I’ve had my October book reviews in my drafts folder since November, but again, grad school got the best of me. (I’m plotting how to do better at this next year.) So you’re getting a mega-three-month edition of book reviews.
Fortunately/unfortunately, I also had quite a few publications happen during these months, meaning they didn’t get nearly as much attention here as they ought to, but here they are in belated fashion. My essay “Turning the Corner” was published in the Fall 2023 print edition of Exponent II. You can’t find this one online, so you’ll have to track down a copy, but it’s about being sick at Christmas and moving to a new stage of parenting where your kids no longer need you to keep them alive from minute to minute.
My short genre confused piece “The Cost” was part of the 12th annual Mormon Lit Blitz. I was completely surprised when it won the judges’ choice award as well as fourth place in the audience choice because all of the pieces in the contest were really strong. I recommend reading them in order together because there’s a great theme of family and life stages that seems to naturally flow.
My creative nonfiction essay “Knit Together” was published in the latest issue of BYU Studies. It’s accompanied by some photographs of a few of the knitting projects that I mention in the essay. This essay was one I wrote over the course of about a week last year when I was still in the emotional throws of the events that happen at the end of the essay, so it’s a really vulnerable piece for me. I hope it can be helpful for others who struggle with family relationships.
I’m also experimenting with mirroring my blog over on Substack, so subscribe over there if you prefer to read on that platform.
Speculative Fiction
Dracula by Bram Stoker – Read for my folklore class. I have not been a big consumer of vampire stories. I read Twilight exactly once, rented the movie using a free Redbox credit and wanted my money back, and have watched I Am Legend and some of the BBC’s Being Human with my husband. So I was not exactly sure what to expect from this book but was pleasantly surprised. The epistolary format is one that I love and Dracula pulls it off fairly well, despite a few instances where it seemed unrealistic for someone to take the time to write their experience before, y’know, dying.
I enjoyed the slow-burn build-up in the first half of the book. The characters frustrated me in just the right ways by being seemingly oblivious to the kind of novel they are in and going about their lives without ever mentioning the word “vampire” until halfway through the book. The second half of the book left a few threads dangling that I wanted answers to, like how Renfield even knew Dracula existed and how he came up with his strange vermin-consuming scheme, and how Van Helsing gained his vampire-lore knowledge. But I suppose these hooks are exactly why the book has been such a fruitful ground for many other creators to explore.
My only real frustration with the book was the ending. Dracula was killed so quickly that I actually missed it and had to go back half an hour in the audio book and relisten more carefully. I’m unsure whether the ending is just the result of differing expectations from different time periods or if Stoker was just bored of the story now that the vibes were over and wanted to end the story. Either way, I’m glad to have read this classic SFF work.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – Read for biopolitical dystopia class. While I get the criticisms that this novel is more about the author’s ability to show off his structural creativity than it is about story or character, I have to say I enjoyed the experiment. Of course, I liked some storylines (Timothy Cavendish, Somni) better than others (Adam Ewing, Half Lives). When the stories started ending in mid-sentence, I thought at first that the protagonist had died, so I was relieved when we got to the second half of the story. The echoes of each story in the others are fascinating to me from a writerly perspective and left me wondering exactly how Mitchell did this.
There’s a strange Mormon mention in the center story of the collection which I need to do some more thinking to figure out. (Is the character just from the area of Hawaii around the Polynesian Cultural Center or is there more substance to it?) In fact, that’s a good summary in general of how I’m feeling coming out of this book: there’s a lot to think about and figure out. Outside of the last few pages of the book which seem to provide some clear didacticism from the author about human nature, power, and history, it’s unclear exactly what the author was trying to say by selecting these stories. Given the careful construction of the book, I have faith that there is something there to be had. Luckily, I’m reading it for a class, so we’ll have the chance to talk about it a lot and hopefully come to further conclusions.
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson – Listening to this again in the car with my teenager’s high school carpool. I’ve read it so much now that the middle started lessening its grip on my attention, but the Sanderlanche is still as good as ever. Caught some foreshadowings of magical mechanics that were revealed in Rhythm of War–Sanderson again proving his subtly in planning and plotting. During the more familiar parts, I occupied myself by thinking of how I would adapt this into a 10-episode prestige television series. It’s going to take a lot of work and possibly a lot of cutting to fit everything. I may write up an actual plan sometime just as a thought exercise.
