The last few years have gone by much more quickly than I'd expected. I never stopped intending to write "Reading Log" entries for each book I finished, although I was developing a backlog even when I was blogging regularly. I've kept adding books to a shelf reserved for future articles. That shelf is overflowing. When I look at it, I honestly don't remember ever having opened some of them. The article below will be based on my memories and impressions of the books, and may contain wild inaccuracies at this point, especially as my brain exaggerates things I really liked or hated.
This is a meagre attempt at briefly acknowledging some of these books, largely so I can get rid of them and reclaim the shelf space. My original plan had been to go much deeper into each one.
Keep that in mind as this gets long. I wanted it to be even worse.
Anna Karenin by Tolstoy - this was part of my push to read some of the "classics" of literature. It was a slog. So many pages of rambling about farming techniques and the boring lives of the idle rich (who are nonetheless plagued by money problems - cutting back on the "idle" part would probably help with that).
My memories of Anna herself are that she's a horrible character. Completely selfish and irresponsible. The second-most contemptible female protagonist I can remember ever reading about. (First place will show up shortly.)
Finally, from the back cover of my Penguin Classics edition:
"In this tragedy of a fashionable woman who abandons husband, son, and social position for a passionate liaison which finally drives her to suicide..."
Dude, spoilers!
Nice use of the serial comma, though. All is forgiven.
Suicide Squad: Trial By Fire v1 by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, et. al. - I started reading comics when I was a toddler. For many years, all my favourite comics and characters were from Marvel. I had a massive Spider-Man collection, and lengthy runs of many of Marvel's other titles. Although I was well aware of DC and had a few hundred scattered issues of their books (compared to several thousand Marvels), I only really followed Teen Titans and special events like Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Suicide Squad hit the stands not long after I hit adolescence, just as I was outgrowing straightforward stories of good versus evil and was ready for some moral gray areas. Things don't get much grayer than Suicide Squad. It immediately became my favourite comic, a position it held until Hitman - another book with a thoroughly non-heroic protagonist - came along a decade or so later. Hitman and Suicide Squad were also two of the very few titles I kept when I sold the vast majority of my collection.
This is a compilation of the first few issues of the 1980s incarnation of the Squad, plus a few bonus features. It's a fine collection, and one I was surprised and disappointed to find on clearance at a comic shop. Too bad its cover reprints the cover from the second issue, not Howard Chaykin's striking art from the premiere.
Overall the comic holds up well, and is far better than the movie. Although the movie shares a basic premise and some story beats from Ostrander's original series (including Slipknot's attempted escape at Boomerang's urging, with the same explosive result), it was far inferior. The inclusion of Harley Quinn and the character assassination of Amanda Waller were mistakes. In the comics, although Waller will ruthlessly sacrifice her field agents for the sake of the mission, she's deeply loyal to and protective of the Squad's support staff. In the movie she personally slaughters a bunch of her own office staff for no good reason.
The Chrysanthemums and Other Stories by John Steinbeck - this is a tiny book. 58 pages, about three by four inches. I noticed it for a couple of bucks when I was browsing ABE.com, so I ordered it because it was a Steinbeck book I didn't have. My interest in Steinbeck resurged somewhere in the last few years, and I resumed gradual pursuit of my old goal of reading his entire output. At least the fiction. I'm not sure I'm interested in reading the travelogues.
In addition to the title story, this pocket-size edition contains Flight and The Murder. All three demonstrate Steinbeck's penchant for never giving anybody a happy ending. And although I'm far from "woke", as only mindless drones say unironically, even I found the gender politics of The Murder problematic. A quick Googling told me I'm far from alone.
I found a few oddball little collections like this over the years, short stories in varying combinations, often overlapping but usually containing a story or two I hadn't read yet. Then it occurred to me to check into the publication history, and I learned that all the stories were from The Long Valley, so I stopped accumulating samplers and bought that instead.
Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins - this is a terrific memoir. Funny, informative, and insightful. Phil exposes a lot of his own faults and failings, and comes off as immensely likeable.
Some of the anecdotes are gold. I especially liked the story of his being cut from George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album and later being teased - and pranked - about it by Harrison himself.
Musically, my favourite member of Genesis is Tony Banks, the group's keyboard player and for many years primary composer. Tony doesn't come off as well in this book. Although it's clear that Phil likes and respects Tony, he doesn't gild that Tony can be abrasive and hard to work with. Mike Rutherford's memoir said the same, perhaps even more bluntly. (I read that one too, but don't own a copy, so it isn't on the shelf for me to discuss any further.)
