Graduate school has begun in earnest, and man, I’m sliding back into school like a fish into water. It’s so refreshing to be around people who are deep thinkers, great writers, and prolific readers all day long. Grad school is a blast! (Remind me of that in December when the paper deadlines hit.)
This weekend (Oct 13 & 14) I’ll be at the Latter-day Saints and Media Studies Symposium presenting my analysis of the portrayal of LDS characters in The Expanse and Stranger Things. Tickets are $30 for two days of interesting research about the interaction between the media and the church and its members. If you’re in the Las Vegas area, I’d love to say hello!
A short essay/fiction/something I wrote made the finalist list for the 12th Mormon Lit Blitz! The Lit Blitz will be starting on October 23rd with my piece being released on November 2nd. I’m also involved behind the scenes this time as I’ll be putting together a podcast version of the Lit Blitz to make it even easier to follow along and vote.
Over at Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we finished our Barbenheimer miniseries by talking about Barbie. I know there’s been a lot of LDS coverage of the film, but I think our discussion added a perspective that wasn’t as prevalent. I also really enjoyed our discussion of season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. If you’re not already watching it, I highly recommend using your free trial of Paramount+ to do so (maybe over the holidays?).
Onward to book reviews!
Speculative Fiction
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – I’ve been pitching this one to people as “the best X-rated Christian book I’ve ever read,” so take that as you will. There is a lot of violent (and sexually violent) content in here; by the end of the first section, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep reading. Parts two and three are where the real problem of the book happens, and I found it to be worth sticking around for. I’m not one to typically be squeamish about such things, though I generally prefer clean books unless the message justifies it.
Does the message justify it in this case? I’m unsure. Watching some YouTube reviews of the movie, they noted that the violence had to be toned down for the big screen. It’s still an extremely hard film to watch, but manages to get the point across with less explicit content. On the other hand, books aren’t visual (especially if you have aphantasia like me) so sometimes you need a higher content level to come across in the same way.
And then there’s the language barrier which obscures some of the details of what’s happening. Burgess’s made-up language Natsat takes a few pages to get used to before you get into the flow of it. (The audiobook is a really useful tool for this.)
I’m still considering with myself what this novel says about the nature of humanity. Though its message on human agency is blindingly clear, I’m wondering exactly what makes Alex the way he is and what causes him to change in the last chapter. Is the message of the novel ultimately that there’s nothing we can do to influence people to be morally good that a) doesn’t impinge on their freedom of choice and b) is actually effective? I also think it would be interesting to compare this novel to “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamozov, since they seem to reach the same conclusion about human nature.
The New Annotated Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – Read this for my folklore class on legends and monsters. While some of the style is a bit dated for those not used to Victorian writing, the plot itself feels very fresh. I am still baffled by the transition this book made into the many interpretations that completely miss the point of the novel. By turning Frankenstein into a grunting monster, they’ve transformed the nature of the horror here. The monster experiences the existential dread of being created by a creator who now hates him and existing completely alone and separate from all creation. Frankenstein himself is not a mad scientist, but someone tempted by the hubris of modern science to believe that he understood the nature of life.
Given that I read this for a folklore class, the frame narrative drew a bit more of my attention this time. In some ways, it’s a classic ghost story/legend set-up. The letter retelling a story from a stranger is an iteration of the friend-of-a-friend distancing technique. On the other hand, it’s interesting to observe that Walton makes a different choice than Frankenstein re:the hubris of science: he chooses to go back rather than continue pushing north and risk the lives of his crew. Granted, he is somewhat forced into this position, but it does seem a direct commentary on what we are to learn from Frankenstein’s tale.
The other thing I learned reading this book is how desperately I need to make time to read Paradise Lost. I have both it and CS Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost on my fall reading list, but that’s falling by the wayside with grad school reading. Perhaps I will slot them into Christmas break? We shall see!
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – When I finished this book, I was only left kicking myself that I hadn’t read it sooner. I had been waffling on it for years, knowing that it was an important work in the speculative fiction space but hesitant because it seemed very anti-religious which is never my preference. The book certainly is against certain forms of religion, but in a much more even-handed way than I expected going in. While the fictional country of Gilead represents the triumph of some distasteful parts of Christianity as it is practiced in some parts of America, the author indicates that she does recognize that it is not Christianity writ large. The book has several minor mentions of religious groups resisting Gilead, and not just the usual “good religion” of the Quakers, but also Baptists and Presbyterians. (I confess myself interested in figuring out where the Mormons are in the geopolitical state of the novel.) I am thinking this whole point–the nature of which religious sects are “good” and “bad” from the novel’s perspective–may be the subject of my final paper for the class. We shall see.
