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.

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

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!

Speculative Fiction

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien – Well, I am now officially finished with my first-ever read through of the Lord of the Rings. Some fragmentary observations:

I had heard book fans complain about the lack of the scouring of the Shire in the films. I understand why it wouldn’t have worked. The Return of the King film already had too many endings as it was. I was surprised to find that the novel had even more. In fact, the “ending” of the ring is about 1/3 of the way through the audiobook! Still, I found the scouring an interesting choice by Tolkien. It highlights the way that the journey has changed our four Hobbits from the way they used to be and gives some personal consequence to a war that has been largely fought away from the Shire.

I find it interesting that the mercy shown towards Saruman led him to become this petty creature, no longer formidable and easily defeated, but still clinging to destructiveness and anger rather than choosing to “consider his ways.” An interesting commentary on the nature of evil and repentance which reminds me of The Great Divorce.

The whole business with Pippin and Gondor is much more drawn out and confusing to me in the book than the film. In spite of that, it’s still moving and inspiring.

And yes, I listened to the entire appendices. This was the lore-indulgence that I expected from Tolkien, which wasn’t as thick in the rest of the series as I had thought. I was surprised to find how much of the story of Aragon and Arwen was complete here. Given how much fans complained about its insertion in the movies, I had assumed much of it was made up whole cloth, but it seemed to come through largely intact.

It may be a while, but I enjoyed my journey through Middle Earth enough that I will probably get to The Silmarillion at some point. I hope my Inklings project will also give me more context on Tolkien’s work and his relationship with other writers.

Lies and Prophecy by Marie Brennan – Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series and its standalone sequel Turning Darkness into Light are some of my absolute favorite fantasy ever. I was hoping to repeat the magic with another academically-focused series by her. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up liking this one. The setting of this book was amazingly intriguing and yet underdeveloped. It was like going to Hogwarts but almost never talking about the classes and there are only a few mentions of quidditch. I wanted a much more immersive experience. The concept for the series–that some ancestral fae part of humanity suddenly awoke and gave half the population magic powers–is barely hinted at rather than fully explored. I felt like lots of things were happening to the characters but the characters themselves had really no choice or motivation in the matter. Disappointing. I still give it three stars for the potential to be awesome.

Fiction

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin – Okay, I heard this book recommended absolutely everywhere, and I thought I would hate it. A baby being raised by a bookseller? How much more pandering does the literary audience need?

I should have listened. I loved this book. The short story recommendations made me want to run out and find them right now. The characters are just quirky enough to be interesting but still realistic. It’s a love letter to books of all kinds and to the reading community at large without being exclusive or elitist. Police procedurals are just as valid as literary short fiction, and the main character admits that despite being sort of snobbish, he doesn’t actually like some highly admired authors and finds that he enjoys True Blood, much to his chagrin. A fun and self-reflective book for readers of all varieties.

Patrick Stewart Performs A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – Should this even be on here? Does this count as a book or a performance? And should it be in the speculative fiction section? (Arguably, yes.) Either way, Patrick Stewart’s abridged version of A Christmas Carol, complete with voices and sound effects all by him, is an absolutely vital Christmas listen for me. If you’re a fan of Captain Picard, I can’t recommend it enough.

And All Eternity Shook by Jacob Bender – This short mission memoir is a heartbreaking story of faith in a God who doesn’t always give us what we desperately want. Far from a trite restatement of platitudes about divine will, the author really digs down into the heartbreak of a wrestle with God over something that really matters to us. Had it been less skillfully executed, it might have felt like a tantrum, but I absolutely bought the author’s rage and despair. It shook me with its raw revelation of emotion. (Some parts struck a little close to home as my husband’s mother nearly died from a stroke when he was on his mission, and in some ways the mother he grew up with was gone when he returned.) The author brings that tension between serving God and yet also being abandoned by him into sharp, painful focus, from which he doesn’t let you look away.

