On Book Reviewing and Control

My friend Geof wrote a good post yesterday about really taking time to digest and consider a book before publishing a review. He appreciates his friend Adam for taking 6 months before responding to Rachel Held Evans’ book. (I’m curious whether Adam’s really been chewing on it for a while or whether he just took a while to get to the book in the first place, but that’s only tangential to Geof’s point.)

When it comes to any book review, I simply question context: who is the reviewer, and does it seem that they’ve taken the time to read it well? Often the former is easily deduced—this is the Internet—but one never really knows if a book has been carefully considered or read simply to be discarded….

…I think you need to spend time thinking about a book if you are going to lend/demand authority to your response to the reading. I think that too many high-profile theology types rush through book reviews purely knowing that their authority rests in their brand. I think that’s a dangerous mistake.

Geof has a good point here, and I wonder how my own review of Rachel’s book would change if I read it again now that I’ve had time to think and interact with others about it.

Geof omitted, though, another critical aspect of why the big-name theo-review-bloggers rush through their reads and get their reviews out early: control. These theo-review-bloggers want to direct their readers’ purchases in ways that they think are “safe”. If a critical review will keep a “dangerous” book out of hundreds of hands, let’s get it published ASAP. Waiting for six months to publish a review might allow time for those folks to buy the book, read it, and *gasp* think about it for themselves.

Don’t get me wrong - I appreciate good book recommendations, and I appreciate folks telling me when a book might be a waste of my time. But Geof is right - there’s far more authority to be had when you’ve ruminated on a book over time before reviewing than when your release-day review is ***DO NOT WANT OMG HERESY STAY AWAY***.

My 2012 reading

Time for my annual roundup of what I read over the past year. While I’m often lousy at cataloging things, this list is easy enough thanks to Goodreads and their nice little iPhone app.

(If you just want to look at the list, go check it out over on Goodreads.)

I read 59 books this year. 36 were fiction, 23 were non-fiction. Most of that non-fiction was theology, with just a couple of biographies / histories thrown in. (I need to read some more history. I don’t read enough of it anymore.)

I rated far more things with five stars this year than I have in previous years. (15 books got 5 stars! That’s more than a quarter of everything I read!) I don’t know whether that means my rating standards are slipping or that my book selection standards are improving, but at least it means I have some good books to recommend.

There are five novels I gave five stars this year:

  • The Fiddler’s Gun by A. S. Peterson - a fun Revolutionary War novel focused on the adventures of a teenage girl. (I’ve got the sequel, The Fiddler’s Green, sitting in my to-read pile… should get it read in 2013 sometime.)
  • The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - a short Young Adult novel focused on two teenagers who are dying of cancer. It’s not as painful as it sounds, but it’s challenging and insightful.
  • Redshirts, by John Scalzi - an odd sort of meta sci-fi romp that otherwise defies comparison
  • The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr. - a fascinating fantasy story which I’m indebted to the Rabbit Room folks for recommending.
  • Gathering String, by Mimi Johnson - a top-notch suspense/mystery novel whose author is a lovely lade I met once at a tweetup in Cedar Rapids.

On the non-fiction side, there were more 5-star books, but a few among those that particularly stood out:

I’m back at the reading for 2013, trying to finish up some Thomas Merton that I started back in December. If you’re so inclined, add me as a friend on Goodreads so we can interact about our reading throughout the year!

"When I Was A Child I Read Books" by Marilynne Robinson

I’ve gotten to the point where, unless I’m looking for a specific book, I don’t even visit the main stacks of the library any more. Instead, I head right for the “new books” section, and pick up a recent novel or biography.

While perusing the new book shelf during my last visit, I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays on a whim. It’s not the type of book I usually pick up, but it looked interesting enough, and short enough that I had a chance to get through it without getting majorly bogged down.

Marilynne Robinson teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the U of I. She’s probably best known for her novel Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2005. It ends up, though, that she’s published more essays than she has novels, and, if her latest volume is any indication, her essays are really good.

When I Was A Child I Read Books is a short, dense collection of essays that perhaps have less to do with reading books, and more to do with the intersection of faith and the current American religious culture. Robinson stakes out a middle ground that on one hand rejects the liberal theology of mainstream Christian denominations, while simultaneously opposing the apparent hard, uncaring line heard too often from the far right wing.

I have felt for a long time that our idea of what a human being is has grown oppressively small and dull.

