What I Read: June 2023

Summer has been a mix of lazy days with massive productivity. At home, I’ve been letting myself indulge in hours of Tears of the Kingdom gameplay with my kids and also reading the first Harry Potter book aloud to my two youngest ones (their first time!). We’ve also been teaching my daughter how to ride a bike: both exhilarating and heartbreaking knowing that she’s the last one! On the weeks that my older kids are going to camps at BYU, I have spent the whole day on campus, practicing for the fall and putting my head down to get through edits while my husband watches the younger ones at home. I’m also prepping for our big family road trip for the summer–we’re driving all the way to New York on a self-guided church history tour, so there’s a lot of planning to be done if we’re to survive with our relationships intact. I hope you’re all finding time to relax and staying cool in the heat!

The biggest writing news from June was the publication of “Reclaiming the Desert” at Wayfare Magazine. They paired my story with amazing artwork of the Utah landscape by Brekke Sjoblom. Her geometric landscapes really fit the futuristic yet natural solar punk feeling I was going for. I’m thinking I have to buy one of her works for my wall now. Anyway, the story is free to read, and once you’re finished, you can take a look at my author’s note to find out about some of the real-world science behind the setting.

I was also invited to present my paper on Mormons writing about aliens to the Mormon Transhumanist Association at their June gathering. (Reading list from the paper here.) Turns out, the MTA has a lot of speculative fiction fans, which in hindsight should have been obvious. They had some great discussion points for me to consider which will influence my future work on the history of LDS speculative fiction.

Our final two episodes of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree before taking a summer break are about space Jews in season three of the Mandalorian and the movie version of the Les Miserables musical.

And if you’re reading this when it’s posted, we’re at the beginning of week two of the “Around the World in Mormon Literature” contest by the Mormon Lit Lab. I’m on the Lit Lab board and it’s been exciting and exhausting to see all the work that goes into producing a multi-language contest. Please read along with me and vote for your favorites! (Not to bias you, but I’m loving the invented folklore of “The Five Angels of Eden” by Claudio Oliveria.)

And now, on to the book reviews!

Speculative Fiction

This Ever Diverse Pair by Owen Barfield – This book contains a mishmash of things that I like and so I enjoyed it. I don’t know if it really coheres together as a whole, and it certainly hasn’t made the splash across history that books by the other Inklings have. The premise (largely autobiographical, as I understand it) is that a London-based lawyer has so suppressed the part of himself that was artistic and literary in favor of the part that is hardworking, practical, and lawyerly that he has split himself into two people, respectively Burgeon and Burden. The book is largely written in Burgeon’s voice and his laments over the need to focus on the practicalities of earning a living to support his family over the indulgences of creating poetry seem strikingly modern. (Specifically, it reminded me of the students cited in the recent “End of the English Major” article in the New York Times, saying they’d love to study literature, but they needed to study something like marketing or bioengineering instead because its more practical.)

The style is patchy and uneven. Some chapters are narrated to the reader as if Burgeon is writing them down in a diary. Other chapters revert to a screenplay format with the two characters arguing back and forth. And some chapters take the form of long legal conversations and treatises which are difficult to follow. Sprinkled throughout are Burgeon’s attempts at literature: poems, plays, speeches, mostly in a doggerel style which is all he can manage after an exhausting day of lawyering. There’s also a long philosophical section on the Platonic ideal of a lawyer and two chapters that are almost entirely dreams. I am left thinking that the book could have been a classic with a few more editorial passes to smooth out and expand the book further. But perhaps that misses the point of a book that’s written in the scraps of time between cases.

I am overall shocked by how much this book feels relevant to today. Burgeon could have been written by a modern Twitter correspondent, complaining about the dehumanizing nature of capitalism. And Burden’s complaints about the constant interruptions that ruin his carefully laid work plans and the “tyranny of the telephone” constantly ringing sound exactly like the complaints about Slack and email today. Additionally, there’s a chapter predicting a possible future where the idea of marriage will be bifurcated between those who think it’s a contract between two people to be broken at will, and those who think of it as a solemn religious covenant in which the community has an interest. It sounds straight out of the early 2000s arguments over gay marriage, only inspired by the author’s experiences with divorce cases in England instead.

