I don’t know why I’m constantly behind on these book reviews, but it seems to be a fact of life, so I suppose I should stop apologizing for it. August started out with my daughter was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s a big milestone for our family since she’s the youngest child. Now they are all in. The baptism itself was a really special event where both her grandfathers gave talks about their testimony of the gospel. Thanks to all the family who came to support her.
Also in August, my mom and I also went to go see Further Up and Further In, Max McLean’s sequel play to The Most Reluctant Convert. I didn’t think it was quite as thematically unified as the first play though he does a good job of piecing together CS Lewis’s works from the period surrounding the second World War. It was really interesting to see him portray Lewis in person. I sent the info about the show to the BYU campus event coordinator; I’m really hoping to get the show (or both of them!) to campus.
September saw the start of a new semester. I’m only taking one seminar class, a theory-based course on the concept of divine silence–meaning our reaction to not receiving the answers or comfort we may desire from God. You’ll see the beginnings of the reading for that class reflected somewhat in the reviews below.
I’m also starting work on my master’s thesis, which right now is going to be an examination of the Stormlight Archive as a post-secular epic fantasy. My prospectus was approved by my committee, and I’m having an absolute blast doing the research for it so far, which I think is a good sign that I’ve found the right topic to discuss. I’m also teaching first-year writing again and training to teach advanced persuasive writing. It’s been an interesting experience so far working with juniors and seniors instead of freshmen; it’s a lot easier to fill out a discussion because they always seem to have opinions on what to say.
On the research front, Carl and I handed in the final draft of our paper on religious clothing in the Mandalorian. We’ll be presenting that work locally at LTUE in February, and I’m thinking I may submit it to ICFA this year as well (either that and my thesis research).
This weekend, I’m presenting at VICFA, delayed slightly due to the hurricanes in Florida. The theme is on “Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems,” so I’ll be presenting my paper about LDS premortal theology in YA dystopias. I’m excited to see lots of other research combining an interest in real-world beliefs and fantastical literature as well. Perhaps I’ll write up a report for the blog, if you’re interested.
Speculative Fiction
Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson – I’m embarking on a reread of the Year of Sanderson novels so that I can write about their possible LDS references for the blog. Watch for that coming soon, though there’s not a lot to write about in Tress–though if you spotted something I didn’t, I’d love to hear about it. Rereading the story, the eventual “deus ex machina” reads a lot better; there’s more foreshadowing than I remembered, so it’s not as surprising as it seems. The book still has a lot of Cosmere references, which makes me wonder how it reads to the less-Sanderson-obsessed reader, but the real star is Hoid’s storytelling voice.
Elias: An Epic of the Ages by Orson F. Whitney – This is one of those books where I’m contractually obligated to read it as a scholar of Mormon lit but haven’t yet got around to it. I had heard that Elias was a pretty dry read, that Whitney had overstepped his skill as a writer in attempting it. And now having read it, I can’t deny the truth of that statement. Still, I found Elias to be better than I expected and to have many parts that are worth enjoying.
While some have read Whitney’s theological introduction of reincarnation into LDS theology into the text, particularly his belief that he was a reincarnation of Noah/Elias/John the Baptist, this idea isn’t really present in the text. The titular character of the text turns out to be, more than anything else, the spirit of the Restoration. Many individual people from Biblical and LDS history are identified with the title Elias, but so is the entire spirit of the Enlightenment and the Reformation, as well as most other modes of human progress. It seems like Whitney’s understanding of Elias is the unification of the spirit of humanity with the Holy Spirit towards the mission of the eternal life and exaltation of man. It’s a strange choice for something that calls itself an epic poem, and by its nature breaks all of Aristotle’s classical rules about the unity of the epic, but it’s nonetheless interesting.
If you had to read just a section or two of it, I would advise picking the first two cantos, which are about Whitney’s calling as both a poet and a prophet, as well as canto ten, which imagines a dramatic summary speech by Joseph Smith as he goes off to his martyrdom and combines many doctrinal and historical aspects of Mormonism. The first two feel strongly like independent works, and the last canto feels the most “classical epic” of anything in the poem.
