Matthew Groves
I didn't know anything about this book before getting the audiobook for a car trip, but I had a good time with it. I especially liked how it showed that for all of rock and roll's love of drugs, drinking, and sex, deeper relationships are the key to life. It had an unexpectedly wholesome heart and was quite tender in places. Highly recommended!
(Also, the audiobook is very high-quality, and the book's format lends itself well to it)
Incredible skill/talent on writing different voices for each of the viewpoint characters; as vivid, real, and raw as anything I've read in a long time; tremendous interaction with Biblical imagery and imagination; a window into a very dark chapter of European colonial relations with the Congo. Highly recommended.
Pros: earnest, humble, the world is still neat, fun blend of genres (murder mystery, redemption journey, bit of a horror / ghost story at times). Really refreshing to meet a pastor who's a likable real character, flawed but good hearted and trying to do the right thing.
Cons: all these weird names are terrible to keep up with, and genuinely hurt my understanding of the plot. I can hang with the best of them on varied casts (Game of Thrones, etc), but this is too much
I knew Ursula K LeGuin was seen as one of the top scifi/fantasy minds of the 20th century, but hadn't really read anything by her as an adult, so I was excited to give this a chance and was not disappointed. This genre always does best when it provides a mirror/comparison to our own world, and this certainly does that. It gets a lot of attention for its novelty around gender, and rightly so, especially for when it was published, but I appreciated it most for thinking about difference in general. How do we communicate/collaborate with others who are very different from us? How do we build trust and friendships? At its heart, the book feels almost like a platonic love story of two people who are very different from each other. There's an emotional heart of beauty and intimacy to the story, and it's one that everybody should give a chance.
Riveting, twisty without feeling unfairly manipulative, dark, and often very intelligent.
Side rant: Hollywood gives us lots of perfect marriages, and lots of terrible ones that implode, but it would be really nice to see more of the role model marriages we really need: couple hits hard times, they have problems and disagreements but communicate well and work through it, and they both choose to stick it out and see the value in commitment.
If you read all 9, no reason to stop before this one! I assumed this would be a combination of fan service and fun ideas the authors never got to, and that's about correct. And it is fun to see some gaps in some characters' arcs, especially Amos and Fred Johnson. A few of them fell a little flat, but three were great and almost all of them had at least a good idea/premise. “Drive” had a great sense of dark humor, “Auberon” was an excellently twisty look at corruption and duty, and “Sins of Our Fathers” gave a very satisfactory dismount for the biggest loose thread in the whole series. Exploring different genres is fun, too. You've got dark comedy, war memoir, teen drama, street gangs and poverty, horror, crime/politics, post-apocalyptic, and immigrant stories. I'm sure it was fun for them to write, and it mostly makes for good reading.
The last one in particular, “The Sins of Our Fathers,” closed strongly on two points. One, it holds a wise discussion of the strange relationship between “doing the right thing for someone else,” and “finding out if my good thing helped them.” Of course we all want to see the fruits of the seeds we plant, but planting the seeds is always more important than seeing the harvest. When you do good things in this world, you don't always get to see how they pan out, and that shouldn't stop you from doing them. In the book, Naomi made huge sacrifices to give Filip a chance to escape his father, and she never found out if it worked or not. But that's less important than making the investment in the first place. As the author's postlude quotes from an earlier book, “You don't get to know [if your good deeds paid off]. They did or they didn't. You didn't put them out so that someone would send you a message about how important and influential you are. You tried to [do some good in the world]. Even if it didn't work, it was a good thing to try. And maybe it did. Maybe you saved someone, and if you did, that's more important than making sure you know about it.” I love this sentiment, and there's something deeply Christian and self-less about this worldview. It reminds me of the Biblical notion of “Cast your bread upon the waters;” giving of yourself to the world, even if the current takes it out of your sight before you see someone pick it up. You're trusting that somewhere around the bend, it will get picked up and nourish someone (Ecclesiastes 11).