In many ways, this book makes me depressed about all the art we’ve missed out on because we are not all free to pursue our heart’s desire but are bound by practicalities. What else could Barfield have written given the time and space? On the other hand, I agree with the novel’s eventual conclusion that every person needs the humanities in their life as a source of meaning, and that even the most technical of jobs can be at least partly done in a way that satisfies the impulse to create within ourselves. Overall, an underrated book. If you can deal with the unevenness of the novel, the insightful contents will surprise you.

Fiction

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave – My local book club picked this one, and I’m glad that I read it. I don’t do a lot of reading in the suspense/thriller/mystery genre. Partly this is because these books don’t tend to have enough dragons in them, but partly it’s because I have a difficult time emotionally reading about families (particularly children) in peril. I have no issues with books about the end of the world, but if it’s about trying to rescue your husband/wife/child who is in peril, that’s for some reason too much for me. (I similarly am fine with almost any episode of CSI but I hit skip if a child is involved.)

I kept bracing myself for the impact of something really terrible to happen, but this book is surprisingly gentle on that front. Mostly it’s a puzzle book of trying to figure out why her husband ran. I did guess a few bits and pieces but was pleasantly surprised on others. I was disappointed that they didn’t dive more into the software he was developing, as the premise reminded me of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. The concept of internet identity removal software seems to be a common near SF trope. Overall, a fun, quick, and compelling summer read. I’m looking forward to watching the Apple+ miniseries with my husband sometime.

Nonfiction

Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature by Sarah Hart -A really fun read for anyone whose interests cross over between the mathematical and the literary, and after reading this book, I’m convinced that intersection isn’t as small as I’d previously thought. This book covers the intrusion of the math into fiction from several angles: mathematical forms of literature like poetry and other pattern constrained forms, the symbolism surrounding certain numbers in fairy tales, mathematical works of fiction (eg Flatland, Alice in Wonderland, and The Library of Babel), math as a worldbuilding technique to make things more believeable, mathematical analogies in literature (like the deriviative analogy I just read in War and Peace), the use of famous math problems as tropes (eg Fermat’s last theorem, fractals, etc), and the portrayal of mathematicians in fiction.

As you can see, the book is absolutely exhaustive in its collection of all things math and literature. I need to buy the physical edition of the book as many of the charts were difficult to imagine from the audiobook descriptions. Plus, I think this is one I will pass along to my nerdy offspring who love charts, calculations, and reading.

My biggest takeaway from this book was her description near the end of how poets and mathematicians are alike: they both need to think radically essentially and creatively about reality and represent it in the most spare possible way with no extraneous information. The idea of how mathematics used to be a popular hobby for educated people is so far away from our current conception of how technical and boring it must be shows how the artificial split between the humanities and the sciences has, perhaps, been to the detriment of both.

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber – I picked up this book because of the title similarity to CS Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, and it’s obviously intentional. This autobiographical study of Weber’s Christian conversion while at Oxford strikes a lot of the same notes as the friendship that led to Lewis’s own conversion. I found it interesting that as a literature student, she fell immediately in love with the Bible including the baffling Old Testament bits, but her biggest struggles were with her received stereotypes of Christians in the media as dupes or self-righteous hypocrites. Her family backstory also gave me the vibes of Tara Westover’s Educated, though inverted as she’s moving from a dysfunctional secular family towards believing at Oxford whereas Westover went from a dysfunctional Mormon family towards secularism at Oxford.

I found some parts of her conversion infuriatingly vague. She glides over the issues of ordinances and denominations (obviously important to me) in only a few dismissive paragraphs. Very evangelical of her, but I suppose I can live with it. Some of her explanations and apologetics were a bit glib for me as well; I imagine they wouldn’t hit well for a non-believing reader. But overall, it was fun to see a more modern version of Lewis’s conversion, though not too modern as she learns about email at the beginning of the book. I wonder if it would be possible to write a similar conversion account now. If academia was hostile to Christianity back when the book was set, imagine how things look now.