Robinson’s essays call us to accept and embrace the mystery and beauty of being human. She urges us to give others the benefit of the doubt, to live with compassion towards even (especially?) those who we don’t know or understand.

There is at present a dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives.

When I Was A Child I Read Books was slow going, but only because there was such richness to savor on every page. If you have the time for some thoughtful reading, I’d recommend this book.

My daughter does awesome book recommendations

Forget my book recommendations, folks: my seven-year-old daughter Laura has me beat. This summer’s Barnes and Noble kids’ reading program asks the kids to list the books that they read and then who they would recommend that book for.

Here’s Laura’s response (click for a larger version):

Her recommendations, as she spelled and capitalized them: (For reference, Addie (age 6) and Katie (age 3) are her younger sisters.)

  1. Book Title / Author: Grandma, Grandpa, and me by Mercer Mayer. Recommended for: Katie. She likes Grandma, Grandpa, and pie.
  2. Book Title / Author: Curious George: Stories to share by Margret & H. A. Rey. Recommended for: Marcus & Drew. They like train’s, firefighter’s, Aquariums and Dinosaur’s.
  3. Book Title / Author: Down by the cool of the pool. by Tony Mitton & Guy Parker-Rees. Recommended for: Addie, its good rhymeing practice for her.
  4. Book Title / Author: Pharaoh. Life and afterlife of a god. by David Kennett. Recommended for: Grandpa, He likes history stuff.
  5. Book Title / Author: No carrots for Harry! by Jean Langerman & Frank Remkiewicz. Recommended for: Katie. She do’s not like carrot’s ether!.
  6. Book Title / Author: Garfield rolls on by Jim Davis. Recommended for: Grandma. She like’s cat’s.
  7. Book Title / Author: Wild wild wolves by Joyce Miton & Larry Schwinger. Recommended for: Someone who needs infarmashin aBout wolves.
  8. Book Title / Author: llama llama mad at mama by Anna Dewdney. Recommended for: Addie. She is always mad at mama

Priceless.

The Anxious Christian - Rhett Smith

Sorry for turning this into a book review blog of sorts. One of these days I’m going to get to some more serious posting. For now, though, I’m going to get the books reviewed that I need to. Bear with me.

The subtitle of Rhett Smith’s book The Anxious Christian is either a very silly rhetorical question or designed to feed the anxieties of the target audience. “Can God use your anxiety for good?” Well, of course He can. God’s ability in that regard has never really been in question. If you’re one of Smith’s anxious Christians, though, maybe your anxiety about God’s ability will drive you to buy the book.

Smith uses the early chapters of the book to recount his own struggle with anxiety as a young man. The loss of his mother and several other close relatives at an early age drove him to compulsive behaviors in an attempt to bring some control to his anxious, insecure life. Smith then explores the lessons he has learned from seeing God’s work in his life.

Christians who don’t wrestle with anxiety on a regular basis may immediately point to Phillippians 4 where Paul instructs us to “be anxious for nothing”. Smith addresses this directly in the first chapter, saying that while the instruction is “powerful” and is often counseled by those who “mean well”, we can inadvertently communicate the wrong message.

When we discourage others from safely expressing their anxiety, then we are essentially saying to them that anxiety is a bad emotion, and that it is something to be done away with. It communicates to them that perhaps something is wrong with their Christian faith…

Kierkegaard referred to anxiety as our “best teacher” because of its ability to keep us in a struggle that strives for a solution, rather than opting to forfeit the struggle and slide into a possible depression.

There, in a nutshell, is what Smith is going to come back to in nearly every chapter of the book: to recognize that God is continuously at work in us, and that our anxiety can be useful if it drives us forward to continued struggle and action. He says that God “uses [your anxiety] to awaken you and help turn you toward Him.” In chapter four he goes further to say that “God wants you to pay attention to it [anxiety]. He wants you to listen to it. For in your anxiety God is speaking to you and He is encouraging you to not stay content with where you are.”

In the last few chapters, Smith puts his experience as a marriage and family therapist to good use as he provides some practical suggestions for working in areas that often cause anxiety; he discusses setting good personal boundaries, refining personal relationships, and asking for help.

With a topic like this, an author runs the risk of playing the victim card, but Smith handles it deftly. As one who has struggled with anxiety at various times in my adult life, I appreciated the reminder that God is at work in my life. While I know it to be true, Smith’s book was a welcome kick-in-the-pants reminder.