The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson – Just like that, the Year of Sanderson’s novels are all released. The Sunlit Man is a fast-paced story set in a fantastical world that absolutely strains credibility at some points. Sanderson has to pull in a lot of science fiction technobabble to explain it, which may be off-putting to readers who aren’t into his hard-magic approach.
Though this one is a bit more cosmere-heavy than even The Lost Metal, I can’t help but love it because of the centering of a religious culture. I literally almost screamed when the book introduced the Threnodites, the culture portrayed in Sanderson’s short story “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell,” which is inspired by a combination of Jewish and Puritan culture. I won’t write too much about my thoughts on the religious elements here because I hope to do a longer piece on the subject, but one of the book’s climaxes draws strongly from the LDS temple experience (at least in my opinion). I am happy to see the faith crisis storyline in Yumi balanced out by a more faith-positive experience in this book, though the protagonist takes the “almost thou convincest me” route in the end. I also got strong vibes of season 3 of the Mandalorian (though of course the book was finished before its release) via Nomad’s struggles with his past betrayal of his oaths. The decision to try again after failure makes this a rebaptism story of sorts.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – Read for biopolitical dystopia class. I stand by my 2018 review of this book: it is a subtle, slow dystopia, focused more on the feelings of the main characters than it is on any kind of social critique or call for revolution. In many ways, this feels like the literary version of all those YA dystopias of the early 2000s where the dystopian set-up was mostly the backdrop for the love triangle. I mean, that’s pretty much exactly the description of this book. However, it’s certainly much more poignant than Divergent or other similar reads. I don’t think I’d choose to read it again though. Too much of an “art” book when I tend to be more of a plot kind of reader.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – Read for folklore class. I’ve been meaning for a long time to read more Shirley Jackson, since my total experience with her is reading “The Lottery” in tenth grade and then making an attempt at her memoir a few years back. So I was happy to pick up this book for our exploration of ghost stories. I continue to be surprised at how much I liked both this and The Turn of the Screw, despite not thinking of myself as a ghost story or horror fan. I suppose I didn’t anticipate just how psychological most ghost stories are, which should have been obvious. Anyway, I really liked the confusion and the unreliable narrator of this book which made you constantly second guess your own memories of what had happened. It’s obviously a classic for a reason, plus a really quick read. Definitely recommend!
Defiant by Brandon Sanderson – The Skyward series is far from my favorite of Brandon’s works, but Defiant is perhaps the most satisfying of the bunch and a worthy conclusion to the story arc. I liked how things that seemed confusing about the first three books–like the completely new cast of characters in each book–were brought together in this book to make sense. I loved the return to the importance of stories in Spensa’s life and its dark opposite in Brade’s overconfidence about her military knowledge. In fact, the parallels between Brade and Spensa were what made this book for me: Brade is who Spensa could have been if she hadn’t learned the lessons that the previous three books forced into her.
Easily the weakest part of the book is Spensa’s occasional conception of herself as a weapon. I get that Brandon was trying to further the parallels between Brade and Spensa, but I just didn’t buy it and it ended up feeling like an unnecessary reversion of lessons learned in the first book. But since it doesn’t take up a huge amount of real estate in the book, it’s not a deal breaker for me. It’s easily made up for by Gran-Gran’s “stand-up and cheer” moment which, though not quite believable, is awesome enough to cause me to completely ignore that. Overall, I’m glad the series will continue for my kids’ sake since they love it so much, but I’m happy to leave the story at this point.
The Power by Naomi Alderman – Read for biopolitical dystopias class. I can’t fault this one for style. The frame device of the letters between the purported authors is really interesting. Every character is compelling; this is one of those rare books where I didn’t have a favorite viewpoint but just took each one as it came. The writing is both beautiful and compelling, with a balance of plot and literariness.
However.
I just utterly reject the way the dynamics between the sexes are portrayed in this book. As my husband warned me when he read it first, it seems to assume that women given power automatically become men, or at least like the worst kinds of patriarchal and abusive men. I suppose you could read the book as a satire in the extreme of all that is wrong with the way we interact with each other, but I just kept being frustrated that there was exactly zero counterweight to these kinds of corrupt and hateful relationships. Never is there a healthy and kind relationship between a man and a woman, conventional or not, barring one relationship between two very broken people that is barely starting at the end of the novel and has no time to show if it will endure. All interactions have been reduced to power in a very Foucauldian kind of way. It felt very inhuman. Maybe that was the point of the whole thing, and if so, well done. But it’s not reflective of what I see as the truth about the world, and so I felt very frustrated by it.