Lastly, the book closes with a terrific riff on an earlier book's anecdote. A young girl is on a ship to found a small colony on a new world, and her school teachers have warned all the kids to be kind to each other, because they'll be living together for the rest of their lives. This logic applies to small towns today, where high school grudges can stretch well into the adult years. But, more importantly, it applies to the planet earth and the entire human species, because we're all connected. The distances between us are an illusion, and we're all stuck with each other on this little pale blue dot. So, I agree with Nami: “We're spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle to each other.”
When I really think about it, it's pretty impressive to finish a series well and in a timely manner. I think The Expanse might be the first big series to manage both since Harry Potter. Lots of series finish on time but poorly (Hunger Games, Game of Thrones TV), or take forever but finish well (???), or are stuck in limbo and could easily never finish (Game of Thrones, Name of the Wind, Locke Lamorra). I think JK Rowling deserves a lot of credit for publishing regularly and ending the series well, and so does Corey.
I thought it ended in just about the only way it could have, and each character's arcs made sense. The end is the right amount of sad, the right amount of sympathetic to villains, and the right amount of messy. I appreciated that the series wasn't too “tied up with a bow” tidy. Lots of small but fairly important things never got followed up on (Alex's first wife, Naomi's son), because that's how life goes. At the same time, we often saw minor characters become major characters in later books, and this is a great addition. It's fun to see them again, and it makes you reevaluate their past decisions in light of what you now know about their motives, which works really well. Captain Singh was one of my favorite characters, so seeing Tanaka's viewpoint adds a lot of depth to his interactions with her. This approach still gives character development, just via an ensemble. It keeps things fresh in such a long series.
The whole series is about two questions:
1. what do we do when we come across an alien thing?
2. if the aliens are dead, what could have happened to them?
This overall makes it a great extended meditation on the Fermi Paradox, and I'm very glad I took the deep dive.
Pros: great atmosphere when the girl is in the marsh (makes sense because the author was a wildlife biologist), she's easy to cheer for, great final dismount
Cons: The dialogue is terribly flat (she does write in an accent, which is actually fine, I mean the sentences themselves). In the first half of the book this is a smaller problem because it's mostly her in the marsh by herself, but then the second half is all a courtroom drama, and the dialogue can't carry the full weight of the plot.
It's framed as a love triangle for a bit, but then that gets resolved quickly. The formula of one part “kid survives alone” like Hatchet, one part “who will she choose” like Twilight, one part legal drama is just too any pieces for the delivery to pull off. A much shorter version that only focused on one of them would have been more successful.
I do want to say that it's great to see Delia Owens breaking into fiction. When real scientists start writing for broader audiences, and especially in new genres, it elevates science in the public mind and what people think science can be good for. (Mary Doria Russell is the other prominent example in my mind)
There's a lot to like about Gallant, especially if you enjoyed her Darker Shade of Magic trilogy. Similar strengths include:
Imperfect but like-able and cheer-for-able protagonists
Tremendous shaping of the atmosphere of her world; the setting feels like a character itself
Really good scope. Gallant doesn't try to be about the whole world/universe in a way that makes the problem feel more abstract than serious (cough cough Marvel). Even though the villain has larger aspirations, the focus is on digging in deeply to one house and its rhythms. This pays off a lot by getting to know the few characters really well and in a few different layers, and the layers we learn about the house pay off in the plot in a non-gimmicky way. Also, in the age of everything being part of a cinematic universe, it was wonderfully refreshing to find an author who had a good idea, told a story about it in a reasonable number of pages, and let it be. It's self-contained because that's all it needs to be
It feels more like a fairy tale than anything, but I really like the tone. You'd think it's bleak and gothic/horror on paper, but it actually feels quite warm and sentimental in unexpected ways, especially the very end. Touching and sweet
Cons: the main character has a million questions, and the biggest ones never really get answered. Maybe that's by design to keep the reader guessing at the mystery of it all (and to make it more of a fairy tale than a hard fantasy, which is fine), but I have the same basic “so, what the heck is going on?” questions as Olivia did and I'd like to overhear someone give her the rundown
Spoilers below:
The Expanse continues to shine in all that it does well: being smart and being fun at the same time, having real consequences without feeling too arbitrary or too “plot armor-ey,” having villains with some redeeming characteristics and reasonable views. I really liked the arc for Governor Singh; he made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of growing in a hurry, and kept learning right until the end. The ultimate morality level of the Laconians is excellently murky; their brutal foundation, and medical experiments show their true colors, but Duarte and Trejo (and even Singh) have some great arguments in their favor. The book shows their hypocrisy, but also how in the grand scheme they might be right. It takes a big combination of morals and stakes for me to respect them for killing a main character I liked and identified with, and think they maybe did the right thing. The constant juxtaposition of short-term and long-term ethics (killing Singh is worth it to avoid setting off centuries of hatred) works really well.
