May 2024 Book Reviews
I read 20 books in May, the most I’ve ever read in a single month. Lest you think I merely skim and forget (which does sometimes happen), I also annotate my books furiously. I underline, bracket, star, question, and make notes in the margins. If I’m reading a library book, I put sticky flags in, then scan the relevant pages / chapters. I listen to audiobooks on 1.75x speed, and try to write down any quotes I find particularly compelling. I also had some sick days this month in which I didn’t do much except read.
Below are my favorites from the past month:
Fiction and Drama
William Shakespeare, King Lear
After reading the play, I watched the Amazon film adaptation (2018; directed by Richard Eyre), which featured a stellar cast, including Anthony Hopkins as Lear. It’s such an interesting play. It’s a tragedy, but there is quite a bit of comedy as well. Most of the intense action happens offstage (the big battle between the French and English; deaths of many of the characters), but you also get a detailed scene of plucking out someone’s eyes (“Out, vile jelly!”) and half-brothers fighting to the death to prove who is telling the truth.
The most powerful line for me comes near the end of the play. I read right over it the first time through. But when Anthony Hopkins said it in the film, my heart leapt in recognition. After Lear brings out his youngest daughter’s dead body, he says, “Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack.” I have a poem about what it was like to pray on the afternoon that Emerson died. He had been taken away in the ambulance, and we didn’t know what the outcome would be. We shouted prayers in our driveway and in the car, trying to “shred the vault of heaven.”
The poem was one I wrote in the early days of grief, and, at the time, I wanted the reader to feel what I felt in that moment. But now I think that is a selfish kind of poetry. The reader doesn’t need to feel exactly what I feel. A poem is more fruitful and engaging when, as Stephen Dobyns writes, “the writer moves the work from his or her life to the reader’s life, [when] the metaphor is moved from the quirky specificity of the writer’s life to the greater universality of the reader’s life” (Best Words, Best Order 52). (My post, “The Tourist and the Artist,” explores this at greater length.)
Now here in King Lear I find someone else making a similar statement about grief. I wasn’t sure how to revise my poem, but having Shakespeare as a conversation partner might not be a bad place to start.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale
I finally finished it! While I didn’t stick perfectly to my “chapter-a-day” plan, I still was able to finish on time (started Jan 1, finished mid-May). I like this mode of reading. I could slow down and enjoy the chapter for that day without feeling the pressure of “getting it done as fast as possible.”
Way back in 2016-ish, I was listening to music on my commutes to and from work. In time I listened to podcasts. While the podcasts were interesting, I found that I didn’t really remember much from them, and eventually grew bored. At the same time, I was lamenting all the “classic” literature I’d never read and would likely be unable to read because of limited time and energy.
That’s when I tried my first audiobook: Moby Dick. It was 40-some hours long and took me a few weeks to finish (that was before I knew about turning up the speed). I enjoyed the story and even all the digressive, expository chapters on cetology and the implements of whalers. Of course, none of these chapters is truly a digression. As Carl Dennis says, in “Not the Idle,” one of my favorite poems of all time:
It’s not the idle who move us but the few Often confused with the idle, those who define Their project in life in terms so ample Nothing they ever do is a digression. Each episode contributes its own rare gift As a chapter in Moby-Dick on squid or hardtack Is just as important to Ishmael as a fight with a whale.
If you’re patient (have I recommended the chapter-a-day model to you yet?), you can begin to read the novel like a braided essay: part narrative, part history, part theology, part meditation, part journalism. It was cross-genre before cross-genre was cool.
Since Moby Dick, I’ve audiobooked many other novels that I’m now beginning to return to in print. My next big book to read slowly will probably be Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, which I audioboooked in 2019.
Juan Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire
Toward the end of April, I had a dream in which my boss, a poet, told me that I needed to read Arias. When I woke up, all I had was the name. I googled “Arias poet” and found a few, but Juan Manuel Arias seemed most interesting to me. However, I saw that he’d just come out with a debut novel. So I audiobooked it right away.