The Nephiad: An Epic Poem in XII Books by Michael R. Collings – Honestly, only people who like and have recently read Paradise Lost should read this book. I don’t think I could have appreciated it without the series of classical epics that I read in the lead up to reading Mormon epic. But if you understand the space of tropes that Collings is working with, this one absolutely hits it out of the park. Unlike Orson F Whitney’s Elias, he hits all of the classical tropes of the epic: unity of action focusing on a singular hero, yet also alluding to a massive amount of mythology and building a national myth (in this case for Mormonism).
At first I was hesitant to start yet another retelling of the story of first Nephi, which is redone so often by LDS authors, but Collings succeeded at convincing me that he made the right choice. The platform of the narrative provides him with the ability to reach into biblical, Book of Mormon, and Restoration time periods. He also does a great job filling out the story in the tradition of Paradise Lost. I particularly liked the idea that Laman was friends with Laban’s son, who was killed in a hunting accident for which Laban still blames Lehi’s family. The details Collings adds to the story never try to wrest the narrative away from the scriptural path, yet they add depth to what already exists. I can whole-heartedly recommend this one to anyone who is a fan of both the Book of Mormon and Milton, small as that intersection may be nowadays.
Mr. Bliss by J.R.R. Tolkien – This book was a Christmas gift that had been hanging around for a while before I finally decided to open in. The comparison to Alice in Wonderland in the introduction is slightly off. This is definitely a children’s book, and one full of nonsense, but the level of magical-ness is much less than Alice’s. I might pin it more to something like The Wind in the Willows, though there is one strange magical creature you can’t account for by that comparison. You can feel that the narrative was strung along by telling it to a child; it almost feels as though you can see Tolkien elaborating on the parts that most interested them while leaving behind the parts that didn’t. A quick and strange read, indeed.
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson – A second part to my re-reading of the Year of Sanderson for the purpose of noticing the Mormon-isms. This one is clearly the least Mormon of the lot–I think the only argument I could make is about agency and self-definition being so important to the novel. I caught a lot more of the foreshadowing reading through this time, which is to be expected. I found the theme of words changing the world interesting (perhaps Mormon? but mostly not). I’m baffled by the choice to start out with a lot of swearing and other questionable content in the first chapter only then to have it disappear for the rest of the book. Overall, this book is still mostly just fine for me. The greater multiverse behind it might be more interesting, but I think the reaction to this one is small enough that it might never get written.
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford – I talked about my thoughts on the portrayal of a future state of Deseret in a separate blog post, but now on to my thoughts about the book itself. This alternate history has really subtle worldbuilding, so much so that I missed the divergence point and had to get it from reviews. But the world that does get built is fascinating and deep. The noir detective story allows us to explore all the nooks and crannies while still being grounded in a specific consideration. I feel like the detective story tends to be the fallback plot for books that want to showcase an interesting world, but Spufford really uses it well.
The character work in this book is excellent as well. I loved Joe Barrow; he’s a main character with complicated ambivalence about his position as a half-Indian, half-black character in a society that is sometimes influenced by larger white society and sometimes plays by its own rules. I called the identity of the murderer in the first third of the book, but it didn’t spoil the slow reveal and Spufford made me doubt my own instincts a few times before eventually coming back where I thought he was going.
Unlike some other reviewers, I really enjoyed the syncretism between the Indigenous religion and Catholicism, and there’s just the tiniest hint of the possible supernatural to make you wonder exactly what is true. Highly recommended if you have any interest in alternate versions of America or noir detective fiction with a speculative flair.
Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson – I still love Lift. Her combination of childish self-deception and deeper, more adult hurt is fascinating, and I can’t wait for Sanderson to develop her more in the back half of the series. Though of course I’ll have to wait, at least five years if Sanderson follows through on his break. There’s not much else to say about this one.
Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson – Another reread in preparation for the release of Wind and Truth. A fun little book with some interesting answers and even more questions about the world of Roshar (and the wider cosmere). I still really enjoy the resolution to the Lopen plotline. As for Rysn’s newly gained powers, it seems that those are set-ups for a far future part of the cosmere, but maybe Sanderson will surprise us by making them relevant to Wind and Truth.