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson – I’ve gone back and forth on reading this for a few years. Now I wish that I had read it sooner! This book was a great example of how fantasy can work with contemporary religion rather than against it. I was fascinated by the different perspectives on Islam presented by each of the characters; even those who were faithful were all faithful in their own ways. And I loved the way the book challenged the reader to take even the most difficult parts of their scripture seriously by building a fantastical world that connected to the Quran. Now, I don’t know enough to accurately assess how well this book interacts with any version of Islamic practice, and perhaps there are obvious flaws to someone more familiar with the subject matter. But as a fan of the mash-up of religion and fantasy, this novel has to go to the top of my recommendation list.
The Faerie Queene, Book Two by Edmund Spenser – Read for Ovid in the Renaissance class. Well, I’m never going to be a great reader of early modern allegorical poetry, but I did enjoy working through this book with a class of engaged readers. It also gave me a chance to read and understand a lot of C. S. Lewis’s scholarship on this book and similar texts. Given that Lewis spent his whole career wrestling with it, I hardly feel qualified to judge it based on one reading. I am glad to have read at least part of it. I did enjoy that this particular edition puts the textual notes at the bottom of the page instead of hiding them away at the end, something I have discovered that I hate in an annotated text.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation, translated by Simon Armitage – Since I knew I would be reading this in folklore class, I forced my husband to watch the recent movie adaptation for a date night the month before, thinking that knowing the plot in advance would help me cope with the language. That didn’t turn out to be a good choice because the movie turned out to be quite confusing if you hadn’t read the original and not a good date night choice either way. However, the adaptation definitely made a lot more sense to me than it would have before this semester: it was basically a straight up medieval adaptation of the work, meaning that the film relied on the allegorical symbolism rather than inserting a lot of the interiority that a modern movie or text would. I think CS Lewis might have approved of its handling of the poem.
But back to the actual text itself. I was not looking forward to reading it after watching the adaptation, but actually I found I appreciated Simon Armitage’s translation a lot more than I did the movie. He did a good job balancing modern-feeling language with some of the old poetic tropes to make it feel like what I assume the original text feels like–lots of alliteration. There were only a few hang-ups where modern idioms threw me out of the text, but mostly it was smooth sailing. I was surprised to find how short and straightforward the text was, and also to find that the entire middle section of the film with the robbers and the lady was entirely absent. In class discussion also enhanced my appreciation of the symbolism in the text. Obviously, I’ve got a long way to go before I reach Lewis’s proficiency with medieval allegory because so much went right past me. Oh well, hopefully more practice will help me continue to get better at it.
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis – I mean, it’s CS Lewis, so you can’t really go wrong here. If you haven’t read this classic short novel of letters from a demon uncle to his nephew out on his first temptation assignment, put down what you’re reading and just do it. It’s short and so apt. Even all these years later, his commentary on the human condition, hypocrisy, and mental traps is just as relevant and fresh as ever. Five stars, will read again and again.
Long Chills and Case Dough by Brandon Sanderson – This was a fun little Sanderson curiosity and a hilarious way to end the Year of Sanderson. (Of course there’s another secret book in the final box. What else would you expect?) It’s not exactly the best thing he’s ever written. I still think the most memorable thing about it is that he used to write his college research papers in this style, which is completely insane. I liked the way he at least acknowledged with the misogyny of the noir mystery genre without making it a big deal. (I’m still unable to read the Dresden Files because of this issue. Maybe it’s just me?) I think it’s probably bad form to give your mystery story a name that only makes sense once you know the solution, but I guess at this point, Sanderson can get away with what he wants.
System Collapse by Martha Wells – This novel had some interesting innovations for the Murderbot series. I wasn’t quite on board with the constant redactions of Murderbot’s traumatic memories, but by the end I found I could live with it. Easily the best part of this one is that they solve the problem by using Murderbot and Art’s obsession with human media. Convincing someone to believe you by producing a documentary was a nice departure from the series formula of ending with a climactic battle. I was laughing my way through the montage of assembling the film. I had forgotten some of the details of the eariler books which made me a bit lost, but nothing that some Wikipedia summaries couldn’t solve. Look, if you haven’t picked up this series yet, I don’t know how anything I’m saying will convince you, but I will continue to read any Murderbot stories Martha Wells puts out and look forward with anticipation to the Apple+ series adaptation.