My ownership of this book has a funny history. I don't think I even knew it existed when I stumbled upon cheap copies on
ABE.com (where a lot of my books come from these days). I bought it, read it, enjoyed it very much, and gave it to a friend who I thought would appreciate it. Then a few months later I was given a brand new copy as a Christmas gift. I was glad to get it, because I was hesitant to part with the first one.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner - I have no memory of reading this book. It's got one of my stickers inside the front cover, with my name, when and where I bought it, and how much I paid for it, and it's been highlighted, as is my wont when reading non-fiction (and sometimes even fiction). But when I picked it up from the stack to write this entry, I didn't remember ever having seen it before. That's going to happen a lot here.
I remember B.F. Skinner, certainly. I remember reading Walden Two (which may be further down the pile), and I remember writing a paper on him on the way to getting my psychology degree. I remember that some of his conditioning principles are quite interesting and useful for educational purposes, but potentially totalitarian if applied too broadly.
From a quick skim through the passages I highlighted and the first line on the back cover ("We can no longer afford freedom, says B.F. Skinner"), it's plain that we're crossing into totalitarianism here. Funny how so many people see nothing wrong with removing all sorts of essential freedoms from others - as long as they're the ones who get to decide who's restricted and how. Just as apocalypse stories are popular because everybody imagines themselves as one of the survivors, fascism fantasies always involve being one of the (very few) rulers, not one of the (very many) subjects. Skinner was just another wannabe tyrant.
Long ago one of my friends dismissively summarized libertarianism as, "Do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt
me." I corrected him by saying that it's closer to, "Do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt
anybody." This is why libertarians should, and often do, oppose abortion as a violation of the non-aggression principle. For Skinner, and other elitists who think their principles should be imposed on others, the non-aggression principle gets tossed out the window before the car leaves the driveway.
Super Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner - the original
Freakonomics caused a stir by suggesting that normalizing elective abortion reduces crime rates down the road, because many of those abortion victims would have grown up in circumstances that correlate highly with criminal activity. Levitt & Dubner went out of their way to insist that they weren't endorsing this, they were just observing the logical connection. There may be a technically valid point there, but it's still repugnant. It amounts to preemptive, speculative capital punishment. It's almost unbelievable that we now need to explain to some that it's wrong to kill people because of what they *might* do in the future, but here we are.
As for this sequel, once again I have no memory of having read it. That's not a good sign. I love books about unintuitive connections and surprising phenomena. Whenever I read something by Malcolm Gladwell or Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I bore the people around me with, "Hey, did you know...?" stories for a while afterward. Even skimming the back cover and table of contents for this one brings back nothing. That's a pretty good indication that there was nothing interesting there when I actually read it.
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis - as with Steinbeck, my goal of reading all of Lewis's works plods along glacially. And again like Steinbeck, I make an exception: I have no interest in reading Lewis's early poetry, partly because he wrote it before becoming a Christian, and therefore before becoming relevant, but mostly because, well, it's poetry. Pass.
This book,
Out of the Silent Planet, and
Perelandra (amusingly referred to on the back cover of this book by the apparent alternate title "
Voyage to Venus") together comprise Lewis's "science fiction trilogy." I usually dislike the entire sci-fi genre. I've never seen a single Star Trek episode or Matrix movie, and although I've watched Blade Runner repeatedly in hopes of catching a glimpse of what others enjoy about it, it just gets worse every time. However, I liked Lewis's trilogy. That may be partly because it's a playful, innocent form of science fiction. One of the books hinges on an interplanetary journey taken in a spaceship constructed in an English backyard garden, presumably using household tools and materials. It's like reading about the Backyardigans or Muppet Babies taking a voyage to the stars, and is clearly not meant to be taken seriously or analysed as to scientific plausibility. For these books, the allegories and spiritual messages are the point. And on that level, Lewis succeeds entirely.
I actually listened to the entire trilogy as audiobooks, and enjoyed them very much. I read along with That Hideous Strength as I listened, and noted passages in the audio that weren't in my printed copy. There's a preface by Lewis in which he acknowledges the abridgement "to a length suitable for this edition." I may continue to watch for an unabridged copy, if such a thing is readily available.
The entire trilogy blurs together now. I couldn't tell you now which story elements were in which book. I enjoyed it all, though, and appreciated the Christian themes throughout. There's a planet of unfallen inhabitants who are corrupted by a visit from Earthlings; the humans become the Serpent from Genesis, tempting the pristine creatures into sin. And one section was particularly creepy, with a cosmonaut trapped in a spaceship with a demon-possessed colleague who just kept staring at him and calmly repeating his name, over and over, until it nearly drove him to madness.
We The Living by Ayn Rand - and here we have that worst female protagonist mentioned earlier.
