If I told you that I was sewing Halloween costumes at 9 pm on October 30th, you’d get a good picture of the kind of month I had. Lots of work on my dad’s campaign and getting the Reflections contest up and running, plus all the craziness of Halloween with four kids. All of it good work, but lots of time away from the writing I’d like to be doing.
Word count for October fell short again (3770/4000) but not surprising. I missed about a week of time attending the LDSPMA Conference. I learned a lot at the conference (I focused this time on podcasting rather than writing) and met some great people who I hope to work with in the future.
This month’s writing was mostly focused on academic projects. I finished a book review of Into the Headwinds which is going to be published by Dialogue. But the more exciting piece was finishing my statement of intent to apply for the English MA program at BYU. I’ve got everything all rounded up, just waiting on letters of recommendation. I did begin a new short story at the end of the month called “Memories” focusing on a robot nanny. First draft has already gotten some good feedback from my writing group this week, though lots of changes to make of course. I’m really enthusiastic about the prospects for this story.
Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree released two episodes last month, one on Top Gun Maverick (I didn’t think we’d get so many moral lessons out of a summer blockbuster!) and a Halloween special on Midnight Mass.
During November, I’m going to continue polishing “Memories” and start a creative nonfiction piece about the culture shock of moving from Utah to Seattle and back again. If you’re reading this on the day it’s published, you can catch me tonight at 7 pm MT at the launch party for the Mormon Lit Blitz’s second anthology. I’ll be reading “The 37th Ward Relief Society Leftovers Exchange,” and just basking in all the other really interesting authors who’ll be there. Next week, I’m attending Dragonsteel 2022 for the release of The Lost Metal. At the con, I’ll be recording a special episode of Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree talking about Mormonism in the Mistborn series, which is something I’ve always planning to write about. Come and listen in if you’re at Dragonsteel! Due to all this busy-ness, I won’t be attempting NaNo this month, but I’m already eye-ing Camp Nano in April for a return to longform writing.
Speculative Fiction
The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien – I am in the unique position of reading Lord of the Rings for the first time while watching the first season of Rings of Power. Of course, I love the films which came out while I was in high school. But when I attempted to read the books back then, I bounced right off of Tolkien’s slow prose and love of lore. But I determined this was the year I needed to redeem myself as a fantasy fan, so here I am.
Watching Rings of Power actually made the songs, poems, and other digressions that Tolkien indulges in more tolerable because I recognized some of the characters I was watching in the new show. It does highlight the self-consistency and effort Tolkien put into the lore of the world. Given that in the initial writing challenge between him and CS Lewis, he was to write a book about “time,” I think he absolutely succeeded on this merit. While the storytelling style is a little slow and impersonal compared to current trends, the fact that his writing still holds up after so many years is astonishing.
I was surprised at how many scenes of the movie are directly lifted from the book (lucky fans to get such a good adaptation). Merry and Pippin certainly did get the Ron Weasley treatment as they are much more distinct in the book whereas the film flattens them into a comic duo. The Tom Bombadil section is wild, and I am still puzzling over its significance. I suspect I will have to dive into the literary analysis to completely understand it.
Overall, a successful first outing into Middle Earth that I think I would not have appreciated earlier as a less patient reader. Frankly, these books now seem downright short compared to Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. I’m excited to continue on with the series.
Knot of Shadows by Lois McMaster Bujold – Finally caught up in the Pen & Des series. Another book that launches off a sidebar of the magic system and leads to a delightful detective plot that wraps up neatly. This one was less interesting to me than The Assassins of Thaslon because the rabbit hole was not one that was foreshadowed in other books so it seemed a little bit of a retcon. Nonetheless, Penric and Desdemona are still charming to follow. A nice little spooky book for the Halloween season.
The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal – This book is unique mostly because its protagonist falls in many categories where you don’t usually see books go: a newlywed woman who suffers from chronic pain and PTSD due to an accident many years back. She has a small service dog who helps her manage as well as a pain suppression device embedded in her brain. As someone who struggles with chronic back pain, I felt those parts were portrayed accurately to my (much less severe) experience, and the way they interact with the murder mystery plot were interesting.
