I’m writing this on the first day of school for my kids, which is about par for the course for summer as a mom of four. Of course, we had the Fourth of July and Pioneer Day here in Utah. We got to experience the negative side of the weeklong fireworks binge our neighborhood goes on since we were babysitting my in-laws’ dog, who is afraid of fireworks (unlike our dog). I’ll just say that he likes to sleep in my kid’s beds and we had to wash a lot of sheets.
July was also a social month, getting together with many friends and family members both local and out of town. I started teaching my oldest child to drive, which went better than expected but was still an absolutely disorienting experience. I finally finished building the Harry Potter reading room under the stairs that I’ve been thinking about for year (see pictures below!). My kids spent some time at FSY and various other camps, which let me complete some of the academic work I set for myself this summer. Speaking of which . . .
This month was the 2024 Association for Mormon Letters conference focusing on the theme of children’s and young adult literature. I was part of an amazing panel of presenters all talking about speculative YA books by Latter-day Saint authors. Emma Tueller Stone presented on the idea of soul mates, and Kjerste Christensen talked about the prevalence of fairy tale retellings among LDS authors. You can watch the whole panel on YouTube, or skip to this timestamp to watch my presentation on the influence of the idea of the premortal existence on LDS YA dystopias.
The biggest surprise of the conference was Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree winning the podcast award! As I said last month, there were so many good podcasts nominated, so I was shocked when we were informed that we were the winners. You can catch the award citation and our acceptance speeches here, and in case you missed it, I posted a celebratory list of our best episodes.
Speculative Fiction
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd – This book started out extremely well but ultimately was massively flawed for me as a reader. The characters and situation of the book seemed built just for me. I love books about academics, and cartographers working for the New York Public Library was a new one for me. The setting and style were strongly reminiscent of Dan Brown but less conspiracy-theory and less thriller pacing, if that makes sense. More of a general sense that the world is full of wonder and secrets.
However, the execution got less and less enjoyable as I went on. First of all, the fantasy element of the book isn’t revealed until the halfway mark, by which point I had long-since guessed it and been waiting impatiently on the characters for pages and pages. At the latest, this reveal should have been at the end of act one, much too slow. Also, unfortunately, the flashback characters were way more interesting than the present-day characters. I found myself wishing that the novel had been written about those characters instead of just telling us about them later.
Everything went pretty well from then on until the ending, which I won’t spoil except to say that the book breaks Sanderson’s first law of magic (“An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic”). I’m fine with books having vague and mysterious magic rather than a systematic magic system. The issue is that when the solution to the plot depends on the character realizing a trick with the magic and executing it, the reader better understand why the trick works and the implications of it. That is not the case with the ending of this book, which made the final solution feel like a cheat. I was also disappointed by the big reveal as the overall justification for why the secret was kept didn’t feel realistic. I was left shouting at the characters for the dumb decision they made without thinking about other possibilities.
However, the magic in the novel, such as it is, almost makes all this frustration with the plot worthwhile. The atmosphere of wonder and possibility made me want to go out and start studying cartography right now, so I suppose mission accomplished. I’m just frustrated that an editor didn’t help tweak the plot a little more so it could be a really perfect book.
Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree – Eh, this book was not for me. I felt like I had to read it because of all the hype about the first book and the wave of cozy fantasy it kicked off. But if I had actually read Legends & Lattes, I would have probably realized that the genre was not for me. The plot was just too slow and felt sort of plug-and-play. You can tell almost from page one that we’re going to watch this bookstore go from rundown and nearly closing to being a huge success, and that every character is going to make some sort of mental-health related realization that improves their life. I guess that’s the point of cozy–to be more predictable and comforting–but it dragged for me. I also didn’t quite think the author pulled off the meshing of the classic medieval D&D environment with modern concepts like a “blind book date” and author signings. I can imagine watching this as a tv series ala Delicious in Dungeon when I need to just zone out, but I don’t think I’ll pick up cozy fantasy in book form again.