Ayn Rand is a complex figure. She had some good philosophical ideas, mostly around individualism, personal responsibility, and the immorality of socialism. This leads to many conservatives, especially young ones, admiring and referring to her. However, when you dig deeper -and it doesn't take far - you quickly see that Rand elevates individualism to selfishness and personal responsibility to condemnation of altruism. Her responsibly self-reliant citizen quickly becomes a sociopath. The conservative, especially the Christian conservative, soon has to part ways with most of her principles.
Rand herself was a thoroughly unpleasant person. In an a
ppearance on Donahue she was cranky and unreasonable, insisting that anyone who questioned her was being rude and didn't deserve a response. This is an early prototype of the modern leftist tactic of accusing sane people of whatever bigotry or other heresy they can think of and urging that dissidents be silenced ("deplatformed"). Her personal life was no better. She may have had the germ of some good ideas (I still have hopes for Atlas Shrugged, which is in both my to-read pile and to-watch folder of movies on a hard drive), but she should not be seen as any sort of role model.
On to the book. If Anna Karenin was a five out of ten on the selfish-and-irresponsible scale, Kira, the protagonist of We The Living, is a solid ten. She's utterly amorally pragmatic, with no concerns past what benefits her. The costs to those around her, those who for some reason care about her, don't matter, and "right" and "wrong" aren't relevant categories in her mind.
Kira is more than willing to use sex as a tool to manipulate the men unfortunate enough to cross paths with her, freely getting naked and swapping fluids at will. I'm pretty sure there's a word (maybe more than one) for women who barter access to their bodies for personal gain. Even stranger is that despite the frequency of her liaisons, I never had a sense that Kira took any pleasure or gratification in sex. It was just mechanical. She seems almost personally asexual but willing to broker her anatomy with all the passion of a salesman spreading open the pages of an encyclopedia for display to a prospective customer.
So, Rand wrote a book with an awful protagonist. Doesn't mean anything about her as a person, right? We don't think Vince Gilligan is a monster because he created Walter White.
Hey, what's this quote from Rand on the back cover?
"..it is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write....The specific events of Kira's life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values, were and are."
Welp, I guess we're done with this one.
Thy Kingdom Comics by Adam 4d - I'm a big fan of Adam 4d's work. He's a contemporary C.S. Lewis. He's not saying anything revolutionary or new, but he's teaching Christian truths clearly, with humour, and accessibly enough to reach a broad audience.
Adam's comics are freely available online at https://adam4d.com/. I bought the book for the same reason I buy most of the books, movies, and music that I bother with these days: because I wanted to financially support his work. I bought extra copies to give away.
Fun side note: for a long time I thought he was just using a nickname, and when I told people about his work (which happened frequently), I pronounced his name as though he were a Star Wars robot: "Adam Four-Dee." Turns out his name is "Adam Ford."
Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles by Tony Bramwell (with Rosemary Kingsland) - Tony Bramwell worked for the Beatles in varying capacities from the group's earliest days to the end, then went to on a long career behind the scenesd in the music industry. I assume this book holds to the rule of "with" authorship - Kingsland probably interviewed Bramwell, took notes as he recounted anecdotes, then went off and wrote the book with his direct involvement being minimal at most.
I wasted way too much of my life on the Beatles. One task yet remains, as I assemble and catalogue my collection of Beatles music, books, and memorabilia in preparation for liquidation. As a rule I no longer buy or read Beatles-related books, but for many years I bought and pored over every such publication I could get my hands on. I picked this one up because it was very cheap (oddly, it doesn't have one of my usual stickers inside the cover recording the details of its acquisition) and, frankly, I didn't remember who the heck Tony Bramwell was, so I was hoping for some new perspectives.
I wasn't disappointed. Bramwell (/Kingsland) offers up lots of fun insider stories. Not much sensationalistic dirt - he clearly still likes the Beatles and most of his colleagues in their entourage. There's one notable and entertaining exception. Bramwell makes no secret of his dislike for Yoko Ono and includes plenty of shots at her. That makes it well worth at least a skim for any Beatle fan.
Lectures in Systematic Theology by Henry C. Thiessen - just as it says on the tin. This book contains a thorough and rigourous systematic theology, covering the relevant topics in depth but in a style that's comprehensible to the layman. I can easily imagine using this book as a reference when leading studies on a wide variety of topics. The Scripture index at the back, listing every reference to any given Bible verse in the book's text, is especially useful.
Bone Volume One: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith - this is a modern classic of the comic genre. My copy is a 2004 Scholastic printing, in colour. I think I bought this for my son to read when he was very young.