Yet the very purposeful, message-driven nature of this book also became the part that bugged me. The service dog plays a central role in the final solution, and a lot of it is based on how everyone loves the dog. As a person who doesn’t like dogs, I found the universal reaction to the dog to be a bit nauseating and tiresome. The book’s projection of how sharing your pronouns becomes normal didn’t quite succeed in convincing me and detracted from the overall plot as the characters had to use ridiculous circumlocutions to mention whether a suspect they glimpsed was “towards the typically feminine end of the scale.” As a tea-totaler, the cocktails and constant drinking by the characters did nothing for me despite the author’s kind afterward about how cocktails should include non-alcoholic beverages because gender inclusivity.
Overall, a fun murder mystery, but not a classic.
Tales From the Weird Weird West by Josh Hrala (Editor), Andie Fullmer (Editor), Patrick Morris (Editor) – Read for market research purposes. Quick little speculative fiction westerns. All but one are shoot-outs, which made me wish for a bit more variety. Still, I got it for free, and you can finish the whole book in less than half an hour.
The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson – A quick relisten to prep for the final book in the series to be released. The final fight is less compelling when you already know the twist, but the characters still carry this through. And the age-ing up of the Mistborn universe is still a really interesting trick. I am excited to finally bring this series to a close.
The Resurrection Box: A Tale of Mormon Horror by Declan Hyde – Technically I finished this in November, but I figure the theme means it deserves to be on the October list. I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
I am not a horror enthusiast, but I don’t mind a little sprinkled into my speculative fiction for flavor. This book sits at a very comfortable level for me. In fact, the horror doesn’t really hit until the 2/3 mark. The opening and development of the book set up two realistic characters: Zina, a polygamous wife who loses her young child in the first pages of the book, and Bill, a trapper disaffected from the church because of his discomfort with polygamy. Though the motivation of one character is more believable than the other, they both feel like real people.
The goal they pursue, and the enemy who is on a collision course with them, are both littered with genuine LDS detail which nonetheless should be accessible to non-members as well. The horror, when it shows up, was unexpected, coming half a beat after I expected it, which meant I’d let my guard down and was genuinely surprised.
I won’t spoil the ending, but after all the characters’ travails, I felt slightly betrayed by an unresolved twist that comes in the last few paragraphs of the story and undermines the work the character has done to come to terms with what has happened. It might have been intended as genuinely faith building, but I felt the reader deserved to hang around a bit longer to understand how this new event would fit into the construct of faith and reason built in the preceding chapter. The book might have been stronger without it.
Overall, a short horror adventure worth your time if you like your mysteries theological.
Fiction
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman – Read this one for my local book club, and I’m so glad someone suggested it because I never would have found this on my own. But once I started reading the cover copy, I knew it would be for me. Unconventional old people who can break all the rules because old. Very British sense of humor and manners. Murders that are maybe not actually murders. The entire plot of the book is delightful from beginning to end. This murder mystery never takes itself too seriously, so you can just enjoy the whodunit without worrying too much for your beloved characters. And you will come to love all of these quirky old people and the police detectives they pull along for the ride.
I’m not sure that I’m sold on one of the perspectives being first person journal entries and the rest being third person limited. It really threw me off for about half the book; by then I finally got used to the voice and didn’t care. And as the author points out in the interview at the end of the audiobook, journal writers are incredibly convenient for revealing information for the author that would be difficult to get across any other way, so I’ll let it slide. That minor quibble aside, a rollicking read, and the beginning of a series which I will most likely continue.
One Dirty Tree by Noah Van Sciver – A heartbreaking autobiographical graphic novel about growing up in extreme poverty and LDS, and how that then affects the artist’s self and relationships in the present. Although the Mormonism is mostly incidental and the ending cannot be said to be faith promoting in a way that would appeal to the Deseret Book crowd, this is still a substantial piece of Mormon literature. I really appreciated Noah Van Sciver’s vulnerability in sharing this story with the world.
Joseph Smith and the Mormons by Noah Van Sciver – This book finds itself in an unusual position as far as books about Mormon history are concerned. Difficult incidents like treasure hunting and Fanny Alger mean that this book is a hard sell for the vast majority of faithful LDS members. But the book also takes angelic visions and Mormonism’s communitarian ethic as seriously as its protagonist does, rather than as sinister inventions clearly meant to pull the wool over gullible members.
