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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Crown of Swords

Image
The seventh book of the  Wheel of Time  series is where many people agree that the series takes a dive in quality. Although I think it's less that anything changes significantly and more that people get tired of how stagnant the books are becoming. Nearly nothing happens in this book. Jordan still has serious issues writing female characters and romantic relationships. The world is continuing to be expanded on, and the rules of the magic system are slowly (so slowly) becoming more clear. But this is also a step down in terms of length. We go from a few 1000 page books in a row to one that's only 850 pages (and the next is less than 700!). Combine that with my brilliant idea to read  A Tale of Two Cities  right before this book, and I positively flew through it. I think you have to reach a sort of zen state to get through this series. There are a lot of side plots, a lot of world building, a lot of descriptions of clothing. Rather than just hating certain characters, you hav
Read more

The People We Keep

This was a really sweet coming of age tale about finding your way and finding your family. Aprils' mother walked out when she was little and her father wasn't much more present. By the time she's sixteen, April is basically on her own, stuck in a small town where everyone looks down on her and even her father mostly pretends that she doesn't exist. And then she realizes that she can leave, too. So April heads out for life on the road, working odd jobs, writing and singing songs, making friends and fleeing before anyone can get too close. And through it all her music sustains her. My favorite part of this book, hands-down, was the soundtrack. April's love of music, and the way the author uses it to set the scene and drill right into her emotional state was fantastic. I kept having to put the book down so I could bring up songs on youtube and listen to them while I read certain passages. This was just an overall enjoyable book. I had a lot of sympathy for April being
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more