Note: Moody Press provided me a free copy of this book asking only that I give it a fair review.

The Road Trip that Changed the World - Mark Sayers

Australian pastor and author Mark Sayers put out a request for reviews of his new book, The Road Trip that Changed the World a few weeks ago, and I’m happy today to take him up on it. I had previously read his book Vertical Self and enjoyed it quite a bit, so I was looking forward to his newest offering.

The Road Trip that Changed the World draws its title and chief topic from the classic American novel On The Road by Jack Kerouac. Sayers examines how Kerouac’s novel incited a generation to leave the ideals of home, family, and place and instead to chase the dream of the road, the hope of whatever lays just beyond the horizon.

He spends a good chapter discussing our search for the transcendent, and notes how when we fail to notice and embrace the transcendence in the material here and now, we end up constantly looking for the next “woosh” - a fleeting moment of awe that makes us feel alive but quickly leaves us searching for the next hit.

The first two-thirds of the book is devoted to this examination of the shift in American culture brought on by Kerouac; the last third brings things around to the gospel. Sayers discusses Abraham as “the first counter-cultural rebel”, and traces a path through the Old and New Testaments, ultimately concluding that we need to reject the endless search for the “woosh” over the horizon, instead finding joy and meaning and transcendence in the here and now, as we experience true community and relationship with God.

I’ll say this - Sayers has the spirit of the times nailed. If anything, I didn’t respond to it more because it already seemed so familiar. His diagnosis of cynicism, distance, and the search for transcendence in “woosh” moments is right on. His prescription of embracing community and finding transcendence in experiencing God is a call appropriate for the time. If my cynical generation is willing to hear it, The Road Trip that Changed the World is a great call back to what really matters.

Note: I was provided a free copy of the book in return for reading and posting a fair review.

Second-guessing God

Stringfellow is just full of good stuff. Still in Chapter Two of An Ethic for Christians an Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he says this about trying to understand God:

Biblical ethics do not pretend the social or political will of God; biblical politics do not implement “right” or “ultimate” answers. In this world, the judgment of God remains God’s own secret. … It is the inherent and redundant frustration of any pietistic social ethics that the ethical question is presented as a conundrum about the judgment of God in given circumstances. Human beings attempting to cope with that ethical question are certain to be dehumanized. The Bible does not pose any such riddles nor aspire to any such answers; instead, in biblical context, such queries are transposed, converted, rendered new. In the Bible, the ethical issue becomes simply: how can a person act humanly now? … Here the ethical question juxtaposes the witness of the holy nation - Jerusalem - to the other principalities, institutions and other nations - as to which Babylon is a parable. It asks: how can the Church of Jesus Christ celebrate human life in society now?

Stringfellow on Revelation

In the second chapter of William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, he continues to contrast the two cities mentioned in the latter half of Revelation: Babylon and Jerusalem. The Babylon of Revelation, he says, “is archetypical of all nations.” Those nations are principalities that, Stringfellow argues, by their very nature are anti-human; they serve themselves and work against that which is good. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is representative of Christians as “an embassy among the principalities” or as “a pioneer community”. (These phrases remind me instantly of N. T. Wright’s similar description of the Church in Surprised by Hope.)

But Revelation, says Stringfellow, cannot be read as a “predestinarian forecast”.

To view the Babylon material in Revelation as mechanistic prophecy - or to treat any part of the Bible in such a fashion - is an extreme distortion of the prophetic ministry….

A construction of Revelation as foreordination denies in its full implication that either principalities or persons are living beings with identities of their own and with capabilities of decision and movement respected by God. And, in the end, such superstitions demean the vocation which the Gospels attribute to Jesus Christ, rendering him a quaint automaton, rather than the Son, of God.

While my Calvinist friends will quibble with the thought that humans have “capabilities of decision and movement respected by God”, I find that last sentence to be a compelling thought - that the work of Jesus Christ redeeming the world is magnified if his work is redeeming free and willful men, and that if, as in the strong Calvinist view, the whole cosmic saga is already completely fixed in history, then Christ is, in a way, just one more player in a pre-defined role.

