I thought that it would get easier to keep up with blogging when the semester ended, but I guess things just keep on piling on. I finished up two really good papers–one on teaching students with dysgraphia in first-year writing and another using C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves as a lens to interpret Fatima Mirza’s novel A Place for Us–and all of my grading, and promptly collapsed.
Then I got back up again and promptly made up for my lack of mom-hours during the semester by chaperoning my daughter’s field trip the zoo and running all the last-minute errands for various school projects. My husband and I also ran a 5K at our local tulip festival with my teenagers, who we’ve been forcing to run all year. I don’t think they enjoyed it as much as I did.
In writing news this month, my short story “Birthright” was published as part of an anthology called Tales of Mystery: Dead for a Spell. The collection features detective stories with a fantasy twist, while the companion volume, Tales of Mystery: The Gravity of Death, is science-fiction themed. My story features a reluctant detective forced to take a case from a dangerous magical family. If you pay attention to the biblical allusions in the story, you may get a hint as to whodunit. I feel honored to be included in the collection along with some other really wonderful writers (including one who wrote one of the books reviewed below).
I had hoped to do more creative writing during the summer, but looks like academia has other ideas. I’m currently working on a paper about memory in dystopian novels by LDS authors for the Association for Mormon Letters conference in July. And in April, my podcast co-host Carl Cranney and I received a conditional acceptance for a paper on The Mandalorian and religious clothing for a possible edited collection, so now I am being forced to rewatch the show for research purposes. Oh, the hard life of the speculative fiction literary critic. 🙂
Speaking of the podcast, this month’s release is a short conversation about The Most Reluctant Convert, a film about C.S. Lewis’s conversion based on his memoir Surprised by Joy. I can’t believe it took me 42 episodes to get a legitimate Lewis episode into the podcast. The film is very short and really faithful to the book. Highly recommend for Lewis fans.
And now onto book reviews, of which 4/5 are rereads. It’s interesting (to me, at least) to see how my perspective on a book has changed over time. I hope the reevaluations you see below are an indication that I’m growing over time.
Speculative Fiction
Dune by Frank Herbert – My first encounter with Dune was as a young newly wed because my husband’s family is obsessed with it. Eventually, I felt I had to read it in self-defense, but I was either pregnant or had a newborn at the time, so the story seemed confusing and convoluted to me. The excellence of the Dune Part 2 movie made me want to pick up the book again.
This time, I feel like I understand what Herbert is doing. What he’s not doing is focusing on plot. If you’re used to reading contemporary science fiction (as I was when first reading), this book can seem strangely paced. That’s not to say Dune doesn’t have plot; it does, but it backgrounds some moments that a plot-oriented novel would foreground. Herbert also isn’t writing for the worldbuilding, though again, he has worldbuilding in spades. There are thousands of years of history, but unlike Tolkien, Herbert is content to barely mention those and explain little about the contemporary landscape either. You have to either accept it from context, or bring in some background reading to understand it.
No, what Herbert is really doing is focusing on the psychology of the characters. This explains the strange early reveals of traitors and the focus on political scenes while the actions that result from them are summarized. Every action a character takes is traced back to its multiple causes, often through explicit internal monologue as well as implied ideas. Even Irulan’s historical epigraphs add to the psychology of the various characters. This complexity makes Dune a compelling read even though there’s not a single character that’s wholly sympathetic or “good.”
The Cunning Man by DJ Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey – Having returned to this book for my LDS speculative fiction class, I think I’m better prepared to appreciate it than when I reviewed it in 2021. I know more about the folklore that this book is based on from the class readings. I still find myself surprised at the lack of LDS side characters, but I think the plot itself was more Mormon than I appreciated the first time. In particular, I understood Hiram Woolley’s struggle with applying his folk practices in a moral way as the kind of Mormon story I’m always asking for: not one about entering or leaving a faith, but one about what it’s like to be a committed member of a faith. Hiram’s belief is never in question, but his attempts to live by that belief are imperfect and require reexamination from time to time. And I can’t believe I didn’t comment on the ending, which reminds me of season 3 of Avatar: The Last Airbender because the way the protagonist achieves victory almost matters more than whether they will be victorious. Anyway, I think I undersold this book last time. I raised my rating by an additional star and will be continuing on with the next book.
