You know how sometimes past-you makes plans that sound fun, but present-you ends up resenting those plans? Yeah, that was May for me. May was the month of conferences, all of which I wanted to attend individually, but maybe not all within the same 30 days. Ah well, I’m sure future-me will look back and be happy we did it, even if it made May pretty insane.
On May 9-10, I attended Storymakers, a local conference mostly for fiction writers. I’ve never been able to justify paying for a ticket before as fiction is mostly a side hobby for me, but when my friend from Seattle told me that her book was a finalist for the Whitney Awards, I decided this was my year. The Storymakers atmosphere is every bit as fun and friendly as I had heard, and we had a great time. I met up with several of my favorite Mormon lit friends and generally stuffed my brain full of writing advice. I tried to focus mainly on panels about editing, publishing, and marketing, since I have a project I’m working on that involves these things. (Watch this space…)
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The next weekend was the Faith and Knowledge Conference at the University of Utah. Lots of great advice given about finding employment in Mormon studies-related circles as well as the relationship between faith and scholarship. It was nice to be in a space where we could talk about our various perspectives on these things openly without worrying about judgement or providing context.
I had a bye week to celebrate the end of school with my kids and then we promptly took off for a family vacation in Ephraim, UT, which was also the location of the AML-MSH joint conference the next weekend. Since AML has only done virtual conferences since the pandemic, it was amazing to see so many of these people whose writing I’ve read in person. Also exciting to have a whole two tracks with lots and lots of Mormon literature scholarship, instead of just a few crumbs. Michael Austin’s keynote was a call to action to further scholarship on lesser-known authors, which some of us are already scheming to answer.
Of course, I still had one more conference to go at this point, but I’ll leave the summary of MHA for my June reading post.
If reading about all these conferences has you ready to jump in on the action (and you live in Utah), you have a chance tomorrow night! I’ll be speaking on a panel about faith and imagine at the Compass gallery on Center Street in Provo on Wednesday, June 18th at 7 pm. More details here. Come say hi and maybe we’ll grab Rockwell Ice Cream’s new Brandon Sanderlanche flavor afterwards.
Now on to the book reviews! You’ll notice that I’m loading up on a lot of the Hugo nominees below. That’s a trend that will probably continue for a few months, though after reading so many brand-new books in a row, I do have an impulse to follow CS Lewis’s advice and grab a few old books as a palate cleanser.
Speculative Fiction
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher – I believe this is my first T. Kingfisher, though my kids loved A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. At first, I had a bit of an allergic reaction to this one because of the abusive, controlling parent situation. It’s not that such parents exist; it’s just that this portrayal of parents is so common that as a parent myself I tire of reading it. (I’m also tired of books about perfect loving parents that sound like they are reading a script from a parenting handbook. Give me realistic people trying their best any day.) But I kept reading and eventually the remaining cast and characters won me over. I love Hester and her relationship with her brother and friends. I was a little befuddled by the ending for her character, which I won’t spoil, but just seems to be unjustified to me. On the other hand, perhaps it’s just that I am so far from that worldview that I just don’t understand what her hangups are.
As a fantasy book, the magic system in this one seems bound by a lot of rules, but the audience and characters have no idea what they are. They spend a lot of the book bumbling around and trying to figure out about them. It almost felt like this book is part of a larger universe that hasn’t been published yet. This isn’t necessarily a problem except that the main plot requires understanding of the magic to solve, and so some of the climax comes off as deus ex machina. The author mitigates this in a few ways so that it pretty much works, but I still felt sort of cheated as a reader, wishing for that rush of understanding that often comes from fantasy books. But maybe I’m just a spoiled Sanderson reader. (Probably yes.)
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson – I bounced off of the Red/Blue/Green Mars trilogy so hard that I was hesitant about ever picking up another Kim Stanley Robinson book. I was ultimately convinced by hearing Paul William’s paper about the book at ICFA this year. The premise of the complete destruction of Europe’s population by the plague and the resulting rerouting of world history was an interesting idea. The fact that the book covers hundreds of years of history seemed to fit with Robinson’s strengths (cool ideas) while minimizing what I saw as his weaknesses (characters, especially female ones).
Well, the book went about as expected. I definitely zoned out at a few points when I really didn’t care about the characters, but overall, seeing the changes in the progression of world history were intriguing. Some of the history parts probably went way over my head. You’d need to be pretty familiar with Asian and Middle Eastern history in order to really say whether Robinson’s projections succeed as alternate history. I did not expect the through-line of the characters getting together in the Bardo, being reincarnated, and eventually starting a war in heaven. I was a bit disappointed when this plot wasn’t really resolved, only confused–is the war in the Bardo a hallucination? is it just a storytelling device?
One part I did appreciate was how central the religious beliefs of the various cultures were to the way their civilizations approached various problems. Again, I need a lot better background knowledge on Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism to tell whether this was done well, but it did make for an interesting comparison between, as a character puts it, “one God, many gods, or no god” approaches to life. In spite of the imperfections of the religious cultures, the conclusion seems to be that having a religion is a positive for society as it acts as a limiting factor on the overall amount of cruelty just by imposing some kind of moral compass. The nations without a strong religious culture end up doing a lot more damage in this history’s combined version of WWI and WWII.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling – Finished reading this aloud to my youngest. Rowling really does do an amazing job of pulling off a twist. Those last few chapters had my daughter gasping at revelation after revelation. The dominos line up so well. Also, the illustrated editions are so fun!