William Stringfellow: "An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens In A Strange Land

Among the many Christmas gifts I received this year, I was quite pleased to get a book which had been sitting on my Amazon wishlist for several months: William Stringfellow’s An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land. I will confess to having been completely ignorant of Stringfellow prior to someone online (I forget who) recommending this book, but he seems to have been a fascinating fellow; an Anglican layman who graduated Harvard Law only to move to Harlem and doing pro bono legal work for racial minorities and sex offenders.

To quote Ben Myers excellent summary of Stringfellow’s emphasis:

The most striking feature of Stringfellow’s work is his powerful analysis and critique of the “principalities.” For him, the principalities are institutionalised forms of death. Institutions exist for the sake of their own expansion and self-perpetuation; they are not subject to human control, but are autonomous entities vis-à-vis all human agency. Human beings often believe “that they control the institution; whereas, in truth, the principality claims them as slaves” (Free in Obedience, p. 99).

I’m only 35 pages into this slim 150-page volume - having read only the introduction and Chapter 1 - but I’m immediately struck by how timely his critique of American government and corporate institutions is. Consider this:

The Fall is where the nation is… Americans have become so beleaguered by anxiety and fatigue, so bemused and intimidated, so beset by a sense of impotence and by intuitions of calamity, that they have, for the most part, become consigned to despair. The people have been existing under a state of such interminable warfare that it seems normative. There is little resistance to the official Orwellian designation of war as peace, nor does that rhetorical deception come near exhausting the ways in which the people have found the government to be unworthy of credence or trust. Racial conflict has been suppressed by an elaborate apartheid; products which supposedly mean abundance or convenience turn out to contaminate or jeopardize life; the environment itself is rendered hostile; there is pervasive babel; privacy is a memory because surveillance is ubiquitous; institutional coercion of human beings has proliferated relentlessly. Whatever must be said of earlier times, in the past quarter century America has become a technological totalitarianism in which hope, in its ordinary human connotations, is being annihilated. … Americans have been learning, harshly, redundantly, that they inherit or otherwise possess no virtue or no vanity which dispels the condition of death manifest everywhere in the nation. (p. 19-20)

If Stringfellow felt this strongly in 1973, what would he be thinking today in 2012?

An Ethic is not quick reading but to this point every page has been worthwhile.

My 2011 Reading

The end of the year means it’s time for a summary of my last year’s reading. Thankfully Goodreads keeps it easy for me to track things; I don’t have to remember to do much more than log my books when I’m done with them (on the handy Android app) and at the end of the year I have this nifty list.

By the Numbers I finished 51 books this year, which made it an average year for me. 19 of those were non-fiction, leaving 32 as fiction. (You can see the whole list on Goodreads if you really want to.) As usual, my non-fiction is basically theology, with a little bit of science and history thrown in. The fiction is essentially scifi, fantasy, and legal/political thrillers.

Best fiction I gave 5-star ratings to 3 novels this year that were first-time reads. They were:

  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This is a futurist masterpiece of a novel that reads really fresh even though it was written back in 2000. Really good stuff.
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. A fantasy novel that doesn’t get so lost in the fantasy world that it forgets to have a plot. This is basically your favorite con-man story set in a fascinating fantasy world. I understand that the second book in the series is out now, so I need to get on it.
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. This one has been at the top of a lot of year-end lists, and while it may not deserve that, it was very entertaining. Set in the future, but full of 1980’s nostalgia, this was a fun, engaging read. (Stephen Granade has a good post outlining some ways that Ready Player One could’ve been changed to be a much better novel.)

Best non-fiction

There are two books that deserve mentions here.

The Stinker

There was only one book that I gave just one star to this year, and I won’t even give it the honor of linking to it on Amazon: Abyss by Paul Hagberg. I can do no better than to quote my review from goodreads:

I should’ve known just from the cover and flyleaf that this particular bit if genre fiction was going to be a train wreck. And yet, like a train wreck, once I started I couldn’t look away.

Ridiculous plot premise, unbelievable protagonist (former CIA director turned bodyguard?!?), uninspired prose and underdeveloped characters fill the 400+ pages of this tome. The author seems contractually obligated to describe each female character in terms of breast size, but mishandles the interpersonal scenes so badly that you wonder if he’s actually ever had an interpersonal relationship.

The cover of the book proclaims it to be “A Kirk McGarvey Novel”, leading me to believe that there are more books out there starring this ridiculous character. My advice: avoid them. Avoid this one, too.

So that’s my 2011. Here’s hoping that 2012 finds me reading the best of books new and old. (Leave any recommendations in the comments below!)