It's also the first book to have real tension within the crew, and that feels like it was well overdue. The timelapse was fine; the “Empire Strikes Back” ending with Holden captured works well. Sometimes, the “bad” guys have a lot more advanced weapons than you, some good arguments, and you can't really beat them. In most plots, the protagonists find some clever workaround. Here, the bad guys overcame some mistakes, killed a main character, captured the hero, and are looking like the powerhouse they are. I respect it.
I also really liked the display of both of the Martian views on the Laconians: Alex thinks they're all traitors and should die, while Bobby's dismayed sadness and “there but for the grace of God would have been me.” Both have merit and are very understandable. A really good job of showing how The Expanse refuses to have a monolithic view on most complex topics. Would have been really easy for it to be a one-note viewpoint.
Pros: splitting the characters up into their own interweaving arcs is good to learn a lot more about them; finally seeing all the different characters on the board at once is fun and feels like an appropriate payoff for the size of series and how far we are into it; still more smart than most fun books and more fun than most smart books (I.e. the politics have a lot of reasonable depth in them and the scenarios feel quite realistic in how people and people groups react to things); Naomi's backstory in particular adds a lot of depth to her since she didn't really have any apparent flaws
Cons: a whole book without the most interesting part of the series (what do we do when we face an alien thing and have no clue what it is or how to interact with it safely?); we're jussssst starting to stretch the credulity of “wait, is every main character linked somehow to every important person in the galaxy?”
The Expanse continues to strike a really good middle ground on lots of issues. The books are long enough that plenty happens, but are mostly dialogue so they aren't as big as the page count implies. If you've ever read a long book and thought “there wasn't enough plot for this many pages,” the Expanse is NOT like that.
The tone is serious enough that there are real stakes to the point that it feels like main characters are in authentic danger, but not just arbitrarily killing off everyone.
It's more fun than most “serious” books, but a lot more thoughtful and intrigue-ful than most “fun” books.
I'm only 3 books in, but it's a long series and it's impressive that they still have lots of new ideas and don't feel redundant.
The science is very well-considered and they clearly talked to some physics people to be sure they understood how travel and logistics work in zero gravity. And if we find alien life, it's almost certainly not going to be humans with a small twist (blue skin, etc), but will likely be something so strange we can't even tell what it is. This continues to include the strangeness of the alien life, and how our response to it is likely to be an uneasy combination of confused and conflicting scientific, political, and military wrangling.
