Book review of How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh

The author needs to read the book, How To Write.

 As an advocate of peace, this highly regarded Zen monk has garnered many acolytes and many accolades. But as an author of a book on mindful walking, he has yet to study a book or two on How to Write. If not, his errant publisher, probably all of them his acolytes, at least should study the book, How to Edit.

The sumi-e-like brushwork illustrations are lovely and are accorded separate pages, which they merit. The texts, however, rarely fill more than half the page, and none fill the page. This book is so small and the entries so short that had its text been consolidated into a single chapter it would comprise only a magazine article. Brevity and austerity are commendable, but not redundancy. Each paragraph on each page repeats ad nauseum the same thoughtful advice: Walk, Don’t Think. Sometimes the author elaborates and ventures with a slight variation: Walk and Meditate. When he gets to feeling really reckless and pulls out all the stops, he puts it all together: Walk and Meditate, Don’t Think. As evidenced by a readership that lavishes this book with 5-star reviews, I suspect an underlying theme not of mindful reading, but of mindless reading. As in, Read, Don’t Think.

I have a keen interest in the literature of walking, but only because these pages are so small and the texts so sparse did I persevere to read even halfway until a welcomed accident delivered me from my boredom. Reclining in my bed while reading, I fell asleep (no surprise there). The book slipped from my grasp and fell into a crevice between my bed and the wall. I could move my bed to retrieve it, but instead I will thank gravity for sparing me from further struggling with its repetitiveness. I am leaving this book where it can gather the dust that it deserves.