It certainly felt like “always winter and never Easter” around here this month. Not only did Utah get continually dumped on with snow (breaking all time records), but it was another tough month of sickness around here with one of my kids missing two weeks of school with a fever topping out at 106. I finished running the school read-a-thon (yay books!), so at least my PTA commitments are finally wrapped up. I’m trying to look positively on them as I won’t have time to participate as much in my kids’ classrooms next year but man, I am really burned out on volunteer service right now.
One of the main reasons I wanted to move back to Utah was to have greater access to Mormon studies events, which tend to concentrate here for obvious reasons. This month, I attended a really interesting talk at the University of Utah by Ben Spackman about the history of evolution in the Church. I’m always interested in the interaction between science and religion. I minored in chemistry (the best science) at BYU and remember receiving some form of the packet on the Church position on evolution that was discussed in this talk. Ben has a recording and notes up on his website, and I highly recommend looking through it. Lots of the situations he described have application for the anti-science movements of today, which, while not sweeping through the Church, are definitely present in most wards today.
My biggest writing news this month is that my essay “Knit Together” received second place in the 2022 BYU Studies Essay Contest! Such an honor as many of my creative nonfiction heroes have also won this contest (and the prize money certainly doesn’t hurt either). I really love this essay, and I’m glad that someone else did as well. I’m excited to share it with you when it’s eventually published in BYU Studies.
On the podcast side, we put out three episodes in March on the two recent Pinocchio remakes, the scifi film Arrival, and the best-picture nominee The Whale. We also received a write-up in the April issue of The Season, the online arts journal hosted by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. I highly recommend checking out the good work they are doing to highlight LDS creators in all aspects of the arts.
In other news, the program for the Association for Mormon Letters conference is up. I’ll be presenting at 9 am MT on Saturday; you can watch live on YouTube all three days. I’m particularly interested in the two Friday evening sessions with papers on some LDS genres I’m less familiar with like interaction fiction and FAQ as a genre, and the panel of LDS speeches (I wrote and presented a paper about LDS rhetoric during my undergrad). Lots of fascinating thoughts to be had!
Speculative Fiction
Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang – 5 stars for this book up until the ending of part 3, then 2 stars for the balance of the text. I should have realized that this book was by the author of The Poppy War and known it wasn’t for me.
The first three parts of the book present a classic Harry Potter-esque magic school experience, only the magic is basically linguistics. Yes, I am in the center of that Venn diagram! Concepts from linguistics are discussed and then twisted slightly into a fantastical system. The central group of four friends against the world were enjoyable and presented an outsider look at the difficulties of living as a minority in a colonial empire that both needs you and despises you. I wouldn’t say this part of the book was a-political, but the politics was a background element of the characters’ lives and relationships which were fully immersive and pulled me through the story.
Everything changes with a dramatic event at the end of part three, which I won’t spoil. But all of a sudden, the characters basically disappear from the narrative and become part of a faceless revolution against the empire. The last third of the book is narrated almost like a history textbook and we lose the interesting relationships between the characters, except for, of course, the one who turns traitor. It’s not so much the politics of the book that I didn’t enjoy so much as the shift to a color-by-numbers postcolonial polemic devoid of any real storytelling. Perhaps it’s the author’s attempt to be realistic about the difficulties of finding a “solution” to the effects of colonization, but the ending was unsatisfying and frustrating. After flying through the first half, I had to struggle to finish the book.
I also wish more had been done with the footnotes aspect, which was what tipped me over the edge to reading this book in the first place. I love fiction with footnotes ala Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but the footnotes in this book only rarely added much to the text. They did figure out a good way to include them in the audiobook by using a second narrator, so points for that. Overall, I’m sad this book didn’t live up to the hype for me, though maybe I’m just not the target audience.
The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin – I was convinced to continue on with the Earthsea books by an acquaintance, in spite of bouncing off of A Wizard of Earthsea both in my teens and as an adult. After reading this book, I am glad I did.
The Tombs of Atuan is a fascinating fantasy book with religion at its center, so it was right in my wheelhouse. The tell-don’t-show writing style I hated in Wizard is mostly gone, replaced by the subtle use of details in a deep POV. In fact, the only flaw I can find with this book is that it should have been at least twice as long. When the main character hits her turning point, it felt like we were only at the first third of the story. But what a story and what a character! I loved everything about this book and highly recommend it. Since the connections to the first book are mostly in the background, I think readers could start with this volume instead. I’m excited to continue on with more of the Earthsea books.
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin – I think my audio listening habits were responsible for this book feeling a bit more choppy than it probably should have. Perhaps it’s also a function of the plot being driven by the characters’ unconscious. Much of the novel, neither of our two protagonists knows where they are going or why, simply that they most likely have to find a solution to the magic draining out of the world.