I also really appreciated the presence and posture of the religious people. The Expanse does a great job in general of not treating any group as a monolith, so the religious crowd is a mixture of pious and sleazy, established traditions and start ups. But no one is a caricature, and the main pastor's grasp of a central Christian belief - no one is beyond redemption - is handled extremely well in service of a plot line. That's rare enough in fiction generally, but especially in sci-fi/fantasy, and I salute them. (Maybe see Speaker for the Dead or The Sparrow for other examples)
Pros: still fun, fast, and funny. Does a really good job at showing how governments (especially big ones) aren't just a group of people who all agree with each other. I feel like a big problem in sci-fi/fantasy world is that oftentimes an organization or government has only one viewpoint on something, i.e. “Country X wants to go to war with Country Y.” But in the real world, any large group of people will have differing camps on any important issue, and this book shows that well. There's also several good uses of revealed information
Cons: has a little bit of the “your princess is in another castle” vibe, with a similar corporate villain as last time
Pros: fun, fast, engaging. A good scope: there's lots of sci-fi that's just a little in the future, like the Martian, or way far in the future, like Star Wars / Trek, but this is in between, and that's a neat time to focus on. It gets it right that if we meet alien life of some sort, it's very likely to be so foreign to us that we can't even conceive of what it is (Arrival or Annihilation, not little green men).
Cons: Not the deepest character development out there, but that's not what it's trying to be
Pros: very pretty writing style; great to see literature interact well with multiple types of science; the tie-in with Flowers for Algernon is great; captures a sense of enchantment with creation that many scientists feel; made me think a lot about how hard parenting is; identifies some of the best questions to be asked about the anthropocene (what's the right balance of caring about the world's systemic problems vs living your daily life in contentment? How can you be honest about what the species is doing to planet earth and its future without being a nihilist? etc)
Cons: some (but not all) of the political commentary feels out of left field and heavy-handed; small stretches of the story shone, but the broader narrative didn't really come together (actually, I had a similar problem with a few other pretty books written during the pandemic like Sea of Tranquility by Emily Mandel and Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr; maybe it's more a product of the era than the author)
A tremendous book about the nature of suffering, bravery, responsibility, and humility.
Set in 1930s Mexico during a period of intense anti-Christian persecution by the government, the book follows a nameless priest who is the only remaining minister in his state after the others have been hunted down and shot. But he's not a heroic figure, or at least not really; he's called a “whiskey priest” because he's a drunk, it's unclear if his younger self was more focused on his congregation or rising up the clergy ranks to get promoted, and he fathered a child years ago. For all that, he's remained to try and minister to the Christians in the area when he could have easily fled the region or renounced the faith and joined the government, like others have. But there's his dilemma: is he doing more damage to the faith by staying and being such a mediocre role model of the priesthood, or is he doing his duty by at least providing the sacraments sometimes? With no support from the Church, and a zealously secular police lieutenant hunting him down to kill him, the whiskey priest's moral dilemma is compelling.
Perhaps more than any book I've read, The Power and the Glory shows how suffering can - if not quite be seen as a gift by God - then at least be something that we try to learn from. That's a message with very little traction in today's world, and mostly for good reason. But the whiskey priest demonstrates something about the necessity of humility, and that a true reckoning of our own sins ought to make us incapable of looking down on anyone. In his life during the good times, the trappings of power overwhelmed his better nature. But when he is brought low by being on the run for years and confronting his own failures, he's able to enter into a much deeper solidarity with all the people around him, not just the most pious ones.
There are a few particularly striking scenes of him interacting with a peasant who wants to turn him in for the reward money. The priest's interactions with the man have such moral weight they feel straight out of scripture.
There's also a scene featuring the priest in a jail cell with a whole swathe of petty criminals that feels shot through with the Christ figure. It's beautiful.
This book and Silence, by Shusaku Endo (about the Christian persecutions in 1600s Japan) strike me as required seminary texts and some of the best possible entryways into a Christian conversation about the nature of suffering and the Christ figure. Highly recommended.
While hearing a confession, “The man had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world of which he was only a typical part – a world of violence, treachery, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant. How often the priest had heard the same confession - Man was so limited he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good and beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and corrupt.”
For a long time, I thought this book had a strange pattern: one chapter would be excellent and thought-provoking, and then the next one would be a drag. It was only about a third of the way through the book that I realized the chapters were pretty steady, but that I only had the mental focus to engage with them for one chapter at a time.
