronouns helped, surprised, and sometimes reassured me. (Word nerds, for a good time, visit the author’s website.) I picked it up thinking I’d just skim, picking specific nuts and bolts to help me tweak my prose; I ended up scouring Pennebaker’s entire tool shed.

Robert Kirkman, et al., The Walking Dead, Book One
The AMC series was days away from starting its fourth season and the Image Comics had already reached their milestone hundredth issue, so it’s safe to say that I was a little late to the party. This hard cover compendium (containing the first two trade paperbacks, Days Gone Bye and Miles Behind Us) was a loan from a neighbor who learned about my own zombie novel and Walking Dead fandom while we were standing around, waiting to use a telephone. How cool to finally learn what the fuss was about!

I like Tony Moore’s clean, expressive art in Chapter One better than Charlie Adlard’s more muddled work in Chapter Two, but Kirkman’s writing and plot development definitely flourish in the latter. Differences in the story lines of show and comic are interesting, including the unfamiliar characters (Chris, Allen, and the twins haven’t appeared in the show), strange relationships (Dale and Andrea having sex!?), and a more natural passage of time (the group’s first winter was glossed over in the show; in the comics, it’s clearly a hard one). The upshot of all this is that I may now be the only person whose Amazon wish list includes a Babylonian epic, the poems of Wallace Stevens, and a graphic novel about people fleeing reanimated corpses.

Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
The history of the nautical chronometer and how its invention came to revolutionize global navigation wouldn’t necessarily interest everyone, but the surprise gift of this book revealed to me a subject that’s actually quite fascinating. If Sobel’s very condensed account of John Harrison’s mechanical innovation were much longer, it might only appeal to scholars and watchmakers. As it is, Longitude constitutes a sort of historical amuse bouche that finishes moist and savory.

Naoki Higashida (K.A. Yoshida and David Mitchell, translators), The Reason I Jump
Using an alphabet grid drawn on a card and laminated, the thirteen-year-old author pointed to each letter of every word of this book about living with autism in a neurotypical world. While many find the young man’s observations intriguing, I was more compelled to read The Reason I Jump because of how its text was composed, which is similar to the technique used by Jean-Dominique Bauby when he wrote his extraordinary memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about his “locked-in syndrome.” The Reason I Jump may not be a literary masterpiece, but it is a major personal achievement for a boy trying to make himself understood in a world that itself defies understanding.

Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Blindness by Giovani Pontiero, 1984 by George Orwell — I love literary novels set in not-so-distant futures, which explore large moral or social issues through whatever central conceit they introduce. I expected On Such a Full Sea to be more than it is, based on when and where it’s situated. Lee is an adept prose stylist, and his tale does offer moments of quiet profundity, but these points only make me more disappointed that the novel falls short of being stunning. I blame its distant narration (by a collective “we”) and its nearly mute protagonist, a stoic young woman, which never allow the book to feel greater than its one-thing-after another parts.

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Voices from the graves of citizens of a fictional Midwestern town comprise this collection of more than 200 free-verse poems. Theirs are mostly hard lives — of politicians, pastors, housewives, drunkards, soldiers, newspaper men, lovers. Their epitaphs are brief, affectingly told. Did Masters get his inspiration from strolling through an Illinois graveyard? I can’t imagine the lives of Spoon River arising from any other source. I love that this book came to me in the midst of my own project involving a motley chorus of characters.

Italo Calvino (William Weaver, translator), If on a winter’s night a traveler
Certain poems are nothing but beginnings, I once read. But what about works of prose? Can a book of fiction, say, be coherent and effective if it’s made up of only introductions, intimations, premonitions, the setting of scenes, promises never to be fulfilled? Calvino, the Italian fabulist, with this novel from 1979, proved that it can. Difficult as it is to summarize what is essentially the beginnings of ten related but disparate novels, I guess I can say that it’s a love story, not necessarily involving people (although, that’s also an element) as much as the love of literature, and the many forms that love can take. If on a winter’s night a traveler is a hall of mirrors, a labyrinth, a bewildering chase, and a cri de cœur for us to think of reading as a sensual delight.

Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
A mid-’90s reinvention of the Pygmalion myth (the tale of the Greek king whose prayer to Aphrodite brought the very literal object of his affection, an ivory statue of a woman, to life), involving a cognitive neuroscientist, a computer-based neural network, and a novelist who just happens to be named Richard Powers. The story follows a straight enough line to its obvious end, even with the apparent digressions into the novelist’s failed relationship with a former student. What brings it to life is the dexterous prose Powers employs, adventurously and with confidence, while exposing the message at the novel’s core: that life may be nasty, brutish, and short, but through our never-ending striving, willful questing, and following of sometimes quixotic whims we make it also something exquisite.

Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
Music appreciation, religious ecstasy, schizophrenic hallucination, drug abuse, evolutionary biology, and other related matters. Flaherty has written a neuroscience text that addresses questions on the minds of so many writers, which she herself agonized over after experiencing bouts of hypergraphia (compulsive writing) and creative block. It’s a scientific perspective on the humanities — nothing I’d encountered before.

The Midnight Disease takes its fitting title from Edgar Allan Poe, who coined the term to describe his own insatiable writerly urges. The book explores numerous creative phenomena and their origins within the brain, quite a few of which are fascinating. For instance, I learned that poets are basically self-medicating when they compose elegies, since all acts of bereavement trigger the release of endogenous opiates in our gray matter. Also, I was surprised to find out that two destinct parts of the brain control language production and language reception — Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, respectively — and that damage to one or the other impacts very different aspects of one’s communication, not in the way you’d probably expect.

If this sort of thing sounds over-technical or tedious, I’m willing to bet that you’re not a writer. To me, though, who gets succor and challenge, frustration and fulfillment in striving to make literature, this new way of thinking about the inner workings of mind and brain in the process of creation is the bee’s knees. I recommend The Midnight Disease for anyone existentially driven to write or who suffers occasional run-ins with block.