It is a multi-generational family drama set in Costa Rica. Arias’s writing is beautiful (you can tell he is a poet), and as his story unfolds, the marvel of his structure takes shape. The family drama involves murder, arson, and abandonment, but there is also redemption and forgiveness. At the same time, in parallel to the family drama, is the international drama of American fruit companies and their control over Central American economies and governments. Toward the end, in a shocking scene, we learn that the entire family secret is instigated by the carelessly callous policies of one of the fruit companies. Sure, call it historical fiction, but this novel demonstrates how viscerally intertwined private and political life is, how much devastation is out of our control, and how much grace—also out of our control—can be present in the midst of disaster.
R. F. Kuang, Yellowface
This novel addresses two major questions: plagiarism and cultural appropriation. Here’s the basic premise: A white writer (June Hayward) is jealous of her Asian-American friend (Athena Liu), who is a rising star in the literary world. While hanging out one night, Athena unexpectedly dies. June finds a complete first-draft manuscript of a new novel Athena was working on, one which nobody else has seen, about Chinese laborers during World War I. She revises it and passes it off as her own. The rest of the novel follows June as she spirals up and down because of book tours and sales, Twitter trolls, personal guilt and self-justification, public accusations and defenses, etc. I did not like the narrator-protagonist, though I did feel sympathy for her at times. She continually digs herself a hole and justifies it by believing she is building an impenetrable bunker. Overall, a well-done novel that made me feel uncomfortable for all the right reasons.
Michael A. Stackpole, I, Jedi
Star Wars is my primary fandom at present. On occasion, I read “Legends” books from the Expanded Universe (EU). It’s particularly interesting to see how new Star Wars content incorporates material from the “non-canon” books, comics, and video games. The novel I, Jedi takes a rare format in Star Wars books: the story is told from the first-person perspective. Usually, the narrator is omniscient, tracking several storylines simultaneously (just like in the films). This book is told from the viewpoint of an X-Wing pilot from Corellia named Corran Horn. He has Force abilities, and Luke Skywalker recruits him for his new Jedi Academy. Corran is a trained detective, and he and Luke are often at odds when it comes to handling mysterious and deadly events that befall the Jedi Academy’s recruits. The dialogue is not always great, and sometimes the emotional or narrative impact of a scene is not as powerful as it should be. What I like about this novel is that it shows Jedi actually being trained from beginner to intermediate. In the movies and shows, we get snippets of Jedi training, mostly masters chastising their padawans. Even in the novels, short stories, and comics, much of the “training” that is shown are the meditation techniques and proverbs of the Jedi. Maybe some lightsaber fights. But there’s not a lot of description of the day-to-day activities of Jedi novices. I, Jedi shows more of that. And because it depicts the first batch of recruits in Luke’s new Jedi Academy, everything is being built from scratch. Though the book is technically non-canon, there are a myriad of connections with the shows and movies (particularly the sequel trilogy) that make it worth the read.
Non-Fiction
Cathy O’Neill. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
This book is interesting, scary, and hopeful. Originally published in 2016, this book examines how big data can be used ethically (say, baseball statistics) and unethically (in the prison system) and even stupidly (in the assessment of public education). The biggest danger, O’Neill points out, is when we “trust the algorithm” without providing a way to check if the algorithm is even working. Many of the algorithms used in unethical ways are not being evaluated rigorously—are their results even accurate or helpful? For example, a teacher with high evaluation ratings from their students, families, and supervisors is fired because one data point—standardized test scores—went down from one year to the next. The algorithm says, “That’s a bad teacher,” even though the actual people in relationship with that teacher say otherwise. Toward the end of the book, O’Neill offers several strategies to make our use and analysis of big data more ethical and beneficial to society.
