Myths and Legends of Hawaii

Kevin got me this book for Christmas, and I really tried to read it. It's a collection of Hawaiin myths, most of them about five pages long. It seemed like perfect bedtime reading. But it was awful. Disorganized and poorly translated to the point of being almost unreadable. As short as these stories were, I often got bored and lost the thread halfway through, which left me wondering what had just happened and what the point was more often than not. About three-quarters of the way through, I finally gave up.

I wanted to like this. I wanted to learn more about Hawaiin myth, because they have a huge pantheon of gods that I know very little about. I at least have some of the basics now: Maui to trickster, Pele the quick-tempered and jealous god of lava, and so on. But any entertainment was drowned out by confusion. Information is never introduced in a natural way to build tension, instead slipped in right before it's needed.

It didn't help that I picked up on one or two mis-translations that filled me with a deep loathing and mistrust for the author. When I managed to see this, and figure out what was happening, the underlying myth ended up being more interesting, but it also took a lot of work and attention, and this was so much like reading a boring text book for a class you only kind of care about that I rarely ended up putting forth that time and attention.

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