The gender relationships in this book are fascinating as well. If this book were written now, I think there would be much more focus on those who don’t fit into the gender binary. There are a few mentions of those in gay/lesbian relationships, but the absolute lack of transgender questions are certainly an indication of how much that issue has risen since the novel was written. We shall see if these issues come up in the recent sequel, The Testaments, as soon as I can squeeze it into my packed reading schedule.
Fiction
A Sense of Order and Other Stories by Jack Harrell – I picked up a copy of this collection at the gift shop of the Kirtland Temple. It made me happy to see that some Mormon lit found its way there amidst all the Mormon historical and doctrinal selections. I figured it was my duty to purchase it to encourage the future stocking of literary titles. I was only familiar with Jack Harrell through his most well-known short story “Calling and Election,” which I read in my undergraduate Mormon lit class as well as when it was reprinted in the horror issue of Irreantum along with my own LDS horror story. So I anticipated an opportunity to learn more about the breadth of Harrell’s work.
For me, the overall theme in this collection is death and the Fall. My favorite of these stories was “The Lone and Dreary World,” which puts a unique spin on the well-worn ground of Latter-day Saint retellings of the Adam and Eve story. This story begins after the expulsion of the garden with Satan tempting Adam to take his own life in order to return to God and Eve making the case for the importance of mortality. Through Adam’s struggle, Harrell wrestles with the difficulty of living in a world of evil and the hopelessness that comes from crippling perfectionism.
Adam and Eve return as symbols in “October Soil,” in which a bishop asks the protagonist to serve as a mentor for a young man in the ward whose parents have just gone through a divorce. I laughed out loud at his attempt to convey the bishop’s concerns to the young man: “I was told you write poetry. This is apparently a serious problem.” The young man’s poetry problem turns out to be about death, leading our protagonist back to the question of the fall and the necessity for evil and death in mortality. The story ultimately ends on a hopeful note, with Adam and Eve cleaving unto each other to provide shelter and comfort from an uncaring cosmos.
Other stories like “The Actuary,” “A Sense of Order,” and “Do Not Mix with Bleach” focus on portraying the bleak reality of death. Even in stories that don’t directly deal with death, there’s a focus on endings and things running down. “Jerome and the End of the Universe” tells of the titular Jerome’s ambitious project to create a scale model of the universe inside an abandoned grocery store. The project brings together all sorts of interesting characters, but when it is complete, there’s a sudden lack of purpose that feels like the uncertainty of meaning at the end of a life. There’s a sense to the collection of struggling with the absolute meaning of mortality, with its brevity and finitude in contrast to the expansive infinity of the human soul.
Some stories in the collection are more intertwined with Latter-day Saint culture and theology than others. “Grandma Ruckman’s Dreams,” for example, while dealing with religious subject matter, seems to be set against a more in traditional Christian backdrop. However, two stories stand out in their engagement with Mormon folklore. The first is the more well-know “Calling and Election” which deals with LDS beliefs surrounding the second anointing. I will avoid saying more because it’s best to go into the story with as few expectations as possible, but know that the ending is disquieting to say the least. The second story, “A Prophet’s Story,” features a general authority main character who is in many ways the opposite of Steven Peck’s depiction of Elder Holmberg in Heike’s Void, in that he pushes against the formality and isolation of his office. I found myself cheering on his exploits and the eventual ending is unusual to say the least.
This collection of stories, while dealing with some pretty bleak subject matter at times, eventually expresses confidence in the ability of human foibles and kindness to overcome an oppressively dying world. Harrell has the ability to turn a phrase or paint a picture that sticks with you as a reader that makes the experience of reading them worth your time.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation – I read books 1-11 for a class on Ovid’s influence in early modern literature. In addition to the difficulties presented by the rapid-fire stories inherent to Metamorphoses, the Golding translation I read presents the barriers of both early modern English and a poetic form that often requires strange syntax and extra words. Even reading 30 pages would tend to take 90 minutes or more with a plot summary by my side and liberal use of Wikipedia for looking up the various divinities’ multiple pseudonyms. I certainly can’t recommend the experience to anyone seeking to read Ovid for their own enjoyment, but I have faith that this process will be useful as I compare Ovid to the works he inspired. Since finishing, I’ve already caught two referenced in situations unrelated to the class, so it seems like this will be a useful foundation for my continued work in fantasy and mythopoeic literature.