Fiction
Salve Deus Rex Judæorum by Aemilia Lanyer – Do I put this in the fiction section? Do I need to start a poetry section? Regardless, read this as part of my class on Ovid’s influence in early modern texts. Poetry is not typically my genre, especially straight devotional poetry, but Lanyer makes some really interesting moves in a feminist religious direction that I found interesting. Her goal is ostensibly to portray the story of the passion, but she keeps making detours to talk about important women in scripture. Her apology for Eve argues against blaming her for the fall. The annunciation gets incorporated right before the crucifixion, bookending Christ’s life with his mother’s willingness to bare a similar burden. There are also discussions of Esther, the queen of Sheba, and several female characters from the apocrypha, and an extended allegory about the church as the bride of Christ and conversion as a sort of romance. Overall, I was interested by the effect and am considering writing my seminar paper on this one.
Paradise by Toni Morrison – Read for postsecular literature class. I’m not sure where my thoughts about this book will go after discussing it for a class, but on initial reading, I think I enjoyed the substance of this book while hating the style of it. The story and characters of the book provide an interesting study in so many aspects of humanity: the destructive nature of insulating a community from outsiders (even if for good reason), the codependence and unhealthy way that men and women often relate to each other, the irrational nature of prejudice. The way that the town rewrites Christian myth to take on their own story was absolutely fascinating and made me think about the way Orson Scott Card talked about the blending of American history and Mormon history in “Pageant Wagon.” This process of using a myth as a palimpsest for our own community is utterly fascinating.
However, the wandering, indirect style was not my favorite and often left me confused about who was speaking and what community they were a part of. I’m still not sure about whether some of the convent women were from Ruby or outside it because the transitions between some things were not clear. I got used to Morrison’s style by the end of the book, and I think switching from text to audio helped significantly. Maybe this disorientation of the reader is intentionally part of what she was trying to accomplish, but I can’t say that I’d specifically seek it out in the future.
Overall, I’m putting this book in Auden’s category of “I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance (or rather with a class discussion) I shall come to like it.” We’ll see how that goes as the new semester opens.
Nonfiction
Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart – Celebrity memoir isn’t my usual genre (I can’t usually name more than one actor in a film), but I make an exception for Jean Luc. The section on his childhood was really interesting. All I knew going in was that his mother was a victim of domestic violence, so I was surprised to learn about his “Victorian” childhood, as his wife puts it. Stewart grew up in a way so foreign to everything I’m used to: no indoor toilet, a coal fireplace for heat, no refrigerator, old fashioned British schools with corporeal punishment. It was eye-opening to realize these conditions are not so far away as we sometimes think. His acting school years and early career gave me some insight into his craft as an actor. Having never acted past my elementary school days, I had no idea what kinds of training and process actors went through. Lots of the names and plays went over my head, but might be interesting to more theater-savvy readers.
The latter half of the book finally gets into the parts of his career I’m familiar with. Lots of fun behind-the-scenes stories from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men franchise, plus the origin of my personal favorite, his one man show of A Christmas Carol. (I listen to the recording every year.) I suppose I shouldn’t have expected better, and I fully give him credit for taking responsibility in the text, but I was disappointed in his infidelity to his two previous marriages. I had hoped for better. Also notably absent after his days as a choir boy are any discussion of his personal beliefs and philosophy of life. While the stage-and-film stories are fun, I was left wanting a little more personal introspection in the second half of the book.
Still, a fun book and even funner audiobook since Patrick Stewart narrates it himself, complete with singing some relevant songs and reenacting some relevant lines from various shows. Definitely worth it to fans, though not life-changing.
Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore by Diane E. Goldstein, Jeannie Banks Thomas, and Sylvia Grider – Read for folklore class. This book is a thorough overview of ghosts and hauntings in the modern world. Though there were some chapters I liked more than others, each of them felt useful for my future ability to contextualize horror stories of the ghostly type. I’ve never been overly interested in that genre, but now I feel more equipped to understand it when it comes up. Also, this book wins the award for “only piece of scholarly literature that my 10yo kept begging me to read to him.” He laughed over the stories in the chapter on children’s ghost stories, only some of which I had heard as a child myself. I look forward to quizzing him in a few months on whether he’s spread these stories to his 5th grade classroom.
Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins – I was really impressed with McKay Coppins’ work on this book, the result of exhaustive research into Romney’s personal documents as well as extensive interviews. This book was a cathartic read to me as someone who is politically aligned with the small island of American politics that Romney finds himself on these days. I’m not sure I quite agree with Coppins’ thesis that Romney could have solved problems by being more authentic earlier in his career rather than playing to data and numbers and sticking to his script. The conclusion I reached was more of a catch-22: he’s doomed when he’s honest and doomed when he’s not. It’s the kind of moral quandary that almost makes you want to give up on America and politics as a project in general, and yet the book didn’t feel hopeless about the future of the country either. It left me hoping that someone would have the integrity to stand up the way Romney did, in the end.
I am by far not an expert on the political situations involved, so I can’t comment too much on how accurately anything was portrayed or the quality of the analysis. However, this book leaves you with the impression of 20/20 hindsight on the Trump issue. I was left with chills as it kept showing how Trump (and all he entails) was the logical result of situations faced by Romney and the country at large. It was downright spooky to see the interactions between these two emblems of Republicanism as it was and as it is now throughout the years as the balance of power changed. Obviously, offering critiques of how history might have been turned was beyond the scope of this book, but it certainly did a good job showing us the train wreck in exhaustive slow-motion.
As a Latter-day Saint and reader of Mormon lit, I found all the little details of Romney’s history with the church fascinating. I had heard briefly during his presidential campaign about him being in a car crash on his mission, but the specific details of his mission did so much to explain Mitt as a person and a believer to me. The things that happen on an LDS mission tend to impact members for the rest of their life. I also fell in love with Ann Romney. I had no idea she was a convert to the church, and I basically stood up and clapped when she told Mitt he’d resent her for the rest of his life if he married her instead of going on a mission. That’s the kind of LDS folklore that deserves to be written down! I guess I need to pick up her biography next.
King Arthur: The Making of the Legend by Nicholas J. Higham – Read the middle 4 chapters for folklore class. I had heard some of the folklore behind the King Arthur legends on my study abroad in England (we stopped at Tintagel and Glastonbury Abbey on our travels), but other than that, I’ve never particularly dived into Arthur-lore. So for me, this book was like being thrown into the deep end of obscure arguments rather than watching the tide of the various accretions of lore over time. I have to agree with my folklore professor that I don’t find the search for the origins or truth behind the Arthur myth to be particularly interesting. I’d rather focus on how people have used and added to the myth over time than have arguments about various names that might or might not have eventually transformed themselves into Arthur. But beyond that, I did think the book did a good job of laying out the various perspectives in a way that was comprehensive and comprehensible to a complete newbie in the topic.
Biopolitics: A Reader, edited by Timothy C. Campbell and Adam Sitze – Read for biopolitical dystopia class. I can’t say that I thoroughly read every piece in here, but I’ve at least skimmed every one. I must say that I haven’t come out the other side as a big fan of theory, especially biopolitics itself. I found many if not most of the writing styles completely unreadable, which was a big contrast to reading C. S. Lewis’s literary theories earlier this year. Many of our class discussions seems to hinge on a single phrase or idea which was all we could comprehend of the text; to me, that says that the thinking that led to these ideas is just not that clear or organized.
There is always the possibility that I’m just too pedestrian and non-philosophical to understand, but the more I read in the world, I begin to think that the problem is with the theorists and not with me. Clear writing is a sign of clear ideas and I’m not exactly a novice-level reader. If you can’t make yourself clearly understood even to people in a graduate program, then is what you’re saying really worth saying? (Too far? Have I said the quiet part out loud?) Anyway, it’s good to have a background in some of these ideas so at least I can recognize the names and general concepts when they come up, but I don’t picture them having a particularly strong influence on my own work in the future.
The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter – I picked this book up as I was working on a paper that involved C. S. Lewis’s scholarship on medieval and early modern texts. Baxter does a great job of showing how Lewis’s literary scholarship, which is probably unknown to most of his fans, connects to his works of apologetics and fiction. Reading this book after having read Planet Narnia this summer really cemented for me all the connections between Narnia and the medieval cosmos. It also helped me appreciate what Lewis saw in the early modern worldview that is missing in our own, namely a dedication to the systematizing and understanding of all things into one great whole. Of course, the familiarity of that idea to me as a Latter-day Saint struck me as another one of the many reasons that we as a people are drawn to Lewis’s writings.