I like a lot of things Merton has written, including this, and I've been grateful for the chance to visit his Trappist monastery in Kentucky. But I will say that New Seeds is pretty thick in places; I think I would have appreciated it a lot more if I had a solid 1-hour per day prayer routine already in place, since he's writing from a monastic setting about how to be a contemplative.
Writing about deep spiritual experiences is almost by definition hard to describe in writing to others, so there's a wide range of poetic language and practical advice. I thought all of his language about the masks we wear and the false selves we show to the world was very astute, and his emphasis on living a life “hidden” with Christ (Colossians 3).
Not a breezy read, but a very thought-provoking one. A good companion to “A Hidden Life” by Terrance Malick, and “That All Shall Be Saved” by David Bentley Hart.
Other strong points: the shallowness of materialism; the importance of treating God like a person in a relationship and not the subject of a study; the purpose of a vow of poverty; emphasis that contemplation and faith make us more human, not less; the last chapter contains one of the best, brief tellings of the Christian view of salvation history and a God who embraces vulnerability and weakness.
“The Saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don't bother about the question one way or another because they are only interested in themselves”
“Do not think that you can show your love for Christ by hating those who seem to be His enemies on earth. Suppose they really do hate Him; nevertheless He loves them, and you cannot be united with Him until you love them too”
“Do not be too quick to assume that your enemy is an enemy of God just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy precisely because he can find nothing in you that gives glory to God.”
“If you have money, consider that perhaps the only reason God allowed it to fall into your hands was in order that you might find joy and perfection by giving it away.”
Laurus was awe-inspiring. It's generally about a wandering hermit / monk / holy man named Arseny in medieval Russia who travels on a long and weary route throughout eastern Europe and the Holy Lands on a sort of exhilarating, fraught pilgrimage. Along the way it explores piety, suffering and death, sanctification, penance, the nature of time passing, and redemption. It feels like a strange but wonderful blend of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and stories of St. Francis of Assisi, Cold Mountain / the Iliad, the Brendan Gleeson movie “Calvary,” the Avett Brothers song “The Fire,” South American magical realism literature, and the Brothers Karamazov. A very wide-ranging and impressive lot!
While I would give a few technical qualms about Arseny's personal theology of justification and salvation, the deeper themes of humility and suffering are beautiful and wise. One of my favorite eastern church fathers, and Dostoevsky's favorite, is St. Isaac the Syrian. His most famous passage emphasizes how the Christian must have “a merciful heart ... burning for the sake of all creation... from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up prayers with tears continually for all of creation.” Dostoevsky phrases this as ��watering the earth with your tears.” Arseny isn't neglectful of those suffering - he uses his medical knowledge and faith to heal all day long - but he also knows that death comes for us all and it's silly to imagine we can avoid it. But still, his heart breaks every time he loses someone. A nun observes that, “During the day, God's Servant Arseny laughs at the world. At nights he mourns the same world.” His vulnerability with everyone he meets is part of what the people love about him, and this vulnerability comes from his renunciation of possessions and relationships, partly because of his suffering in them. In Laurus, renunciation isn't about avoiding the world and its emotions, but about entering them more deeply alongside people. His radical generosity often feels like it belongs in a Gospel story that got cut from the New Testament, and his hospitality with dangerous strangers and nature feel like a tale from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Talking about Dostoevsky one time, Archbishop Rowan Williams reflected on suffering in a way that fits this story well: “Suffering confers a certain authority. We learn from it. Dostoevsky is often accused of masochism. But he's not saying suffering is good for you. He's saying suffering is how you are likely to learn. Don't be frightened when it happens to you.” I recently read “Hannah Coulter” by Wendell Berry, and it prompted me to consider the fruits of taking a vow of stability like some monks still do, and what's missing from the modern world when very few people's lives have any form of stability. In a similar vein, I think Laurus really shows how a vow of poverty can open us up to loving more widely and deeply, and how our material things keep us from living in right relationship with others and God.
