A lower intensity reading month. I finished wrapping up my dad’s campaign for Salt Lake County Auditor. He didn’t win but did manage to get over 40% of the vote as a third-party candidate which is impressive. I also ran my traditional Thanksgiving 5K, shaving about :20 seconds off my most recent time even though the course was full of hills.
I managed to finally smash my word count goal this month, writing 6240/4000 words. Most of this was on a new short story which has the codename of “Robot Nanny” but I think will probably be called “Memory” or “Memories.” I can’t decide about the plural, but the story turned out great. I’m sending it in to Writers of the Future this quarter.
Part of November was spent attending Dragonsteel Con 2022 to celebrate the release of The Lost Metal with my family. Bonus that I got to record a special episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree talking about the echoes of Mormonism in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. The recording turned out super well and was released on Thanksgiving. We also released an episode on Howl’s Moving Castle with author William Morris (whose new short story collection is reviewed below). We also have a very fun Christmas special talking about A Christmas Carol, why it’s so popular, and lightning reviewing several adaptations.
I also spent time this month learning to use Descript for podcast editing, and after some wrestling, I got it to work with our Zencastr recordings. I’m hoping to make some quick video tutorials on our process so that others don’t have to struggle as much as I did. I think it’s really going to boost editing efficiency on the podcast, which has been my biggest complaint about the process.
For December, I’m polishing up the “Robot Nanny” story and starting a new creative nonfiction piece whose codename is “Landscapes of Faith,” comparing and contrasting the landscape and church experience in Seattle and Utah. I’m also brainstorming ideas to submit for the Association for Mormon Letter’s virtual conference this spring. The theme is genre fiction, so I obviously have to be there! We’re also wrapping up season one of PCAT with an episode on Rings of Power.
Speculative Fiction
The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories by William Morris – Exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of short stories with plenty of speculative elements combined with innovative uses of LDS culture, history, and theology. If you know anything about my reading tastes, you know this collection was right up my alley. I had previously read a few of these stories in the Mormon Lit Blitz anthology, but the wide range of William Morris’s work contained in this volume was extraordinary. He has a talent for spinning stories all across the genre map that imply so much more than fits inside their tight word count.
A few genres you’ll find in this volume:
Tall tale-type humor: The entertainment value of pieces like “Proof That Sister Greeley is a Witch,” “There Wrestled a Man in Parowan,” and “The Elder Who Wouldn’t Stop” cannot be denied, though they are less “deep” than the others.
Mormon supernatural: More serious than the previous type, these stories have a fantastical element that is largely left to stand on its own unexplained. From tales of a Mormon dryad in “Wild Branches,” a haunted (or blessed?) revolver in “Uncle Porter’s Gun,” and children rescued from a mysterious cult in “The Only 15,” I was compelled along by a desire to understand only to be left with no real explanation, and still loved it anyway. The stories really replicated the feeling of listening to a ghost story: many specific details and a kind of internal logic, but no final conclusion as to their relationship to reality.
Explorations of theological ideas: “After the Fast” is a three Nephites story that manages to be contemplative rather than campy, a hard thing to accomplish in my opinion. “A Mormon Writer Visits Spirit Prison” explores very effectively why anyone would choose not to be saved, though the jumping back-and-forth format really didn’t work for me and I ended up piecing the four conversations together straight through instead. “With All Our Dead” takes seriously genealogical ghosts in LDS tradition with interesting effect.
Alternate history: I was amazed at how Morris deftly builds a whole backstory of a future (or past) Mormonism that never was, with only a few allusions and key details. “The Darkest Abyss” posits a future where the church had to flee the United States to Japan, while “Emma Goes West” tells an alternate history of the split of the restoration movement. (If you can catch exactly what’s going on in that second one the first reading, you’re better than I, but the well-crafted language means you don’t mind toying with the puzzle.) “Ghosts of Salt and Spirit” pushes this genre to the extreme of a spacefaring socialist/communist version of the church, still with the same scripted historical missionary tours. And don’t even attempt to understand how we got from now to the high fantasy Mormonism described in “A Sword Bathed in Heaven,” but I’m pretty sure there’s a way to piece it together if I just keep rereading.
This book really expanded my understanding of what Mormonism and speculative fiction can accomplish together, which is very exciting as someone who hopes to write more in that space. I hope people will pick up these strange stories; they deserve a chance to speak to a larger audience. So often, writing in an LDS setting is seen as a bit campy and lame; Morris makes the reader see again the wonder and mystery of our own tradition as something worthy of attention.
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson – A quick relisten of the second Mistborn series to prep for the final book in the series to be released. I didn’t think I’d have time to squeeze it in, but once I started, I couldn’t resist. The final fight is less compelling when you already know the twist, but the characters still carry this through. And the age-ing up of the Mistborn universe is still a really interesting trick. I am excited to finally bring this series to a close.
Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson – Ouch, that ending still hurts even when you see it coming. I’m not sure why I haven’t returned to reread that Wax & Wayne series as often as I have the original Mistborn or Stormlight Archive. It’s certainly not because the books don’t hold up. I enjoyed seeing the progression of the characters from Alloy to this book, and now that I’m not blindsided by Sanderson’s choice to not have Wax and Marasi get together, it’s a really satisfying twist on the reader’s expectations. (Plus now we all know Steris turns out to be awesome.) This time I was reading for theological implications in preparation for a podcast episode about Mormonism in the series, and it’s definitely there. So much of the plot in this book (series, really) relies on the idea of agency vs foreordination. Lots of interesting concepts to consider.
The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson – Confirmed Sanderson still an evil genius when it comes to plot. Can’t wait for the fulfillment of all the greater Scadrial and Cosmere hints in this book when I crack open The Lost Metal. I loved Wax’s anger at Harmony that fuels a lot of this book, and Sanderson manages to resolve it without resorting to simple platitudes. It’s a complex relationship and doesn’t get a solution so much as a ceasefire to pursue common enemies.
Speaking of relationships, I have never felt so strongly seen as with the growth of Steris into the best dang character in the series. I mean, Wax loves her so much he’s willing to go through her spreadsheets with her? Exactly what every woman wants. *Swoon* Or at least nerds like me. I love that Sanderson’s female characters tend to be nerdy-types. We get a lot of stereotypical girly-girls and bad-ass heroines in other series, but where else do we get not just one nerdy girl with spreadsheets and charts, but another that’s a detective who loves stats and social science? And it works in a high fantasy setting? What even is this series? But I love it so much.
The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson – I can’t believe Wax and Wayne are finally finished. The plot of this book is still full of the fun pulpy tropes that make the series what it is, plus a whole bunch more interconnections with other books that blow the Cosmere wide open. I enjoyed fun team-up with characters from other magic systems, even if it felt a little too “Marvel” cinematic to me. I’d prefer we had more time to do more in-depth examinations of the differences between the various cultures. But I suppose there’s plenty of time for that in Mistborn era 3 & 4!
The overall book is perhaps not as coherent in its tropes as the first three books (respectively, the wild west meets the city, a political detective thriller, and an Indiana Jones adventure), though I guess you could say this one was a disaster movie. It’s a little more its own thing than the others were.
Marasi and Wayne’s plot lines worked for me, but Wax and Steris seemed to be just rehashing what had happened in previous books–not even rehashing, just summarizing and coasting off of previous growth. I did enjoy seeing a main character be a loving parent, a stage in life too often ignored by epic fantasy. But Wayne really steals the show. There’s a strong arc of him learning to become less of a jerk without sacrificing his slightly crude and unserious personality. I liked that he still felt like Wayne even as he shed some of his problematic prejudices.
Overall, a fitting ending for the W&W series. Can’t wait for the time jump to see where the Mistborn series goes next, especially if we get greater on-screen involvement of the three characters from the first series.
The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien – The second volume in my quest to redeem myself as a fantasy scholar by actually reading the Lord of the Rings. This book is actually much more of a mess than the first book. It seems like Tolkien was hesitant to switch back and forth between perspectives so that all the storylines could move at once. (Or perhaps it had not been invented yet?) So it’s a bit of a strange experience to have the battle of Helm’s Deep, which is rather short and not at all the climactic event of the film, take place at the one-third mark of the story. We then get the story of Merry and Pippin’s interactions with Treebeard almost entirely told through dialogue as they explain to Gandalf and co. where they’ve been. And finally in the final third of the book, we have the completely separate adventures of Sam and Frodo.
In the category of things that I’m baffled were actually in the book:
- Gimli and Legolas’s kill count competition
- Merry smoking a pipe in the ruins of Isengard
- What’s taters, Precious?
I guess I had this idea of Tolkien as a Serious Writer with lots of Lore and Mythological References, but I had no idea that the man is a master of understated British humor.
The Two Towers makes me understand a little more those book fans who complained about the glorification of war in the films. There’s definitely less emphasis on combat in the book and a lot more on travel and lore, which ends up being deprecated in the film version. Although speaking of which, it did feel like the lore dropped off quite a bit in some parts of this book compared to the first one, Trebeard excepted because that guy can go on and on. I will need to rewatch the film of this one to do more comparisons, as it doesn’t coordinate as much shot for shot as the first one did.
Overall, Tolkien still much more readable than I expected, though definitely suffering from the lack of some of the narrative techniques that would later be vital to the genre he invented. On to the Return of the King!
Nonfiction
This Strange and Sacred Scripture: Wrestling with the Old Testament and Its Oddities by Matthew Richard Schlimm – This book is an interesting compilation of all the problems people have with the Old Testament (eg violence, gender roles, etc) and how some deeper thinking can help. While the problems are not always resolved per say, I think the author provides sufficient reason to not reject the Old Testament entirely. Not that I was at any risk of doing so. Some of the problems were more specific to an evangelical audience and didn’t apply to me as a Latter-day Saint who has different ideas about the nature of the Bible, but others are ones I had heard at church before. The “Old Testament as a friend” metaphor was a little too cute for my taste, but it got the point across and served as an organizing principle. This book is a surface-level look at problems and provides resources for digging in further to anything that particularly troubles you. Despite its flaws, I recommend this resource to anyone who struggles with the difficulties of the Old Testament.