The full-color artwork is fantastic, managing to be beautiful while covering a lot of narrative, traits I don’t usually find in the same graphic work. Though some of the minor characters can be difficult to tell apart, it’s hardly a fault as the cast is huge. Van Skiver packs all of Joseph Smith’s young life into one volume, which is a feat since many Joseph Smith comics barely manage to cover the First Vision. Speaking of which, this volume does not open with the First Vision which is a unique choice.
And did I mention the plush cover with gold embossing and a ribbon bookmark? I hope this book finds an audience because it richly deserves it. Anyone looking for a different, accessible yet accurate version of the Joseph Smith story could do much worse than this for a first introduction to this controversial part of American history.
Nonfiction
Why Is This a Question?: Everything About the Origins and Oddities of Language You Never Thought to Ask by Paul Anthony Jones – (NetGalley) I have a moderate interest in linguistics but am by no means an expert. I took one class in college as part of my English major and listen to the Lingthusiasm podcast (though much of it goes over my head), but I haven’t really made a deep dive into the subject. This book hit just the right range of knowledge for someone like me. I usually had heard the opening anecdote or theory of the chapter, but then the author would go further into the subject with examples and extensions I hadn’t heard before. This book reminded me of What If? by Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame), but for linguistics instead of science. From the difficulties of how to define a word or language to the vagaries of English spelling quirks, there’s a little bit of every kind of linguistic knowledge to be found here. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on why languages have gender. It’s a relevant issue to modern times and has more advantages than those of us in a non-gendered language would think.
I recommend this book to other writers and consumers of language who want to expand their knowledge a bit but aren’t wanting a full scholarly take on the subject. It’s also a helpful guide from the perspective of a speculative fiction writer looking to do some worldbuilding. I must have written down at least ten language quirks that I want to employ in future storytelling.
A Book of Lamentations by James Goldberg – I start with the caveat that I am not a poetry person. Though I have a degree in English and therefore some experience, I do not usually appreciate it much aside from a few favorites which are mostly old classics–some Robert Frost, some Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson poems I read in high school, a few bits of Tennyson. I am, perhaps like most of the reading public, not a huge consumer of poetry.
I made an exception for James Goldberg because having read one of his novels and enjoyed all of the poems he’d shared on his Twitter account, I knew I could trust him to not waste my time with esoteric self-indulgence. I knew he would have something to say. Thus, I decided to dive in.
And the result? I marked so many poems in this book as favorites to return to that my book darts have started to look like the tabs on an LDS scripture set. (If you aren’t familiar with book darts, buy yourself a set. You’ll never go back.)
Goldberg uses images from my own religious tradition (and several others) in a compelling and transformative way that frequently compelled me to re-read a poem immediately after finishing it, just to marvel at the emotions he created with language. He has boiled down to their essence many of the collective experiences we all had during the pandemic, plus others that are uniquely his own but which you’ll feel that you lived through after reading.
This book reminded me, or perhaps taught me in the first place, how powerful poetry can be as a concentrated form of expression. I don’t know if it converted me into a reader of poetry, but this book certainly made me a reader of James Goldberg poetry. Definitely picking up more in the future.
How To Write a Novel in 20 Pies: Sweet and Savory Tips for the Writing Life by Amy Wallen, Emil Wilson – (NetGalley) What a fun mashup between writing advice manual and cookbook! The illustrations are fun, laugh out loud additions to the text of the book. Does it contain the world-rocking secret to being able to write a best-seller? No, but there’s definitely a good amount of writerly commiseration and details that might be good for aspiring writers unfamiliar with the progress. Does it contain some interesting pie recipes to feed you along your writing journey? Yes! There were definitely pies I had never thought to make that I wanted to immediately go buy ingredients for, particularly the interesting savory recipes. Overall, a fun coffee table-type book for writers.
Supernatural Lore of Southern Utah by Darren M. Edwards – What a great read for October! While I’m no paranormal expert, these stories drew me in with their setting in my own backyard. (Well, sort of–I’m in northern Utah, but I visited many of these areas on vacation growing up.) I loved the unique blend of personal narrative and scholarship on the supernatural. Edwards has done firsthand research on each of the places mentioned and includes photographs of each area. The book engages with the unique Utah combination of both LDS and Native American lore, along with the more generic haunted houses. I’m still mulling over his thoughts on the Saint George temple and the line between the holy and the frightening. A fun, accessible read for any Utahn.
I was very impressed with Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Can’t wait to read One Dirty Tree!