book reviews - Liz Busby | Writer

What I Read: May 2023

School officially ended and summer officially begins! We had a successful camping and kayaking trip at Deer Creek Reservoir to kick off the summer. The lake is so much fuller than it was last year. The rocks I remembered being halfway up the beach were almost completely underwater! A testament to Utah’s insane water year.

Playing Phase 10 is an important part of our family camping culture

Some really good writing news this month: I sold a story! “Birthright” will appear in an anthology of speculative fiction detective stories by Inklings Press! This story features a very costly magic system that twists the relationships in a family to the breaking point. I’m sure it will be a while before the anthology will be available, but I’ll keep you up to date on it. I also turned in my edits on “Reclaiming the Desert” to Wayfare, so hopefully you’ll see that one sooner.

On the other side of the writing desk, I’ve finished the developmental edits for my portion of Irreantum‘s genre fiction issue. I should be diving into copy edits soon. The stories we received for the issue are truly amazing and only getting better with every draft. I’m excited to share them with you.

For Mother’s Day, we released an episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree about the portrayal of Mothers in the Media. Our other episode was one of my kids’ favorites for me to prep for, an episode of the Australian sensation that is Bluey.

This month was a bit light on the reading with all the end of school activities, but I’m hoping to get back on track with the summer months before grad school takes over my reading list in the fall. That is, if I don’t spend all my spare time exploring Hyrule in Tears of the Kingdom. I cannot believe they made a game this good with a reused map. Every minute of the seven year wait was worth it.

Book reviews after the jump!

What I Read: April 2023

April started off pretty poorly with a vacation to southern Utah during which we were supposed to explore Zion National Park, which ended up getting derailed by car trouble and sick kids. But at least our AirBnB had a pool, so that was a plus for the kids who could enjoy it. The month got much better as things went on. My husband and I ran in the Tulip 5K at Thanksgiving Point, and I cut 3 minutes off of my 5K time from this Thanksgiving! I’m still slower than molasses. I have never been fast, and all my hard work over many years was wiped out by back surgery in 2018 followed swiftly by a pandemic. But it’s nice to see that I can actually still improve, even if my training was frequently derailed by Utah’s massive snow totals.

Not many tulips at this year’s 5K due to cold

This month was the Association for Mormon Letters Conference on genre fiction in Mormon literature, and I had an absolute blast. My presentation on aliens in LDS science fiction was well received, and I also picked up a lot of wisdom from the other presentations. You can watch my presentation among the others on the AML YouTube channel, and check out my Mormons and Aliens reading list.

Writing my AML paper took up most of my writing time this month, so I’m looking forward to being more free to pursue some new projects during the summer. One of my major projects will be consolidating the debris from my various note-taking software iterations (Evernote, OneNote, Zotero) into my current solution, Obsidian. I think it had a lot of advantages over my previous solutions, particularly that it can sync with Readwise (which I use for collecting reading highlights) and Zotero (which I use for citations) and allows you to link to pages wiki-style, including ones you haven’t created yet. I hope to get ahead of some of my graduate studies by reviewing and processing in relevant information from last spring’s fairy tale class and other things I’ve read over the years. I’ve been filling up my registration cart at BYU, and fall semester looks to be both exciting and a truckload of work.

Over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we put out two episodes this month, both discussions of recent movies. Our episode on Where the Crawdads Sing discusses the novel in the context of teaching teenagers about dating violence and the novel/film’s context in the #metoo era. And we had a rollicking good time discussing Latter-day Saints’ obsession with Dungeons and Dragons on our episode about D&D Honor Among Thieves.

What I Read: March 2023

It certainly felt like “always winter and never Easter” around here this month. Not only did Utah get continually dumped on with snow (breaking all time records), but it was another tough month of sickness around here with one of my kids missing two weeks of school with a fever topping out at 106. I finished running the school read-a-thon (yay books!), so at least my PTA commitments are finally wrapped up. I’m trying to look positively on them as I won’t have time to participate as much in my kids’ classrooms next year but man, I am really burned out on volunteer service right now.

flower sprout from the ice covered ground — Photo by Artem Meletov on Pexels.com

One of the main reasons I wanted to move back to Utah was to have greater access to Mormon studies events, which tend to concentrate here for obvious reasons. This month, I attended a really interesting talk at the University of Utah by Ben Spackman about the history of evolution in the Church. I’m always interested in the interaction between science and religion. I minored in chemistry (the best science) at BYU and remember receiving some form of the packet on the Church position on evolution that was discussed in this talk. Ben has a recording and notes up on his website, and I highly recommend looking through it. Lots of the situations he described have application for the anti-science movements of today, which, while not sweeping through the Church, are definitely present in most wards today.