Fiction
Silence by Shūsaku Endō – Read this book again for a graduate class on divine silence. I’m pretty sure this is my fourth time reading it, some assigned and some by choice. This time around, I saw a lot of more of Endo’s intentionality in setting up Rodrigues’s conflict with God’s seeming silence in the face of suffering. I also read the ending as a lot more hopeful than I did as a college freshman. This time, I assumed that Rodrigues maintained his faith even though he was forced to remain silent about it, a reflection of God’s own silence towards the Japanese martyrs. I saw more hints in the strange economic log of the last chapter than Rodrigues kept secretly practicing his faith, especially with regards to Kiichijiro. Perhaps this is just contamination from watching the (amazing) film, but it just seemed so obviously intended to be read this way, which would surprise my college freshman self who read it as absolutely atheist in its ending.
Nonfiction
East Winds: A Global Quest to Reckon with Marriage by Rachel Rueckert – I reread this memoir as I’m hosting a book club discussion of it this month. I still agree with my previous assessment, but the book flowed more easily this time for me–perhaps because I was listening to the audio? I really do process things better in audio format. I’m interested to see what kinds of conversations this book’s skepticism (and yet eventual acceptance) about marriage will bring up among a book club of mostly middle age married Latter-day Saint women. I think Rachel definitely comes across as a sympathetic character, even to those of us who made the choices that she fights so hard against in this book.
Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America, edited by Marie W Dallam and Benjamin E Zeller – I picked up this collection as a reference for that paper about The Mandalorian and religious clothing. After the introduction, I focused mainly on the middle two sections, which talk about religious clothing for developing community and for negotiating boundaries in the community. I was, but wasn’t, surprised to find two chapters dealing with Latter-day Saints. Kate Davis’s chapter on missionary clothing guidelines for women vs men was too heavy on theory and light on analysis of details for my taste, but I really enjoyed Jessica Finnigan and Nancy Ross’s chapter on their survey of attitudes towards wearing the temple garment, correlated by gender and “conforming/non-conforming belief.” Other interesting chapters in the book include an essay on the gradual reduction in ritual nudity in Wicca, Amish fashion trends, esoteric Christian tattoos, and Black American adaptations of both Jewish and Islamic dress traditions. Really interesting collection!
The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis – I reread this one before going on to A Grief Observed for class because these two are often read as a pair of theoretical versus experiential thoughts on the subject of theodicy. I know I’ve read this one before, though apparently I didn’t mark it on Goodreads. There were some strange tangents I didn’t remember, like the whole section on whether animals will exist in heaven and whether they have souls. I didn’t quite follow the argument that led to Lewis’s conclusion that domesticated animals have more of a soul than wild animals. It seemed to rely on some assumptions of mainstream Christianity that I don’t share as a Latter-day Saint. Overall, the book has some great one-liners, like pain as the “megaphone to arouse a deaf world” which frequently gets quoted, but the book is less conceptually whole for me than The Four Loves.
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis – I’m always reminded when I read A Grief Observed what a different book it is from most of Lewis’s writing. Sure, the book still has Lewis’s characteristic analogies and readable yet poetic diction, but compared to most of his other work, even Surprised by Joy, his spiritual autobiography, A Grief Observed is so much more emotional and less organized. This book is raw, but does that make it more authentic, more real, and perhaps most importantly, more true?
One helpful analogy for looking at this question is from Lewis’s essay “Meditations in the Toolshed.” In this essay, Lewis describes being in a dark toolshed and seeing a beam of light streaming in from a crack in the door. When he stood in the darkness, he was able to see and examine the beam of light itself; when he stepped into the beam of light, he could no longer see the light but could see the world outside through the beam of light. Lewis called these two experiences “looking at” versus “looking along,” which he identified as a critical difference between discussing theology and having an experience with God.
