Monkey King: Swinging the big bat
Well, I think this is cool....
The fledgling Chinese Baseball League has chosen legendary folk hero Sun Wukong the Monkey King and his invincible as-you-will cudgel as its mascot. Perfect!
Known best to Westerners as the inspiration for the anime series "Dragonball Z," the adventures of the Bugs-Bunny-'cept-Godlike Sun Wukong are chronicled in the 16th century Chinese novel, "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en. In JttW, Sun Wukong accompanies the priest Sanzang on his journey to the Western Heaven to recover the lost Buddhist sutras. This is his punishment and reward for challenging the gods and styling himself "Great Sage Equalling Heaven" in a previous life.
I'm about halfway (1200 pages) through "Journey to the West," and I have to give it the highest possible recommendation. The book can be read on several levels: as an endless chronicle of spectacular kung-fu battles with demons; as a travel novel; as a meditation on the synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism in Chinese thought in the 16th century; or as an extended metaphor for the individual's quest toward enlightenment. As such, even when the demon-fighting gets a bit much and the poetry goes on for pages and pages (this book has more effing poems than The Silmarillion," it's still a surprisingly compulsive read.
If you have the least interest in China, you should check it out.
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May I just add that I
May I just add that I attempted to read the Silmarillion recently. I failed. It was almost like a mystical, Middle-Earth artifact in its own right, because every time I'd finish a chapter I seemed no closer to the end; indeed, it would seem every page I turned added a page to the back of the book. An Elvish Tome of Perpetual Time Devouring.
Which might be consistent with that universe, since being immortal, elves would have the requisite lifespan necessary to finish the book.
I've never finished it either
I've never finished it either. I hasten to add that the [em]only[/em] similarity between Journey to the West and the Silmarillion is the reliance on poems. The big dif even there is that the Chinese poetry is beautiful, and Tolkein's is faintly ridiculous.
I actually like the
I actually like the Silmarillion. You have to get in a kind of zen no-mind state, and let your imagination fill in all the stuff Tolkien never had time to add. The book is like a backgrounder, or an outline for a story probably three times as long as the LOTR. It would have been the greatest epic novel ever, had he actually written it.
I need to read that book of yours, Johno.