Paradise Lost by John Milton – Milton obviously doesn’t need my approval, but this is a classic for a reason. Having now finally read all of the text rather than just the excerpts from undergrad, I feel even stronger in my assertion that Milton is the beginning of religious speculative fiction. In between the bits that adhere strongly to Christian dogma (or at least Milton’s version of it) are many parts where Milton innovates all kinds of details that are fascinating. I especially loved the building of Pandemonium and the war in heaven scene. You can clearly see how every fantasy portrayal of angels is tied to this poem, especially Good Omens, His Dark Materials, and Lewis’s Space Trilogy. I can definitely see myself returning to study this text more in the future: this is truly one of those works that has layers and layers that absolutely justify the massive amount that has been written about them.
For anyone struggling with focusing on the text, I highly recommend grabbing an audio version and listening along while following the text. Audio made it much easier for me to follow the complex syntax and longer images as the intonations gave you a clue to when things were a digression. There are two free recordings on Librivox, though I’m sure professional narration would get the nuances even better. As CS Lewis and Philip Pullman both point out, Milton’s masterpiece is meant to be read aloud, and if those two agree on anything, I suppose we’d better listen.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers – Like the first volume in the series, I found this book just okay. Again it asks good questions about the meaning of life and the nature of human self-fulfillment, but then fails to give what I would regard as an interesting answer. I also frankly find it disturbing the degree of casualness that is given to sex. There’s not even a pretense of desire to build a relationship, just the fulfilling of a mutual need, and this is apparently supposed to be seen as enlightened? I was interested by the almost Amish community at the end which rejects the solar punk vision of an eco-tech-topia as entirely false, but the book ended before it was really possible to get into that. To me, it seems that the author likes to ask interesting questions but is afraid to actually nail down any answers for her characters, much less humanity in general.
Fiction
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume – Read this aloud to my two youngest children. My 11yo had the uncanny ability to predict exactly what Fudge was going to do next, which may speak to his own Fudge-like tendencies or perhaps to how iconic the plot of this book is. It’s still one of my favorite non-fantasy read alouds for children. No matter where we fit in the family, we can all empathize with Peter’s exasperation with his little brother, and perhaps see our own family in a bit more charitable light because of it. Plus it’s dang funny.
Nonfiction
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion -Man, this book was a really tough read for me. I’ve read a lot of holocaust novels and memoirs over the years; I think this one was harder because the author doesn’t follow the general course of gradually building up to the final horrors. Instead, the outcome is there straight from the start. Rather than watching the characters make choices and wondering about their eventual fate, we know pretty much from the start the horrors that await them and are constantly reminded of them. It was painful to read for more than twenty or thirty minutes at a time, which of course you feel bad about because imagine how much more painful it was to live through, so you continue to try to go on, but eventually the book went back to the library without my having quite finished it.
Nonetheless, I learned about a completely new-to-me aspect of this time period. The author’s diligence in bringing forth the history of these women resistance fighters in the ghettos of Poland is absolutely heroic. I was fascinated with just how much the Jewish youth were involved in radical politics and social justice, and how that had to be back-burnered to the monumental task of helping a community survive in a nightmare. Worth a read if you can handle the darkness.
Writing to Learn: How to Write–And Think–Clearly about Any Subject at All by William Zinsser – I put this book on hold completely because of the title. I’m reworking my first-year writing course to focus on the idea of “writing as thinking,” and this was one of the few library books that came up when I searched for that idea. Part one of this book does a great job of framing the idea that writing forces us to put our ideas into a concrete framework and thus transforms nebulous feelings into knowledge. It does this mostly in the framework of how writing can be useful in understanding various subjects across the curriculum, including math and the sciences where we don’t typically see a lot of writing assignments. Another good point the book makes is that often what we think is difficult about a subject is just a lack of clear writing about the subject. Good writing can make nearly any subject both comprehensible and interesting to the average person, and college educators ought to be both practicing that discipline and teaching that ability to their students. I may come back later to read more of part two, which discusses how writing across the curriculum looks in various subjects and disciplines, but that part was less relevant to my own project for now.
Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning by James M. Lang – I did not know a pedagogy book could be a page turner, but I plowed through this one in five days and could not stop. Lang puts his finger on a lot of the principles that I had instinctively understood from my various readings across self-help, psychology, and even classical education books. As each section approached the practical tips at the end, I found pieces I had already decided were missing from my class but couldn’t articulate why. This is a really good source of practical tips for how to teach better without having to redo your entire class by focusing on small tips that really help students ingest the material. I am definitely going to read this one again and highly recommend to all teachers.
