January is my birthday month, and usually one of my favorites, but things got off to a rough start this year. The school board was thinking about closing a program my kids participate in, so I had to make time to go and speak at a board meeting. Success: they’ve decided to expand the program instead of close it. Then one of my kids slipped in the snow and got a concussion. On top of regular life stuff, I’ve been struggling to keep all the balls in the air this semester. I finally decided to withdraw from a class last week, so hopefully there will be a bit more breathing room.
Next week is the Life, The Universe and Everything Symposium (number 42!) in Provo. I’ll be presenting my paper on Mormon portrayals of aliens on Thursday and participating in a panel about religious clashes in speculative fiction. On Saturday, I’m on another panel about speculative fiction for various school ages and classes. If you’re coming, please send me an email and let’s meet up!
Speaking of upcoming conferences, my paper on representations of Latter-day Saints in The Expanse and Stranger Things was accepted by the Mormon History Association for their conference in June. I really love this paper and am excited to work on it a bit more in preparation for the conference.
On the podcast side, we’re back in the swing of things with an experimental new short format which will hopefully let us cover more things while spending less time on post-production. Our first short episode is on a documentary called The Mission on Disney+, which is about an evangelical missionary who is killed trying to contact an isolated people. We also released an episode today on Indiana Jones as a possible lapsed Latter-day Saint, with the authors of the popular post over at By Common Consent. It’s a really fun episode!
And now, forward to the book reviews!
Speculative Fiction
The Freezer by Ben Spendlove – Full review at the Association for Mormon Letters. Here’s a shortened version:
In the beginning chapters of the book, aerospace engineer Thane Ryder meets and marries Dawn Smith, a pilot on a space ferry he’s taking to evaluate progress on a spaceship that will hopefully allow a few humans to escape the impending disaster. A rogue planet is destined to collide with Earth in less than a decade, resulting in the total destruction of all human life. Dawn and Thane’s devoted relationship becomes a lifeline of stability in a world that’s being gradually broken down by the specter of doom.
It becomes just as much a lifeline to the reader, pulling us through the otherwise harrowing events of an apocalypse with its passionate description of the goodness of devotion and sacrifice for a family. […] As all life on Earth is under an irrevocable death sentence, Thane is shocked when Dawn tells him that she wants to have a child. Spendlove’s portrayal of Thane’s struggle with this decision is an engagement with contemporary concerns of young couples about the morality of bringing children into a world of climate disaster and political brinkmanship. The novel directly rejects the idea that choosing not to have kids might bring more satisfaction than having them. […]
I believe it’s this post-apocalyptic setup that allows The Freezer’s most profound theme to be moving rather than saccharine. Because we have been through Thane’s fear, his indecision, his grief, and his agony at all the choices the world has for him to make, his growth towards faith at the end of the novel becomes believable. […] I won’t spoil the central fantastical conceit of The Freezer by mentioning the exact circumstances in which Thane must finally exercise his faith. I will say that I wholeheartedly bought the final resolution of the novel because I felt every cost Thane had to pay along the way. This novel had the exact balance of speculative conceits and real humanity that made it a perfect read for me. Spendlove’s prose is compelling and profound, while never straying into self-indulgence. The values of family devotion and hard-won faith are a perfect antidote to anyone feeling the doom and gloom of the 24-hour news cycle. I can’t wait to start buying copies of The Freezer to pass out to the people around me because its harrowing plot wrenched my heart in all the right places to allow hope to grow in its wake.
Cain: A Mystery by Lord Byron – I had no idea this play existed until it was assigned for my Belief and Doubt class. You know, now that I think about it, I think I read more about Lord Byron than I actually ever read of Lord Byron. Anyway, this short play in three acts expands the story of Cain in a style strongly reminiscent of Paradise Lost. Byron creates wives and children for Cain and Abel: winking at the incest-ick factor, Cain’s wife is not only his sister but his twin. This first family is constantly being visited by angels when Lucifer shows up and presents himself as just one more of these. The second act has Satan taking Cain on a world/galactic tour, including showing him the extinct dinosaurs and mammoths and the yet-to-be-peopled hell. The mystery here is not who killed Abel, or whether Cain will kill Abel, but why Cain doesn’t kill everyone after he thoroughly buys into the satanic logic of the unfairness of life. There are definitely some temple resonances here that could be exploited by an LDS critic, particularly the importance of altars and prayer, as well as the literal presence of Lucifer as a tempting figure after the garden. It’s a quick read and the audio version on Libravox does a decent job of a full cast recording.
