Book 111: Mediocre Monk by Grant Lindsley

 I just finished Mediocre Monk and I give it 🧘🧘🧘 1/2.

This book is a memoir of Lindsley's six months experience the Thai Forest Tradition of Buddhism.  In this tradition, men live a monastic experience that begins with meditation in the morning, work, alms (going out in the community and collecting food/money from people in the village), more work, the one meal a day, and then basically 12 hours of silent meditation and sleeping until the next morning. He begins at a fairly large monastery and then goes to a very small one. Lindsley writes of his struggles and of the people he meets, and he writes well, but the reader doesn't know exactly why he has chosen to do this, and if he will do this for the rest of his life. Throughout the memoir, little hints as to why he is there pop up, but it isn't til the very end that we learn the reason why he went and whether he stayed or not. 

I think learning all this made me feel a bit cheated by the book--knowing the reason why he joined wouldn't have made any difference in the course of the book, but knowing about his ultimate motivations would have, which I'm sure he struggled with. So I felt like he wasn't as authentic as he could be. The writing is good, I learned a lot about buddhism (well, in retrospect, probably not a whole lot) but as I mentioned, I feel a bit cheated.