Bad Buddhist is the wrong book.

I try to make a point of buying new books at a physical bookshop on a semi-regular basis, just for the heck of it. Bookshops never have anything I need. I live in a library – sorry, work! I work in a library. I don’t live here, I just never leave. Anyway, I work in a library, and I occasionally visit the local public library as well, so 90% of my book “needs” can be covered for free. That last 10% is too old, weird or technical to be sold in a “real” bookshop, so I make most of my serious book purchases online.

Yet I don’t want to live in a world without a local bookshop. I want there to be shops outside of airports where people can go and browse books and buy them in person. So, even though I’m not a huge fan of wasting money on crap I don’t need, I buy new books at full price for the heck of it. I wander in, find something that strikes my fancy, and buy it. I often try to pick an author I haven’t read before or a genre I don’t usually read (but I have to admit that most of the time it’s holiday reading fare).

In my most recent excursion, I found a book by Meshel Laurie called Bad Buddhist. I’m familiar with Meshel Laurie from television (I still miss her early 2000s stand-up show), but I don’t read any of the magazines she writes for, so I’ve never read her work. Plus, this is (or appeared to be) the type of book I’ve been enjoying from the public library of late (personal reflections on Buddhism, perhaps from a woman’s perspective), so it seemed like a good choice.

This book is wrong. That’s the only way I can describe it. On a fundamental, publication level, as a book, it’s wrong. It has the wrong title, the wrong tagline, the wrong cover image, the wrong jacket blurb and the wrong structure – and it’s displayed in the wrong part of the bookshop.

I found this book in the Religion and Spirituality section of the bookshop (sitting next to Meshel’s earlier book, Buddhism for theUnbelievably Busy*). It’s called Bad Buddhist, the tagline promises “speed bumps and detours on the path to enlightenment” and features a picture of Meshel giving a Namaste-style salute.** All of these things, combined with the titles of the chapters and the blurb on the back, suggest it’s going to be in a genre I like to think of as “humorous anecdotes with faith-based reflections”. The genre probably has a different, much better name, but I’m an academic librarian so I’m not completely down with the terminology – I am, however, someone who has read several books that fit within this genre over the years, and I know what to expect.

Granted, I’m not familiar with this genre from a Buddhist perspective. Catholic, Anglican, or Presbyterian, on the other hand? Totally. Thanks to my mother’s and aunt’s bookshelves, I grew up with that stuff. Books like My Cope Runneth Over and The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Aged 37 3/4*** were in my space from an early age. Even if this book wasn’t necessarily in that genre, the next logical expectation would be what I mentioned above: personal reflections on Buddhism from a woman’s perspective. Either of which I was okay with – this is what I imagined I had signed up for when I bought it.

This book was neither of those things. It was an anthology of articles she had written for various publications that occasionally (very, very occasionally) mentioned something Buddhist. Most of the time, though, this was a collection of a comedian’s autobiographical writing, and it just so happened that the comedian was a practising Buddhist. I guess you'd say the book was about a Buddhist, but I was expecting more mentions of Buddhism within the book.

I also felt that, not only was the book itself not what the outside of the book implied it would be, but it wasn’t structured well for what it was. I don’t mind a good anthology, but I like to know that’s what I’m reading. An anthology doesn’t hang together the same way a book written as a single piece of writing does, so without knowing that I was reading pieces written for several different publications over the course of at least six years, I found it uneven and disjointed – not to mention oddly lacking much by way of “Buddhist” content.

At some point I flicked to the back of the book and noticed the “acknowledgements” actually solved the puzzle – it told me that “some” of the pieces had been published previously in a number of different publications (and by "some", aparently they meant over 80% of the book). Suddenly, the book actually made sense.

If, like a normal anthology, there had been an introduction where Meshel let us know we were surfing across several years’ worth of work, everything would have fit together nicely. If, as often happens in anthologies, we had some information at the start of every story that put it in context (like the date it was written), that would have made this a grand little trip through a jam-packed time in a Buddhist comedian’s life. If this book had been called Whatever Floats Your Boat**** and the cover picture was Meshel walking along a beach, then it would have been suitably neutral in its advertising of “Buddhist” content, and the fact that there wasn’t much of it wouldn’t be confusing. And if it had been shelved with the other autobiographical books written by comedians, then everything would make perfect sense and everyone would know what they were buying.

It wasn’t the book I thought I was buying. It’s not the book that was advertised. It’s not a bad book, it’s just wrong – and it didn’t have to be. A few simple changes would have made it more honestly what it is. Granted the book it actually is is not the book I wanted to read at that point in time, but that’s beside the point.

*I probably should have bought this book first, but I have an irrational distrust of books with “For Busy People” in the title. I should get over that, I suppose. Besides, it’s probably not what I think it is.

**Meshel has the same photo on the cover of most of her books published through Blank Inc. The front cover. Someone needs to quietly take her or her publisher aside and remind whoever is responsible for the cover design that the front of a book is not the place for the author bio pic. 

***It occurred to me, when I was thinking about this, that back when I read that book I thought 37 3/4 was definitely middle aged (of not heading towards old), and now I’m older than Adrian was. I should re-read it to see if he seems less like an old fart now.

****Naming an anthology after one of the stories inside it is fairly common practice.