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar – This is my first piece of fiction by Sofia Samatar after reading part of her memoir (entropy-ed out by digital library return). I see a lot of her own identity reflected in this novella: one main character is born into a slavery very similar to the American system only on a spaceship; another is a middle-class grad student who wants to study the culture of these people and possibly fight back against the system. Underneath it all is a mysterious religious impulse that seems to almost magically pull people together to fight against the system that keeps them all imprisoned. As with most novellas, the book ends right when the crucial decision has been made, leaving me wondering if their revolution can succeed. (At least it doesn’t end the way Babel did . . .)
I loved the message that part of what helps us fight injustice are the things that are both humane and spiritual. Some wonderful satires of the current version of university culture. Lots of interesting folklore implications here as well. Samatar’s work here meshes well with Rita Felski’s theories about the need to remember the purpose of literature and other humanities studies. A must read for anyone interested in the current humanities crisis.
The West Passage by Jared Pechaček – The only adjective I can use for this book is disorienting. Something about the way the story is told keeps the reader constantly several steps behind the characters in even understanding what is happening, much less what it means. It’s definitely a stylistic choice, not an accident, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. The story itself should have been on target for me–mysterious female gods running down into mortality, a society of the verge of total collapse, strange mystical folklore from children’s games that turns significant–but the lack of clarity made it difficult to really enjoy the twists and turns. I wouldn’t say no to another book by Pechaček, but I’d have to know the style was much different.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – I can see why the BBC optioned this one. This is a time travel novel in which the time travel itself matters a lot less than confronting Britain’s past, present and future. Basically, the main character serves as a nanny to orient people that the British government brings in from the past, helping them adapt to all the changes in cultural expectations. Near the end of the book, you get more of the typical time travel hijinks, but the majority of the book is reflecting on what we’ve gained (and lost) in modern culture and how the past can impact us. It’s a fun short read that doesn’t overstay its welcome. The sex scenes got a little too explicit for my taste, but the relationship itself is well-earned.
Fiction
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1 by Beth Brower – I had seen two people on my Goodreads blast through this series multiple times, but I had assumed it was a romance series that I wouldn’t be interested in. How very wrong I was. The Unselected Journals really is what it says on the tin: a book about many things, but really all about voice and character. There’s some mystery, some slice of life, some romance, some literary fan girl, and some Victorian autobiography. Beth Brower really nails the genre and makes it fun to consume “just one more entry” while not making it feel like a chore. The idea of plotting a series of short books in arcs like a TV series is also genius marketing–apparently there are six books to each “season.” I will definitely be picking up the rest of the series as some fun summer reading. (Since there’s a ghost, you could argue that this is speculative as well, but I’ll let the rest of the series determine that.)
Poetry
An Open Book: Poems by Orson Scott Card – I always seem to start my poetry reviews with a warning that I’m not much of a poetry reader; maybe I should stop saying that. I grabbed this on a lark along with all the literary criticism on Card for a project I was working on. I remember Card coming to BYU on book tour for this back when I was in undergrad and was absolutely binging through his back catalog. I never ended up picking up this one though.
I don’t know whether undergrad-me would have enjoyed this collection, but present-me did. There are some speculative poems about the apocalypse and others that are clearly inspired by his own life. The love poems are personal yet universal in a great way. The poems about the death of his daughter and son are absolutely heartbreaking. I don’t know how to compare it to other poetry, but as Card’s goal was to write poetry that worked for average readers, I think he succeeded.
Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day by Sharlee Mullins Glenn – Don’t go into this epic poem expecting orthodox LDS views. It’s not just the inclusion of Heavenly Mother; this book endorses the theory that she is the Holy Ghost, along with several other interesting doctrinal speculations. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether these are plausible or not, but they certainly continue the tradition of making theological arguments in Christian epic poetry. The poetry itself is smooth and readable, not too high a style. I finished it in two sessions and could have finished easily in one long one. Other reviews have remarked on a few loose ends in the narrative that also bothered me, and the section after the Fall seems to speedrun through the atonement in record time. It’s certainly an interesting addition to the genre of Mormon epic, though it doesn’t surpass The Nephiad in my personal ranking of the genre.
Nonfiction
The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen – I heard Jeffrey Rosen speak at BYU and knew I had to pick up this book. It was exactly what I wanted it to be: a mixture of classical literature, American history, and advocacy for virtue-based liberal arts. Rosen manages to strike just the right balance on the squeamish bits of the founders as well. He doesn’t cover anything up, but he also doesn’t leave you feeling everything about American history is horribly tainted. As a result, you feel that you come to know these founders as real people with flaws that they struggled (and often failed) to overcome. Instead of demigods (ala 1776) or demons, you get people doing their best and forming a pretty amazing system of government because their aspirations were greater than their individual traits. Highly recommend as a patriotic read with some serious humanities chops.
A possible side effect of reading this book is you may find yourself ordering Cicero’s Tusculan Disputation immediately afterward. Apparently it’s *the* book to read in revolutionary America, and I had never heard of it before. Look forward to a future review.