New year, new reading challenge! This year, I’m trying out the 5×5 Challenge (via the Scholé Sisters homeschooling community). The premise is to pick 5 categories or topics you want to read about more in-depth this year, then select 5 books for each category over the course of the year. It comes out to about 2 books a month. I’m hoping this will be a way to balance my need for structured reading with the ability to still pick up random books from the library (or more realistically, the new Brandon Sanderson novel).
My five categories for 2022 are:
- Old Testament Context – Our church’s Come Follow Me curriculum this year is on the Old Testament. In addition to reading a new translation, I want to get some background on how to get your head around the Old Testament. Some of these will be LDS-specific and some more generally Christian or even Jewish (I hope to pick up Robert Alter’s Psalm translation.)
- Mormon Lit Backlist – Filling in some works by Mormon authors that have been on my TBR pile for a while that I need to get to.
- Stoicism – It’s been a rough year for me coping with the new political environment in Utah (really, several years and the whole country would also work here). I’m hoping that reading about stoicism will give me some tools to both act according to my conscience while not drowning in anxiety and anger.
- Reading the Hugos – Working my way backwards through the novel winners that I haven’t read yet.
- Books Becoming Movies – Because I like to have read the book first, plus my other categories are so serious that I felt like I deserved a break.
Now on to the reviews!
Speculative Fiction
Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children #7) by Seanan McGuire – I’ve enjoyed most of the volumes of this series but this one just didn’t work for me. There were some plot points where characters had to make logical leaps based on knowledge they didn’t have. I also wasn’t satisfied with the ultimate resolution about the nature of the “other school.” Perhaps the author is leaving it open for a further sequel? I hope so, but I still feel this book was lacking in overall hijinks.
Rejiggering the Thingamajig and Other Stories by Eric James Stone – I picked up this collection after meeting the author at a convention. (He was also the guest judge for the “Saints, Spells, and Spaceships” contest.) I figured as an aspiring scholar of Mormon SFF, it was long since time for me to read “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made.” I really enjoyed that story’s take on evangelizing aliens and the ethics thereof. Even better than “Leviathan” was the story “Salt of Judas” which is a sort of mashup of the living portrait concept with the LDS concept of the soul being “refined matter.” I have always known that theological concept was ripe for SFF use, and Eric James Stone really pulled it off. “The Ashes of His Fathers” was another favorite, with the way it takes seriously the religious beliefs of its characters, even though the other characters see him as a fanatic.
One really great feature of the collection was the author’s notes included at the end of each story. Reading them all was a great lesson for me as an aspiring writer in different angles to use to approach creating a story. Lots of writer resources to look up as well.
Penric’s Progress by Lois McMaster Bujold – Re-reading the first three Penric novellas as a whole rather than separately. Penric’s Demon is rather less connected than the second two novellas, Penric and the Shaman and Penric’s Fox. This readthrough, I was struck by how Bujold makes such small stories feel so big. There are no “end of the world” plots here, just simple detective plots interwoven with interesting magic and worldbuilding. These novellas are great fun and much less traumatic than her novel length works. Perfect for comfortable reading when the world is already too stressful.
Nonfiction
How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life by Massimo Pigliucci – A great introduction to my 5×5 challenge category on the Stoics. Pigliucci breaks down the concepts of stoicism and relates them to religious ideals as well as modern science. I listened on audio, but I think I’ll need to go through with a print copy to take some notes on important phrases and exercises. There’s a bit of a quirky tone, as the author pretends for most of the book that he’s talking to the ancient Greek philospher Epictetus, and it’s a little distracting until you get used to it. (“I asked Epictetus what he thought, and he explained the concept to me this way.”) Overall, I feel like I got some practical tips that can help me manage my own life in a more ethical/happy way, plus I learned a lot about the ancient stoics and a few modern ones. Now on to read the originals.
Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible by Mark L. Ward Jr. – First book in my 5×5 category of Old Testament context. A great overview of what makes the KJV great and not so great, along with why you should be reading multiple translations. A short book that covers all the basic arguments. As a Mormon, I wanted rather more background on each of the translations and the perspectives they came from (since I am not in the evangelical context assumed by the author), but at least after reading this book, I know where to start looking.
Mormonism and the Movies edited by Chris Wei – (review cross-posted at AML) This book is a great collection of essays on the many different ways Mormonism can interact with film: as a director/producer, as an actor, as a consumer/viewer, and as a critic. Some of the ideas were familiar to me, but just as many were new or stated in a more beautiful and succinct way that I had heard them before. I hadn’t seen some of the films mentioned, particularly the independent or artistic ones, which occasionally made the reading a bit harder. (Many of these films are now on my watch list.) But when I came across an essay that focused on something I had seen before, that’s when the book really spoke to me.
Essays I particularly enjoyed:
“The Case for Resurrection: A Mormon Movie Manifesto,” Barrett Burgin – I am one who enjoyed the much benighted Mormon cinema of the early 2000s. Mock me if you wish. But Burgin gives a deft analysis of what worked and what didn’t, and challenges creators to reclaim the movement in a more sincere and realistic way. His vision of the mainstreaming of films about Mormons is one I share for Mormon literature.
“Watching Bodies: An LDS Ethic of Spectatorship,” by Scott Parker – I admit that some of the philosophical language was a bit above my head, but I think this essay lays out a good case for how to morally and ethically move beyond the “wholesome,” Disney-level of movie watching into exploring films that are more tough to process.
“My Mother’s Broomstick: Navigating a Faith Crisis with Kiki’s Delivery Service,” Brooke Parker – I have never seen someone describe the point of Kiki as clearly as Brooke does in this essay, and it meshed well with the narrative of her own questioning of her beliefs.
“Groundhog Day,” Adam S Miller – More of a creative non-fiction piece than an essay, it reads much like the original film only even more intense because the author brings your life into the situation.
“Three Approaches to Crisis,” Chris Wei – Perhaps I enjoyed this one because of the abundance of references to films that I actually had seen, but I also think it’s an excellent analysis for dealing with a faith crisis. I could easily see (and I mean this as a compliment) this essay as a great basis for a 5th Sunday lesson on dealing with doubt and crisis, with the films mentioned being used as particularly vivid examples to the youth. Highly recommend this essay to everyone.
Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism by Terryl Givens – I had read some of Eugene England’s essays as part of my (so long ago) college experience at BYU. I remembered that I had been really impressed by them but didn’t remember any specifics about why. This book covered the things I remembered and so much that I never knew about England’s conflicts with church authority. Whether you side with him or church authorities, there’s so much to be learned here about how institutional change in the church happens or does not happen. Also, England was really prophetic on the need to inoculate youth about church history questions and sticky bits. The things he wrote about it predicted the direction the church itself would go decades later as the internet made the “just don’t read about it” approach untenable. Terryl Givens was the perfect author for this book as he’s able to use his trademark explainer-style to help the reader understand the background of the many intellectual battles that England was involved in. I recommend this book to any Mormon interested in Mormon intellectual history of the past 50 years. England is a figure you need to know.
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang – This book is really long and I ran out of time to finish, but the 50% I did read was fascinating. Jung Chang follows the history of her family from her grandmother (a warlord’s concubine) down to her mother (a member of the communist party during the revolution) to herself (which I mostly didn’t get to). The book goes into in-depth detail on the politics of China’s various revolutions; I learned a lot about the pressures faced by ordinary people. The plot tied into a thread of history I’m frequently thinking about, which is, what makes a revolution stick in a country and what makes permanent cultural shift really possible? You could see in this book why communism was appealing–the massive nepotism and corruption of pre-Communist China was a huge problem that communism promised to solve. And people like the narrator’s father really put forth genuine effort to solve it, even though overall there were still so many societal problems. I would love to come back to this book when I have the time to give this question the thought it deserves; or perhaps even better, find a non-fictional study of this transition in Chinese history.
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