My biggest writing news this month is that my essay “Knit Together” received second place in the 2022 BYU Studies Essay Contest! Such an honor as many of my creative nonfiction heroes have also won this contest (and the prize money certainly doesn’t hurt either). I really love this essay, and I’m glad that someone else did as well. I’m excited to share it with you when it’s eventually published in BYU Studies.

On the podcast side, we put out three episodes in March on the two recent Pinocchio remakes, the scifi film Arrival, and the best-picture nominee The Whale. We also received a write-up in the April issue of The Season, the online arts journal hosted by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. I highly recommend checking out the good work they are doing to highlight LDS creators in all aspects of the arts.

In other news, the program for the Association for Mormon Letters conference is up. I’ll be presenting at 9 am MT on Saturday; you can watch live on YouTube all three days. I’m particularly interested in the two Friday evening sessions with papers on some LDS genres I’m less familiar with like interaction fiction and FAQ as a genre, and the panel of LDS speeches (I wrote and presented a paper about LDS rhetoric during my undergrad). Lots of fascinating thoughts to be had!

What I Read: December 2022 & 2023 Reading Projects

I hope your holidays were much more calm and bright than mine. I don’t think we had a single day of the winter break where someone wasn’t sick, including major bouts of vomiting. There was also a good amount of family drama and about a week of rain. Oh well. Such are the holidays.

I hit about half of my word count goal in December, 4500/8000, but as I had forgotten to account for Christmas break, I consider this basically a win. I finished my short story “Memory” and sent it in to Writers of the Future two whole weeks early. They sent out a few emails saying that not a lot of people had entered this quarter, and I feel like this story is my best one yet, so I’m crossing my fingers for it. I’m also still working on my “Landscapes of Faith” essay which is currently wandering every-which-way with no particular purpose.

christmas cookies on white ceramic bowl — Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

In publication news, on the last day of 2022, my essay “Self Portrait in Cookies” came out in Young Ravens Literary Review, issue 17, on the topic of womanhood. Hopefully later this month, I’ll write a little author’s note about this essay, but in general, it explores the relationship between baking and womanhood. Bon appetit!

And over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we released a Christmas special about adaptations of A Christmas Carol as well as our final episode of season one, discussing The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power.

For January, I’m lining up my ducks in a row to get my application for graduate school completed and still working on my proposal for the 2023 AML Conference. I’m thinking something on Mormons and aliens right now. The deadline for the Irreantum genre issue I’m co-editing is also coming up (Feb 1st!). I look forward to reading all of the interesting submissions, so make sure to get yours in.

2023 Reading Projects

four pile of books on top of brown wooden surface — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I’m starting some new reading projects for 2023. I enjoyed the idea of my 5×5 Challenge last year and made some good progress on most of it. But I think I need more structure so as not to put off the books I want to read in favor of the shiny new things I see. This year, I have two major reading projects (three, if you count the year of Sanderson–6 new works by Brandon this year!). First, I’m joining up with the Hardcore Literature Book Club on Patreon to dig into some classics, partly to prepare my brain for grad school and partly because I ran some stats on my Goodreads data and found that the majority of my lifetime of reading is things published in the last 20 years or so. That’s something I hope the HLBC 2023 reading list will correct. (I will probably drop off once/if I go back to school in the fall.)

I’m also planning a personal study of the Inklings in 2023. I’ve got a schedule of approximately a book a month, starting with a history of the group, then working through a fiction and non-fiction book each by Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers (who isn’t technically an Inkling, I know, but I keep hearing so much about her that I figured I might as well include her). Interspersed with these are some of CS Lewis’s works of literary criticism, which are some of the few of his books I haven’t read. If you’re interested in following along, here’s the reading list, though I reserve the right to adapt as needed.

Now on to the book reviews!

What I Read: November 2022

Taken after the 5K, as I never smile while running

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.

What does it say about us as parents that this is the pose we automatically went for?

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.

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2023 Reading Projects

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