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis – I hadn’t returned to this short musing on the nature of hell and heaven since reading it for CS Lewis Society many years ago. I had completely forgotten that George MacDonald shows up in the second half! Anyway, what can I possibly say to recommend this classic to the unconvinced? I loved Lewis’s vignettes of the various ways we justify our hellish habits and keep ourselves out of heaven. Where so many modern pieces fall into the trap of making Heaven boring and Hell edgy-cool, Lewis shows us with clear eyes the dreariness of beings who willfully choose separation. And of course, that’s the beauty of Lewis’s vision. Rather than a retributive judgement by God, he focuses on a vision of the atonement which enables us to grow if we both accept it and work with it. It’s another instance when Lewis’s doctrine meshes so well with Latter-day Saint theology.
Fiction
A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza – This story tells of an American Muslim family and how their relationships with each other and their faith change over time. The story focuses mostly on ordinary life events–school friendships, arguments over buying shoes, parties attended or not–and nothing particularly dramatic happens besides life, at least on the outside. But on the inside, these mundane happenings are quietly rearranging the relationships of the family. For a while, I felt annoyed that two of the primary characters fall under classic exit-narrative stereotypes (the one who sees no reason to believe or practice, and the one who rigidly adheres because of a desire to please), but as the book complicated these ideas, I became more okay with it. I felt the mother was the weakest character of the book as she seemed largely helpless to influence her children, doomed to just watch as their lives unfolded as they would, except at one crucial point where she radically misunderstands and squashes what might have been a positive change. (Or maybe not–I would argue that her interference, though devasting, probably prevented something even worse.)
The point of view shifts in the last part to a previously unused character. At first, this threw me off, but in the end, this section made the book for me. Previously inexplicable actions are recontextualized, softening all the previous anger into something more tragic. The book ends with a rejection of doctrine in favor of mercy, yet there was enough of the original faith there to help me really believe it as an adaptation and expansion of faith rather than a watering down of beliefs to indistinct hope. I find that I’ve really enjoyed all three of the Muslim fiction books I’ve read recently, so I suppose I need to pick up a few more.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy – When I mentioned to someone I was finally reading a Cormac McCarthy book, they said, “I don’t know if you’ll like it.” That turned out to be quite true. The style was strange to me, so cinematic as to effectively shut the reader out of the characters’ heads, excepting the long monologues that started each part (which I mostly enjoyed). I read on Wikipedia that this book was originally written as a screenplay and that this isn’t typical of McCarthy’s style, so I won’t come to any conclusions about McCarthy overall from this book, but I did not enjoy the clipped, straightforward style at all. The plot of this book is far from my cup of tea, though I can imagine it making a great action movie. I just wasn’t really invested in any of the characters besides the sheriff. Too much straight gore and violence for my own taste. If I hadn’t been reading this for a class, I probably would have quit the book.
This is all true up until the last 20%. I found the extended epilogue to be better than the entire preceding book. Why? I found the meditations on justice and life’s purpose much more interesting than the fugitive chase. I’m a sucker for older characters reflecting back and reconsidering their choices. And the premise of Chigurh’s particular brand of justice/integrity leaves one with a lot to think about, especially in light of what happens to him. I need to go back and reread that last section to really get my head on straight for what I think about how it ended, but the ending was almost worth the slog of the first 80%.
Nonfiction
The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz – A good summary of the findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I was surprised at the format of the book which focused less on statistics and more on telling the stories of individual participants who embodied the results. The writing style is very listenable for a research book.
No real surprises in this book: the key to happiness lies in maintaining positive relationships with our families, our friends, and even ourselves. One concept that I found really interesting was the idea that different community contexts have different timelines of expected life milestones. So it wasn’t so important whether you married at 19, 24, or 30, but whether this was perceived as “on time” or “off time” in relation to your cultural context. So much of our happiness depends on whether we meet the expectations that we’ve unconsciously set for ourselves; even if no one pressures us on them, we can feel those ideals within ourselves. I’d be interested to read more research on how to moderate the negative happiness pressure that being “off time” can cause. It seems like that is an important point in supporting those around us.
On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche – I know I had heard a lot about Nietzsche before, but I don’t think I had ever read anything extended from him. Setting aside his arguments, I found his very colloquial writing style intriguing. It read like a transcript of someone’s rant rather than a polished and logical piece of philosophy. Of course, as a religious person, I’m bound not to agree with Nietzsche on most points, though he brings up several important issues that I gather people have been wrestling with ever since. There are several cases where LDS belief breaks from traditional Christianity which let us slip out of his nooses, but also some where we ought to be just as convicted. Not being a philosophy student, I am glad I’m in the position not to have to grapple with his accusations directly for the most part. But I appreciate understanding his thoughts a bit more for having read this.