The strengths of this book are in its discussion of the acceptance of mortality and the madness of quest for immortality when it is sought because of fear and desire for power. I want to go back and highlight some of those sayings in a physical copy because they were profound (even if they don’t completely align with my worldview). Still, I’m left liking this book less than its predecessor, The Tombs of Atuan.
Fiction
The History of Honey Spring by Darin Cozzens – This book is a story that contains LDS characters but isn’t about Mormonism per se, which is a refreshing change from all the LDS books that are wrestling either with doctrine or culture directly. Set in the 1960s, Jim Ray returns home from war to discover that he’s inherited a farm from a distant relative, only because that relative wanted to stick it to his neighbor by keeping the land and the spring on it out of their reach. Thus Jim sets out to become a small-town rancher and farmer, tutored by the lawyer who delivered the news, Nolan, a non-member who pretends to despise the predominant LDS culture of the area more than he really does. The remainder of the plot consists of the strange happenings and squabbles of small-town life, and the slow unraveling of the quarrel that led Jim to inherit the farm in the first place, along with its eventual healing.
In style, it reminded me of Wendell Berry, or perhaps a grown-up Little House on the Prairie, in that there are long descriptions of various farm tasks. The narrator somehow renders these charming through the interactions of the characters until you find yourself actually enjoying a pages-long scenes of castrating bulls. The parts I loved the best were the sly notes on the interactions of the members of the local ward. It’s difficult to capture the feeling of a longstanding ward without straying into either caricature or sentimentalism, but Cozzens manages it admirably. I did at times bounce off something about the style which I can’t quite put my finger on, but overall, I can recommend this well-constructed novel about a small LDS farming community and the healing of long-held grudges.
Heike’s Void by Steven Peck – Oh my goodness, I didn’t know Mormon lit could be like this. Heike’s Void is a philosophical struggle with the meaning and power of the atonement disguised as a compelling piece of fiction. I was pulled along through every page, worried about what would happen to my favorite characters (and by the end that was all of them). I stayed up past my bedtime several nights trying to finish just one more chapter.
Peck’s take on Nephi is perhaps his most profound accomplishment in this book. He manages to completely rewrite our perceptions of Nephi (and the entire Book of Mormon along with it!) while still allowing the scriptures to work as they are. The first time I realized that the now resurrected Nephi was an only angel while Laman’s wife was a goddess, I was hesitant, worried that the rewrite would be slanderous of a venerated (though not uncontroversial) prophet, but by the end, the reworking of Nephi’s story is life-giving and one of the best sermons on the nature of a prophet as both called of God and flawed human.
And that’s the nature of this book: Heike’s Void asks uncomfortable questions, setting up situations in which something you thought completely settled becomes obviously wrong. And then he proceeds to provide, not a pat answer, but an exploration of the dimensions of the question that leads inevitably to a clear picture of justice and mercy and who we really are. And it does all this with prose that is both clear and beautiful. I will be recommending this book to people for a long time.
Nonfiction
Defying Jihad: The Dramatic True Story of a Woman Who Volunteered to Kill Infidels—and Then Faced Death for Becoming One by Esther Ahmad & Craig Borlase – This is a book of many aspects, some more challenging than others. On the one hand, it’s a miraculous story of one woman’s conversion from Islam to Christianity. And I use miraculous in its most literal sense, because there are several parts of the story which if they had been written in fiction I’d have called implausible, including a prophetic dream. This book caused me some considerable wrestle over the reality and frequency of miracles.
The author’s experience with being radicalized through her school and her desire for her father’s approval is a fascinating window into an experience completely foreign from my own. The flat-out persecution of Christians was eye-opening and sobering. The book really keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering if and how she will escape to safety.
Another aspect of this book is a sort of Bible-bashing apologetics against the Quran. Many of these are detailed conversations between characters in the memoir and most likely true to life, but it still feels like a superficial proof-texting approach to finding truth which made me uncomfortable. I tried to remember that the author grew up in one particular version of Islam and that other more enlightened practitioners of the faith would probably have different approaches to the questions she poses.
For instance, Esther is universally shut down when she asks questions and told to just let the Quran flow through her and not worry about understanding it. I know plenty of people who have left my own tradition who had similar experiences when asking questions and use those stories to declare our beliefs can’t hold water. I had the opposite experience growing up where people took my questions seriously and helped guide me to answers. Which one is the “true” portrait of our faith depends usually on which side of the theological divide you’ve ended up on.
The author is briefly asked in the afterward about people who use the same kind of proof-texting approach to disprove the Bible and insists that the Bible can hold up to questions even if it’s not entirely self-consistent. I think this is probably a healthier approach to religious belief than the entire rest of the book.
