Early January Highlight Reel - Books
My writing has slowed down lately, but that’s because holy crap have I been consuming a lot of media. Here are the highlights of what I’ve read in the last couple weeks:
Akira - by Otomo Katsuhiro. I wrote about this a couple posts back, and the remainder of the series did not disappoint. The artwork was excellent throughout, the story kept me on my toes, and the plot kept up a breakneck pace which made a set of very long books feel much shorter.
History of the English-Speaking Peoples - by Winston Churchill. I finished volume two, but don’t have three, which I’m afraid seems to have gone out of print in the edition I have (I have vols. 1, 2, and 4). I’ve long felt like I should improve my grasp of English history, and I’ve certainly done that. Churchill, for the most part, does a good job avoiding taking sides in his presentation, though he assumes that readers know their British geography, so I had to get out my atlas at a couple points.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces - by Joseph Campbell. Cripes, this was disappointing. Campbell asserts, but doesn’t really prove, that mythology and dream analysis are connected, and spends a large portion of the book discussing psychoanalysis and the similarity between the meaning of symbols found in dreams and the symbols of mythology. His idea of the “monomyth” is already so broad that it’s a bit suspect, but I could accept his outline of the archetypes that connect world mythologies. Adding in the psychoanalysis stuff was too much.
More than that, though, I object to some of his ideas about the importance of mythology. I’d agree that myths are important to society and that every culture has and needs them. I’d even say that men generally learn better allegorically than by reason. However, he also says, referring especially to Christianity, that it doesn’t particularly matter whether these myths are true, and that all religions and mythologies teach fundamentally the same things. Unless I misunderstood the point Campbell was making, the latter idea is plainly false. As for the former, though I agree that “mere” symbolism can be quite powerful, and a story needn’t be true to have meaning, surely a story is all the more powerful if it is literally true