An earlier edition of this book gave me
a great story from my days running a comic shop. For that alone it will always hold a special place in my heart.
Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, published in 1997 by Wordsworth Editions Limited - another artifact of my vague goal of reading the loosely-defined canon of western literature. Wilde is too prominent a name to ignore. The first oddity about this book is a typesetting error that runs throughout its 954 pages: somewhere in the process the apostrophe character was lost and replaced with spaces. "Can't" becomes "can t", "Dorian's" becomes "Dorian s." It's inexcusable for a publisher to have allowed this distracting, annoying error to reach shelves.
Wilde's writing is generally quite entertaining even now, over a century later. Almost every page contains a one-liner or two that's funny or insightful. I read this book with highlighter in hand, and found no shortage of targets.
Despite his own well-established hedonism, Wilde's writing often reflects the widely Christian culture of his day. It's taken for granted in the social backdrop in a way that would be foreign to most modern readers. However, Wilde goes horribly off the rails when he tries to write about Jesus directly. It immediately becomes obvious that although Wilde knows a little bit about Jesus, he does not know Him personally. The most egregious example is in the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
"And the message of Christ to man was simply 'Be thyself.' That is the secret of Christ."
No. A thousand times, no. Jesus did not come to Earth, be born of a virgin, suffer, die, and rise again to tell us to "be ourselves" (whatever that even means). He did it so that we can accept His sacrifice, embrace His salvation, and be forgiven of our sin so that we can spend eternity in His kingdom. Wilde's is a disastrously wrong belief that can lead nowhere except Hell.
Nothing else Wilde wrote could possibly matter in the slightest if he left this life with such a heretical view of Christ. I hope he repented before then.
Holy Lands: One Place, Three Faiths from Life books, no credited author(s) - another one I barely remember. This was published in 2002 by a western journalism company, so I would expect it to be an apologetic for Islam. A new skim appears to support that expectation. An article on the Koran ends with:
"As with the Old Testament, there is violence, sometimes meted out in Allah's name, but the Koran more often urges mercy and compassion."
The dangling participle, demonstrative of the writing skill I expect from "professional journalists," leaves it unclear whether the Koran contains more exhortations to mercy and compassion than does the Old Testament, or the Koran encourages mercy and compassion more than it encourages violence. Either way I doubt the claim.
The introductory paragraph on Christianity demonstrates a view of that faith that is so incomplete as to be laughable. Presented sentence by sentence with commentary interspersed:
"In Israel, 2,000 years ago, a child was born to a Jewish couple."
First of all, what is that first comma doing there? More importantly, Jesus was not born to a "Jewish couple" unless they consider God Jewish. He was borh to a Jewish mother and into a Jewish home, but this sentence subtly asserts that Joseph was His biological father and the virgin birth is a myth.
"Jesus grew to be a charismatic preacher, gathering disciples as he went."
[SIC] throughout because of not capitalizing pronouns referring to Jesus, but that's admittedly a stylistic decision. Other than that, this sentence is unobjectionable, if a little minimizing.
"This Son of God performed miracles, they said: raising the dead, calming these waters of Galilee."
"They said" is subtle but pernicious, encouraging the reader to reject these claims.
"Jerusalem's authorities, perceiving a threat, had Jesus executed."
Fine.
"His followers, taking up the cross, built the world's largest religion in his name."
That's it. Not a word about the Resurrection. Not a word about sin, repentance, or salvation. Not one iota of what Paul considered of primary importance (
I Corinthians 15:1-5). This is Christianity as mere philosophy, which is no Christianity at all.
I'm sure Islam is given just as skeptical an introduction, though. Let's take a look:
"More than 1,300 years ago, a man in Mecca was visited by the archangel Gabriel and received an extraordinary gift: the word from Allah, the one God."
Stated as fact, no qualification.
Welp, I guess we're done with this one.
Bizarre Phenomena - Reader's Digest books, no credited author(s) - a worthless compilation of pseudoscience and urban legends. If you're looking for a book that suggests the Loch Ness Monster just might be in there somewhere, based on long-discredited photos, this is for you. Dishearteningly, my local library has a copy of this on the shelf. In the Science section.
Being Born and Growing Older: Poems and Images Arranged by Bruce Vance - this, as the title suggests, is largely a collection of poetry, and I don't like poetry. I've owned it since the days when I would sweep up any and all books on religion (and several other topics of interest) that I found in library book sales, flea markets, or other cheap sources. In a mental Freudian slip I misread the title as "
Being Born Again and Growing Older" and assumed it was about aging as a Christian. Nope.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the bookshelf that housed all of these. And still a bunch more.