Matched by Ally Condie – Returning to the book after a decade, I find that it still holds up, perhaps better than many of its contemporary YA dystopias. Whereas many books in this category focus strongly on plot and worldbuilding, Matched is much more about its prose styling and the interior experience of its characters. This approach works well for a book that is largely about language and its ability to change a person. This detail has been used before in dystopian novels. I compared it to The Giver in my first review, and I think there is definitely some influence there, especially in the few instances where the society seems to have the same “precision of language” idea focused on accurate vocabulary. Echoes of 1984 here as well.
But Matched takes this focus on language much farther: it looks at not only vocabulary but poetry. It might seem strange to write a YA dystopia novel (a genre some might regard as disposable, or at least pulpy) about a genre as apparently permanent and serious as poetry. But I think the focus here is on what is lost when we deem poetry (and other forms of art) as disposable and commodifiable instead of as expressions of something real and human. In that way, Matched almost anticipates the modern “humanities crisis” resulting from our view of literature as mere representation of politics and power.
Anyway, the prose is lovely, and the characters are nuanced and interesting. Highly recommend picking it up for the first time, or rereading. I’m working on a paper about Matched as an LDS dystopia, particularly its focus on memory. There’s a lot more depth here than I remembered, and I am excited to start piecing together my thoughts about it in a more cohesive way.
Fiction
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver – The idea of this book is brilliant: rewrite David Copperfield into the American South as the opioid epidemic grows. Dickens’ books are all about the social problems of his day, so it makes complete sense to recast this one into one of the biggest social ills of our time. The ultimate effect reminds me of Hillbilly Elegy turned into a work of fiction.
As the concept might imply, this book is absolutely a tough read. Lots of swearing, drug use, and abuse pervade its pages. Sometimes that pain that Demon is going through is almost too much to continue reading. He grows up deeply disadvantaged by his parents’ bad choices, and he grows up to make plenty of bad choices of his own. It hurts deeply when he doesn’t listen to the adults who give him good advice and instead follows those who are unstable. If you’ve got any kind of triggers or sensitivities, stay far away.
It can be dangerous to rewrite a classic as it invites comparison between your writing and an undoubted master. But if anyone could do this, it’s Kingsolver. In spite of the painful content, I was pulled through by the gasps of fresh air provided by her masterful prose. You grow to really care about the characters even though every choice leads them to their own destruction.
Nonfiction
The Four Loves by CS Lewis – Reread this classic for at least the third time, if my various highlight colors are any judge. I initially started this reread for CS Lewis Society but then decided also to use it as a lens for my paper in postsecular literature. As a result, I also took the opportunity to read through a paper or two of literary criticism on this book, which I found very helpful to my understanding of it. I highly recommend Jason Lepojärvi’s “Brilliance and Blindspots: New Light on C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves,” which helped me understand that in spite of the book’s title, Lewis has more than one schema of love in this book, which makes it a lot more complicated that it appears. Besides the standard four loves, he also discusses throughout the sections need-love, gift-love, and appreciation, as well as healthy and unhealthy versions of each of the loves.
There are still some difficulties with the modern mindset here. The friendship section is very weak on account of Lewis’s bias towards an intellectual type of friendship. I especially found his statement that friends don’t want to know anything about your personal life to be laughable, especially from a female-oriented view of friendship where knowing each other’s lives is often the main point of the whole thing. And his discussion of the awkwardness of being introduced to a friend group whose interests you don’t share would have been much better if he’d left the issue of gender out of it. But the chapter isn’t entirely a wash because the discussion of the dangerous group-think that can pervade friendships captures so much of exactly what is happening in internet echo chambers that it’s uncanny.
This time I had fewer problems with the Eros section, perhaps because I’ve come back around to a gender complementarity that I didn’t have the last time I read, apparently. I also think his discussion of the dangers of treating romantic love as a truth are a necessary counterbalance to the way we think of love today.
Of course, the section of Charity is beautiful. This time I was particularly struck by the way Lewis balances between the first and second great commandments. This is a huge topic of discussion in Latter-day Saint circles at the moment, and Lewis names perfectly all the nuances and issues that go into this balance without coming to any false or trite conclusions about it.
.
Very insightful stuff, Liz.