Jhumpa Lahiri. Translating Myself and Others. This is a collection of essays on the art of translation, including translating one’s own work. In my favorite piece, “In Praise of Echo,” Lahiri connects translation with mythology as she describes translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Here is a quote from that essay:
Translation has always been a controversial literary form, and those who are resistant to it or dismiss it complain that the resulting transformation is a “mere echo” of the original—that too much has been lost in the process of traveling from one language into another. Ovid’s story draws attention to the nature of this loss, or impoverishment, as personified by Echo, a figure who inspires the word, also Greek in origin, to explain an acoustic phenomenon: a sound that, as a result of moving in a certain way and encountering a barrier, “returns,” replicating a portion of the original sound. We must be careful, however, not to equate the word echo with simple repetition. The verb Ovid attributed to Echo, once condemned, is not repetere but reddere, which means, among other things, to restore, to render, to reproduce. It can also mean to translate from one language to another (46–47).
Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. This book reflects on Indigenous “precepts” and contrasts them with the Western European worldview. Some chapters are more engaging and compelling than others, but overall, I highly recommend this to anyone interested in Indigenous teachings, environmental justice, psychology, and community-building. I won’t say more here, as I’ve already engaged with some of the material in prior posts (Writing Update May 2024; Viewing Children as Our Peers).
Merlin Sheldrake. How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
This is a fascinating book about the fungal world within and around us. The main argument of the book is that we live in symbiotic communities of life. There is no such thing as an independent life form. Many of the processes we attribute to plants, say, are actually conducted by fungi living within and between those plants. A soil’s health depends on the fungi and bacteria present. Our bodies are not solitary beings, but are communities of bacteria. The most interesting part of the book came near the end, when Sheldrake talked about the ways fungi are being utilized in modern life. Want a more eco-friendly piece of furniture or even a house? The process of mycofabrication uses mycelial webs as a building material. Strong and flexible, the material will also compost once you are done with it.
Poetry
Top Recommendations in Order:
Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Lucky Fish
Louise Erdrich, Baptism of Desire
N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear
Katherine Larson, Radial Symmetry
All of these collections reckon with life and grief through reflection on the natural world: plants, animals, geology, mythology, horses, fish, sea stars, elk, sun, moon, stars.
Theology / Spirituality
Amy Kenny, My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church
This book was a “community read” at the church we attend. It is a good introduction for those who have never considered the relationship between disability and the church. It is also a helpful book for those who have. Part memoir, part how-to, part theology, this book is insightful and practical. How many churches exclude people because they do not have accessible parking, seating, bathrooms, entryways, programming? What does “healing” actually mean in Scripture? What might “healing” be like in heaven (e.g., perhaps what we define as “disability” here on earth may be a celebrated feature of someone’s whole being in heaven)? Kenny includes several lists of microaggressions throughout the book (“Top Ten” lists). It was helpful for me to reflect on those—which have I committed, out loud or in my head?—and consider ways to repent, to change my perspective and actions. Kenny also has some wonderful, interesting interpretations of Scripture passages (even some, like in the Psalms, that portray God as disabled).
Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales
This is a book of parables. They are designed to challenge your faith and theology. Most of them are fascinating and surprising. They catch you off-guard. You think the story is going one way, that it means one thing, and then all of a sudden, at the end everything is turned on its head. Many of these fables alter parables from the Gospels. Others narrate modern scenarios one might encounter at church or in the world. Here are my taglines for a handful of parables that particularly struck me:
Instead of feeding the 5,000, Jesus and his disciples “eat like kings” in front of the hungry 5,000.
An old priest is so hospitable that he lets a demon take up residence in his heart.
The devil is so fearful of a prophet’s message that he hides it in beauty. The people are enthralled by the beauty of the message but fail to heed it.
Judas comes to understand that he is called by Jesus to commit the betrayal.
Jesus loses an argument on purpose to demonstrate the power of God.
My main gripe about this book was that after each parable, the author explained what he meant by it. It would have been more interesting to leave the parables on their own, with no commentary afterward. If the explanations must be included, they should be collected in the back. The parables were so engaging, but the explanations took me right out of the magic.
Thank you for reading! If you read any of the books I’m reading, please let me know! Blessings on your weekend!