Hangzhou Lovin’

I’m back on land, been here for about 2 weeks, gained about 15 pounds and I’m starting to pine for the open waters. I was absurdly productive on the boat. I adhered to a grueling schedule; up at 6 or earlier depending on when the sun came up, on watch at 6:10, break at 8 where I messed around on the internet, back on watch at 9, a 2 hour break at 12, where I usually skipped lunch and went to the gym for some running, rowing or weight lifting, then I’d be back on watch till dinner at 5:45. At night I’d watch a little TV, write up the days notes, then turn in for some reading and meditation. I was a Zen master on that boat, the living and breathing bastard son of Buddha and Jesus. I also read about 6 books and before I forget what they are about I might as well put a little review of them up here for posterity.

1 and 2. Patrick O’Brian The Yellow admiral and Blue at the Mizzen. These were the last two books in the Aubrey Maturin series, which is about the British Royal navy in the Napelionic era. They were good and contained all the classic O’Brian goodness. Naval maneuvering, political espionage, good food, scientific naturalzing and familial conflicts, but I felt that he was on cruise control. To much went right for Jack and the plots almost seemed a bit formulaic. Still this series is still probably my all time favorite and I look forward to starting over again with the first book in the series soon.

2. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. It’s been described as a a smart man’s version of The Davinci code, which is accurate enough. The characters were presented very well and there was lots of fun facts about medivieal secret societies. The problem was that the mysterious underworld presented in the book was just as inane as the Da Vinci code. (I’ve never actually read the D’ Vince code but I’ve absorbed enough of it through my vast powers of culturally absorbtion to be able to basicically rewrite the book. (jesus had kid with Mary M. They went to france, some dashing young archeologist/reporter/theologian figures this shit out but has yet to figure out the awesome consequences of these facts, some shadowy organization tries to kill him, Adventures!, a hot female love interest who either has a sexy accent or glasses but not both, finally an anticlimactic revelation about how somebody bad was good or visa versa)). Ok back to the Eco book, the characters in it where great and I wish it had simply been a book about life in Italy during the 60s and 70’s. During the last third the book starting getting silly; page after page of conspiracy theories filled with obscure references ranging from Shakespearian England to the Jewish community in Prague to the assassins (but not enough assassins, you can never have to many references to the assassins). The major conceit of the book was that all these conspiracies were just made up by the characters to amuse themselves. This starts to piss you off after plowing through 50 pages of their crap. Then ending reminded me of the ending of Pay it Forward, a stupid needless death scene that made me feel like I’d been cheated out of something.

3. The long walk by some polish guy. Cool but fake. It’s about a polish cavalry officer who is taken prisoner by the Russians at the start of world war two and sent to a gulag in Siberia. From there he escapes and makes his way south, past lake Bikal, through Mongolia, across the Gobi desert, over Tibet and finally to India. And he sees a yeti along the way. It’s a great read, but after I finished it about 5 minutes of googling revealed that most of it was probably made up.

4. Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonneget, Vonnegut’s war novel about the fire bombing of Dresden which he witnessed from the epoumynous slaughter house. It’s a Vonnegut book. You can never tell if the shit he is saying is trite or brilliant, but it’s honest and surprisingly zen like, and most zen works have that same quality of seeming to be trite and deeply true at the same time.

5. A walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I’ve been recommended this Bryson book several times, I tried to read the one where he drives around America before but I found him to be annoying. This one was much better, a nice little story about his attempt to walk the Appalachian trial with an ex alcoholic friend of his. It’s funny and American and should be made into a movie.

6. Jarhead by some marine, Speaking of books made into movies, this book was made into one of my favorite movies of last year. I’ve always thought that the saying “the book is always better that the movie” is dead wrong. It’s usually said as a way of showing you are culturally superior to someone else and is rarely said with any consideration. I would say with most pop bestsellers made into movies, the movies are often better for the simple fact that the movies are shorter. Now with Jarhead I would say that the movie and the book are about equally good, but they are very different. The book does not have much narrative consitency and jumps around the author’s life, while the movie takes several character and scenes from the book and combines them to make a more straight forward story. They both do a good job showing what young men are like when they are surrounded by a bunch of other young men and guns. Which is what any good war novel should do.

7. Some meditation book. I haven’t finished this book yet, but it is about how to do mindfulness mediation. A worthy goal, as meditation is basically exercise for your mind. I’ll probably write more about meditation later, but I’ll just say that this book was horribly written. It could have been half as long and still would have contained the same amount of information. Still writing isn’t everything and the main points of the book were interesting. I actually kind of liked the shitty writing because it made you react. It was like reading a book from the 17th or 18th century where you have to slog through a bunch of nonsense before you figure out what the real point is.

I’ll add links to amazon if I feel like it but I’m lazy

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