Nonfiction
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis – Another new Lewis book for me. While the title indicates this is a book about (literary) criticism, I think this book is more properly categorized as a book about reading. It reminded me of Alan Jacobs’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Like Jacobs, Lewis is trying to define the different ways in which people read and what we mean by literary reading, with the goal of expanding the number of works that can be considered “literary” or worthy of criticism beyond the typical canon. For example, there’s a good chunky chapter all about how the academy overlooks works of speculative fiction because they are biased to the idea that to say anything worth saying, you must be realistic. Lewis ends the book with an appendix with argues for a literary canon defined not by a book’s influence but by the ability of readers to read it in certain ways that justify further scrutiny.
There are also some good confessions about Lewis’s personal taste in here. Anyone who doesn’t particularly like modernist writers will leave feeling vindicated and with some new arguments for their quiver. His chapter on poetry is excruciatingly blunt about how the once-queen of the literary arts has painted herself into an irrelevant corner. I confess to feeling condemned by the apparent importance Lewis places on sound in prose, which isn’t something I think about at all.
This book is probably not for the average reader of Lewis’s apologetics or fiction, but for those interested in his mature literary opinions, it’s a must-read.
Beehive Girl by Mikayla Orton Thatcher – This book provides an interesting deep-dive into the first personal progress-type program for the Young Women of the church. The author attempts to complete all the badges from the Beehive Girl program introduced in the early 20th century. Some of these are staples of the program that continued into my own youth days like baking bread or doing acts of service for your family. Others are more rural or specific to that time in the church like milking a cow or identifying the purposes of different types of lace. And then there are some that I wish people were still doing today like writing about a local historical site or telling the biography of four prominent women in the church. Since I’m fairly well informed about women’s history in the church, there were only a few surprises for me, but I think the average Latter-day Saint reader would learn some surprising things about women in the Brigham Young to 1930s era of the church.
While the content of the book was fun, I thought the overall package was missing one or two coats of polish. The chapters feel very much like separate entities, like diary entries, rather than building to one cohesive package. In other books I’ve read in the “interesting project and what I’ve learned from it” genre, my favorites have been those that, while having an iterative challenge also have a cohesive story about the protagonist-author which interacts with the project and grows over time. The fragments we do see of Mikayla’s life feel almost incidental to the chapters they were, and I wish they had been developed a bit more into a cohesive theme. On the other hand, this format made it easy to pick up and read a short chapter in small snatches of time. Overall, I would definitely recommend the book for those seeking an easy and entertaining way to find out more about Latter-day Saint women’s history.
The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert – I absolutely loved this collection about the relationship between folklore and popular culture, the combination of which the editors term “the folkloresque.” Just reading down the table of contents and seeing Spirited Away, Neil Gaiman, and Harry Potter in one volume let me know that this book was for me, and it absolutely didn’t disappoint. I hadn’t before considered folklore as something that applied to my work with Mormon literature and speculative fiction, but now I’m seeing it everywhere. Obviously, this may not be of interest if you aren’t a nerdy humanities academic, but if you are, this is paydirt.
Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber – An exhaustive compilation of the folklore roots of the vampire. I was surprised how few connections the book made to the vampire as we see it in literature and popular culture. While a few things made the jump from folklore (drinking blood, being dead yet alive, staking, garlic), most of the popular vampire conventions seem to have been made up in a literary context rather than directly from existing beliefs. Barber makes the case that what we now think of as the separate traditions–vampires, ghosts, revenants, and even some pieces of werewolf and witch lore–were all actually part of a more mixed body of beliefs about how dead bodies could affect the living and how to stop them from doing it. The book takes an almost Mary Roach turn as it discusses the nature of what happens to corpses after death and burial and how that might have affected folk traditions. Overall, not what I expected, but there were a few bits of unusual folklore that I absolutely intend to steal for future stories.