At some points near the end, the literary affectation of swapping back and forth between his childhood, his mission, and the story’s “present” begins to break down into incomprehensibility, I think intentionally, but for the majority of the book, the effect is pulled off well. The focus on how going on a mission affects life afterwards makes this book stand out for me from other works in the mission memoir category. This is a truly Mormon story, to be sure, but I think most believers could appreciate the grapple with what Lewis called “the problem of petitionary prayer.”

Nonfiction

Fleeing the Garden: Reading Genesis 2-3, ed by Adam S. Miller – I love the idea of a deep reading of scripture, going through one or two chapters and giving them the thought and weight they deserve. Some of the essays were definitely more striking to me than others. I don’t know that this is the fault of the essayists but perhaps of the reader.

I particularly loved Julie M Smith’s “Paradoxes in Paradise,” which delves into the complications of the Mormon doctrine of the fortunate fall. We can be quite glib about this idea, acting like the book of Moses solves all the problems of the Genesis story, but Smith really digs in and shows how basically all readings of the fall (positive, neutral, negative) are problematic. At the end of her essay, I came to the conclusion that the inability of the fall story to be simplified is what makes it important and true to me as a believer, a foundational mythos worth thinking over and returning to again and again.

Ben Spackman’s close analysis of the naming conventions in Genesis 2-3 was a good follow-up to what I’d previously read about the concept. It makes it clear that it’s not clear, that it isn’t *just* a symbolic tale with a metaphorical protagonist or a concrete history about a real person, but some blending of the two. Adam Miller’s essay on “theoscatology” (use your Latin roots for that one) had really insightful points about the nature of mortality, once you get over the ridiculousness of the topic.

I will definitely be picking up the other volumes from the LDS Theology Seminar as they fit into my scripture study.

Getting Things Done for Teens: Take Control of Your Life in a Distracting World by David Allen, Mike Williams, & Mark Wallace – When I was 15 or so, I purchased a book on student organization from a college bookstore while at EFY. That book changed my perspective on schoolwork and revolutionized my system for accomplishing them. Later in college I learned about GTD from a friend who carried a little notebook in his pocket as a “capture” device.

Now I have a teenage son who is in desperate need of a wakeup call about being responsible. I picked up this book to see if it could be as lifechanging for him as my book was for me. I’m pleased to say that this is not only a great book for helping a teen be organized, it’s a fantastic review of GTD principles for anyone. I already made a slight tweak to my productivity system since I read it.

I especially love section three, which consists of little experiments to run to test out whether GTD is helpful or not. Sometimes teens won’t believe you unless they do it on their own, and these provide some great options for little challenges to give them. I will return and report back on how these go over with my specific teen. Pray to the parenting gods for me.

Exploring the Apocrypha from a Latter-Day Saint Perspective by Jared Ludlow – I had heard of the Apocrypha before and even encountered some of the stories through classical art (“Judith slaying Holofernes” by Artemisia Gentileschi, anyone?) but had never really dug into what was in these books. I found Jared Ludlow’s guide very helpful, particularly the context about the environment in which these books were (most likely) composed. The summaries of the books were very accurate, at least from the few books I went and read through afterwards. Ludlow made an interesting choice to include a comparison to a Book of Mormon story or something from church history at the end of each chapter. It felt a bit patronizing to me, as if members of the church couldn’t appreciate these stories on their own without backing up their validity with LDS parallels. But that’s such a small part of the book that I can let it go. Overall, a great introduction to the Apocrypha for non-scholars like myself and a good bridge to the New Testament.

Miracle on 10th Street: And Other Christmas Writings by Madeleine L’Engle – Though not every poem or journal entry was a winner, there were enough revelations in this captivating little volume to be absolutely worth my time. I always forget that L’Engle was a writer of faith first and a writer of children’s literature second. Her insights into Advent and Christmas were unique to me as an LDS reader, especially the apparently common idea of tying Advent to the second coming which isn’t something that is emphasized in LDS practice. At first, I was annoyed that I hadn’t finished reading this by Christmas, but it also has some great stuff for New Year’s, so it all turned out great. I particularly will return to her essay “A Call to Jury Duty,” which contemplates the problematic nature of viewing God through the lens of the legal system.