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.
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.
Speculative Fiction
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson – Sanderson’s second secret project gives off serious Hitchhiker’s Guide vibes with its silly over-the-top universe that takes its minutia seriously and its overall concept flippantly. I’ll have to do a reread once my physical book arrives as my children tell me that the cartoons in the margins are delightful.
The main character’s journey to remembering his identity and then changing that identity was almost believable, but that’s fine for this kind of book. It hits the expected standard. I can’t say this will be a new favorite Sanderson, but there are a lot of enjoyable moments along the way and it certainly earns its keep. The ending gives hints of a larger series of novels set in this universe, which I have no idea how Brandon will find time to follow through on, but maybe he’ll toss this to one of his many collaborators to play with.
“The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges -Picked up this short story in its connections to Piranesi (Susanna Clarke was influenced by it) as well as A Short Stay in Hell. The style fits that sort of faux-academia that I’m a sucker, but I’m not sure the message of a meaningless universe being the ultimate meaning is one I’d embrace. Still, always fun to put together the web of literary connections and influences.
The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis – I don’t know if I’ve reread this book since I read it in first grade. It had never been one of my favorites of the Narnia books. I picked it up this month as background for my rereading of Piranesi, to remind myself about the echoes of this book that Susanna Clarke put into her work. The obvious one is Ketterly/The Other sharing a name, a method (manipulation of unwilling innocents), and a motivation (power through control of the supernatural universe). The House also seems to be a blend of the aesthetics of Charn with the responsive world of post-creation Narnia.
This time around, I also noticed the multiple fall narratives in Magician (another theme echoed in Piranesi, which can be read as Piranesi’s movement from innocence to experience). Even though I wish the book went on longer, it was really refreshing to finish a book in only a day. I think I’ll be revisiting more of Narnia soon.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – I return to Piranesi again this year as my book club selected it from my suggestions to read this year. The fact that I can read this book a third time in four years and still be finding new things gives me hints that this book has staying power as a speculative fiction classic. Beautiful themes of solitude, justice, spirituality, art, intertextuality, etc. And the prose is so meditative and deep with allusions to the core of Christian speculative fiction. I say about Clarke what CS Lewis said about Jane Austen: “Her books have only two faults: that they are too few and too short.”
Fiction
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Antony Briggs – Well, it took me twice as long as anticipated and a switch from paper to audio, but I finally made it through War and Peace. In the beginning, I was drowning the tide of Russian names that I had been warned about. By the first third, I was finally getting into it and understanding why the book has been heralded as the greatest novel. By two thirds, I was slogging through again, striving to finish so that I could finally say I had read it.
My main observation is that Tolstoy really wanted people to understand his view of history as an uncontrollable tide that sweeps us all along with it. He intrudes as the author to explicitly give lectures debunking the popular historical explanations of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and eventual defeat. Then he proves his point again by putting us inside Napoleon’s head and on the battlefield with his troops to see just how arbitrary and unintentional everything is. So far, so good.
Part of Tolstoy’s thesis is that the common people have more free will than the great men because they are less pulled along with the forces of history. I have to say that I don’t think that Tolstoy proves this well. In several of the story lines, Natasha’s and Pierre’s in particular, the major choices and events in their lives just seem to happen to them, rather than being something they engaged with consciously. Natasha’s abandonment of her engagement happens almost in a dream and she regrets it almost as soon as it is over. Pierre’s attempts to reform his serfdom have absolutely no effect on the actual conditions of the workers. So it seems that even the nobility have little control over what happens to them and are stuck just experiencing what comes.
Maybe if a common peasant character had been included, we would have seen them actually make choices and prove Tolstoy’s point. As it is, I find the lack of volition among the characters both disturbing and boring. Add that to a plot that’s purposefully designed to be open-ended and without any particular driving plot or conclusion, and I just can’t say I personally think this book is well constructed as a piece of fiction. Oh well, now I know that Tolstoy is probably not the author for me. I’m glad I got through it as least this one time though!
Nonfiction
The Personal Heresy: A Controversy by C.S. Lewis & E.M.W. Tillyard – It took me a while to work through this because it’s more difficult to find time to sit down and parse the book. Lewis’s academic writing was a bit more difficult to parse through than his apologetics (and to be fair, this is at the beginning-ish of his career before he developed his characteristic readable style).
But once I got into the swing of things, I found the conversation via essay between Tillyard and Lewis riveting. I loved the congenial tone: as they try to tear each other’s arguments, they make sure the reader knows that they are only arguing because they really respect the other person’s writing. That conception of engagement as respect is missing from a lot of internet discourse today and we could use more of it.
As for the central argument about whether we can get to know an author through their work, I found value on both sides. I side heavily with Tillyard in believing that certain works could only have been produced by certain authors because their unique interests and thought process. Lewis really overstated the extent to which poetry (and other writing) draws on universal values versus individual experiences. I did appreciate that Tillyard acknowledges that biographical criticism is almost always the weakest kind of criticism and that it’s better if we can engage written work directly rather than as an inevitable result of a person.
However, Lewis convinced me of the danger of “poetolatry,” or the idoloization of the writer as a special human being with special sensitivities and innate talents. It makes it harder for us to teach writing by setting a high barrier to entry (much like the idea of “math people or not math people” does for math instruction) and it sets up an inability to question the work of admitted masters rather than forcing the writing to stand on its own.
Development of LDS Temple Worship, 1846-2000: A Documentary History, ed by Devery S. Anderson – A key to reading this book is the idea of a “documentary history.” This book is a compilation of documents rather than arguments, which I suppose would be obvious to a scholar, but wasn’t apparent to me as a non-specialist reader. The advantage to this format is that as a reader, you get the non-processed documents and get to draw your own conclusions from them rather than being told what to think, though there is some context offered in the footnotes. Once you get over the format and get used to skimming over multiple slightly altered versions of the Church handbook (especially in the later years), you get to dig into a fantastic study of how LDS thought about the temple has grown and changed over time.
I appreciated seeing that the same old discussions come up over and over again in different forms: the altering of garments, the pushing back against modernization by leadership, the constant fight against the changes creeping in by spreading to more temples, the adjudication of complex questions of sealing and worthiness. The more things change, the more people stay the same.
Another insight I had is that the first concerns about people not understanding the endowment don’t show up until the 1940s and 50s, after the culture of Masonry had died somewhat in the United States making the endowment something for which the average member didn’t have a context anchor. Not that the temple is a direct rip-off of Masonry (from what I can tell–I still need to pick up Method Infinite), but that the symbolic language that both drew on fell out of favor in the United States in the meantime. I highly recommend this book for any member with a little patience for reaching their own conclusions about the history of the temple.
