This month I was the ending of a lot of things: my speculative fiction class at BYU (which convinced me to apply to grad programs next year), my Under the Banner of Heaven analysis for Public Square Magazine, and my presentation on colonialism in the Stormlight Archive for the Mormon History Association. We’ve also put the podcast on summer break.
I am kind of exhausted and looking forward to a summer break and maybe getting back into some fiction writing of my own after all this academic and nonfiction writing. I’m going to just try to relax for the whole month of July, then jump back into the mix in August as the kids go back to school. (Did I mention my youngest is starting first grade?! It feels both so long in coming and too soon at the same time.) I will certainly be doing a lot of reading during the break, trying to catch up on a few books people sent to me for review as well as books that I bought at LTUE and MHA. A reader’s work is never done!
Speculative Fiction
The Sum of All Men by David Farland – This book has been on my radar since I wrote a paper during my undergraduate years on Mormon authors of speculative fiction and heard it cited as an example of Mormon themes in mainstream SF. It’s been in the back of my mind since because David Farland/Wolverton was the mentor of several writers who I enjoy. I finally picked it up after the author’s unfortunate passing last year.
Well, maybe this book has just not aged well or it’s just not for me. There’s a lot of worldbuilder’s disease in this book, pages of explanation of interesting economic systems and battle tactics. The book is structured largely around action, particularly military action, which we follow through from beginning to end with very little interpretive lens. What’s missing for me are compelling characters. They were not easy to empathize with and didn’t seem to change a lot over the course of the book. In other words, this book is all plot and no story.
That all being said, the central magic system of the book and its implications are brilliant, no doubt. I just wish it had been pulled off in a way that made me care more about those implications.
Stephen Leeds: Death and Faxes by Brandon Sanderson, Max Epstein, David Pace, and Michael Harkins – An enjoyable entry in the Stephen Leeds series. I really didn’t expect I’d be getting Manicheism in a speculative fiction wrapper, but here we are! Another excellent example of how Sanderson’s work is deeply intertwined with religious ideas–although actually this volume was written with more of a television-style writers room it seems, as part of Sanderson’s quest to expand his ability to put out stories to the point where I can’t keep up. If they all work as well as this one does, I welcome our new Sanderson corporate overlords.
The Orphans of Raspay by Lois McMaster Bujold – What stood out for me on this quick re-read was the set-up of the orphans to be important to Penric’s life in future books. Will one of them inherit Desdemona? I also enjoyed the three try/fail cycle plot more than the first time. Still, not one of the more memorable P&D novellas for me.
Fiction
Under the Tulip Tree by Michelle Shocklee – An interesting examination of a historical fact I had not heard of before: the federal writers’ program and the interviews they cataloged with the last former slaves in the 1930s. I had expected the book to contain a panoply of interviews, but instead we quickly drill down into the story of one particular former slave and her journey through the Civil War to the present. This book strikes many contemporary themes like privilege and white guilt, but the strongest themes in the book are of redemption, forgiveness, and change. It’s a difficult story to tell, but ultimately hopeful. Highly recommend this book.
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens – Certainly less depressing than the premise makes it sound: a six-year-old girl is abandoned in the marsh and manages to survive. I think the key that I didn’t realize before picking it up was that she doesn’t do this alone. Though the townspeople are largely as prejudiced and unhelpful as you would expect, the few people who do help her are heartbreakingly good and always manage to handle her with the perfect amount of care. There were echoes of my childhood favorite Island of the Blue Dolphins in here.
However, there is another storyline at work here, one with sexual assault and murder. The eventual resolution definitely raises some questions: are we to accept the morality of nature or the human ideals of justice and mercy? Perhaps the popularity of this book is partly because of its release on the heels of the Me Too movement. Definitely some things to think about.
Read as part of my Books to Movies category for my 2022 5×5 challenge. Now I guess I’m ready to watch the movie!
Nonfiction
Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin – As befits one of the masters of the genre, this book is an excellent guide to writing fiction. Short and snappy yet not at all superficial, the process of writing is examined from the creation perspective rather than a retrospective look at the finished product.
I found particularly interesting her chapters on point of view and changing point of view. Most authors stick to commenting on first versus third person, but Le Guin identifies several other types of narrators and discusses their uses. It’s the first writing book I’ve read that doesn’t just dismiss the omniscient narrator as an artifact of the Victorian age but really engages with its uses.
Another fantastic part is the appendix on running a peer group workshop. I had heard some of these principles before, but Le Guin lays them out succinctly and establishes *why* they matter. (This chapter does show its age when it begins incredulously that there’s no way for people to meet online “unless people can Skype as a group.” So that needs updating.) I’m excited to do the exercises in the book sometime this fall: they seem really intriguing.
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs – I found this book through a quote on the Modern Mrs Darcy blog about there being five acceptable reactions to a book as an adult reader. That quote is actually a quote from Auden within this book; there are so many quotable quotes in the book for fans of reading in general. This book fights both against the idea that reading is dead in the age of the internet and the idea that our reading should be directed to some virtuous list of “important” books. It’s very much a philosophy of what it means to be a reader and how we go about being readers in the modern world.
Jacobs is a firm advocate of reading at “whim,” that is, reading what we feel like reading rather than what we feel like we should be reading. I feel torn about this. On the one hand, this validates the side of me that felt bad preferring speculative fiction over the classics as an English undergrad. On the other hand, I love making reading lists and flow-charts. I have a complex Trello board TBR system right now.
I also enjoyed his comments on marginalia and how those processes change when reading on a Kindle or other digital device. I’ve been looking for better reading practices myself as I look toward returning to school. The author gave me a lot to chew on in this direction, though I wish he had included a more descriptive list of useful marks, even as I understand how that would contradict his central thesis. Overall, highly recommend this romp on the essence of being a reader.