This distinction strongly relates to the way Lewis wrote A Grief Observed. Because it is essentially a book of experience rather than examination, it provides a different kind of spiritual evidence than his typical writing. In emotion, we can’t have self-examination, but we can have interaction with the divine, or in this case a lack of interaction, like an inverted beam of light that obscures rather than illuminates. Yet both are important to building our understanding of God, and Lewis eventually turns from “looking along” his own experience to beginning to “look at” that experience by the end of the book. It can be a bit uncomfortable if you aren’t used to reading such blatant doubt from the apologist, but understanding where it came from really helps put things into context and also legitimize moments of doubt and anger towards God even in those who strive to believe.
The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim DeFede – This book was my book club’s selection for our September meeting, and I ended up reading it right around September 11th, which is probably the best way to experience the book. If you haven’t already heard the story from this book or the musical that was based on it, DeFede gathers the stories of the passengers on transatlantic flights that were diverted to Newfoundland when the US grounded all air traffic. His descriptions of the friendliness of the Newfoundland community felt really familiar to ways I’ve seen my own community pull together in a crisis. They really turned what could have been a disastrous event into something memorable and life-changing for their temporary guests. It was also cathartic to remember the confusion about exactly what had happened that I think all of us who we watching the news that day felt. There were so many misconceptions about how long they would be there and why, which reminded me that perspective only comes with time. When we get swept up in the latest crisis of the constant news cycle, it’s good to remember that we can set aside our immediate hot takes and wait for more information and greater context.
Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You
by Ali Abdaal – Look, y’all probably know by now that I’m a productivity book junkie. I just can’t help it. They are my comfort reads when the world feels like it’s too much, which of course with the semester about to start, it does. Abdaal’s book has a unique take in that it focuses on how important our emotional state is to our productivity. That makes it sound like he advocates that we only work when we feel like it, which couldn’t be farther from the point. Instead, the twist of this book is to figure out how to make doing stuff feel good instead of guilt-inducing, how to find the joy in the things you have to do and get into the right mindset on purpose, rather than on accident. This puts the book in opposition to the current backlash against productivity that believes “hustle culture” is the source of all the world’s ills. It’s a good, gentle approach to feeling better about life and getting stuff done.
Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job by Diane Glancy – As I feel like I’m saying with increasing frequency, poetry is not my best genre. And this book of poetry, picked up for my class on divine silence, was very postmodern and tough to make anything out of, at least for me. My goal was to get at least one insight out of each section, which I did, so I consider my reading a success. But many times, the most I could say was that my eyes definitely took in every word of the poem.
Glancy’s conceit for the book is interesting. She blends together some narrative poems on the book of Job with historical insights on the battle of Little Bighorn and the destruction of Native American culture. Mixed in are her own experiences traveling to various sites and wrestling with the nature of meaning and a connection with God. I feel like the Job poems were definitely the strongest in terms of being a clearly articulated experience that the reader can follow. Some of the more personal poems left me feeling like an outsider who didn’t get the references to experiences I wasn’t there for. Anyway, I’m not sure my opinion on the book is really worth much since the whole experience could just be tainted by my lack of understanding for poetry in general, rather than Glancy in particular.
An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards, 1953-2000 by Jo Walton – I knew from reading Among Others that Jo Walton had a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the various speculative fiction genres. Yet somehow I’m blown away by the scope of this book. Without even trying, she’s read a good chunk of the Hugo novel nominees as well as the nominees for shorter fiction. I’m fascinated by how much short stories used to be a part of the genre when now they seem to be merely a side game for authors and editors to impress each other.
I can’t say I read every word of this book. I skimmed a lot of the parts that were comments on the original blog posts. But I definitely feel as if I’ve travelled through science fiction history in reading it. I added many interesting books I had never heard of to my to-be-read list, especially from the early years. It was interesting to see patterns of themes and authors emerge.
Of course, it feels slightly unsatisfying that the book stops in the year 2000, before the two major Hugo controversies of my lifetime (the Sad Puppies ballot slating which resulted in major changes to the rules, and the censorship scandal of the Bejing Worldcon). I need to look around online to see what Walton has had to say about them, because she clearly has the background to see these events in context.