In a way that I'm not really cut out to describe, the world of Arseny is also mystical and alive with wonder and meaning, “enchanted” in a sense. More than any theological treatise I've ever read, this has made me curious about the Eastern Orthodox tradition. One Orthodox reviewer wrote, “Most Americans who read Laurus will take it as a work with a strong current of magical realism; the handful of us American readers who worship in the Eastern Christian tradition will recognize it as simply Orthodoxy, where the border between wonder-working and everyday life is porous.” I don't know much about Orthodoxy, but I know scripture says “You shall judge them by their fruits” (Matt ch7); if books like Laurus are the fruits of Orthodoxy, then it sure has a lot to offer today's hyper-materialistic, reductionist modern world. This interaction between faith, miracles, and the natural world pops up over and over again. When Arseny heals someone, a nun asks herself, “‘Is this the result of our brother Arseny's therapeutic measures or the Lord's miracle, appearing independently of human action?' Essentially, the abbess answers herself: ‘one does not contradict the other, for a miracle can be the result of effort multiplied by faith.'” This reminds me of an excellent passage from Terry Pratchett in Small Gods about how “just because you can explain something, that doesn't make it stop being a miracle.” It also touches a bit on something Aquinas is a big fan of, how grace doesn't contradict nature, but rather perfects it (Q1.8).
I also learned a lot about a part of world history that I didn't know much about, and enjoyed filling in that part of the map and timeline in my mind. (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman have also helped in this area recently.) The author has a few fascinating interviews online where he discusses how the concept of the Middle Ages doesn't apply to Russia in the same way it does in Western Europe, because one of the primary historical touchstones for Russia doesn't happen until the Christianization of the region in 988 leads to a unification of many smaller groups into one larger Russian state (of course there are a million intricacies here, especially with modern politics, disclaimers, etc). But it's fascinating how the story that the farther eastern stretches of Europe tells itself is much different than what Western Europe tells itself... in the West our histories often gloss over the millennium between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Enlightenment, but that's of course a mistake and a type of historical malpractice. I've greatly enjoyed the imagination and landscape of the Russian novels I've read in recent years (Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, the Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy, and in a more trivial way even the Shadow and Bone books, whose author is of Russian-Jewish descent), and Laurus helped paint a more rich picture of the backdrop for the whole region's sense of identity and heritage.
The book also used a strange mix of Old English and modern language, which worked well since part of the book is about how the passage of time feels so elusive, and we experience the flow of time strangely at different moments of our lives and faith journeys. Several times Arseny experiences multiple overlapping moments in time all at once, and they're beautiful prose.
One last thing, which really stuck with me. In all of his wanderings, Arseny sometimes has a great sense of purpose, but in the first half he mostly just seems to be blundering forward in some combination of restlessness and guilt. At this point he has an interaction with an older monk that I loved. Arseny has just asked the monk for a sign that he is going in the right general direction: “‘But is not Christ a general direction?' asked the elder. ‘What other kind of direction do you seek? And how do you even understand the journey anyway? As the vast expanses you left behind? You made it here with your questions, though you could have asked them in your local monastery. I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. But do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great] who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.'
‘Then what should I be enamored of?' asked Arseny.
‘Vertical motion,' answered the elder, pointing above.” This distinction between horizontal motion and vertical motion strikes me as a brilliant comparison for our age, where so many people and systems are trudging forward without a broader eye to where certain trends are carrying society. We have spent a lot of technological brilliance in recent decades answering “how do we do __” questions, but not a lot of asking where that will take us or if we should pursue it. Lots of modern life, with lurches forward, sometimes feels telos-less. Maybe Arseny and the Orthodox have found a better telos than the rest of us.
If there's a fiction book more full of gospel love and truth than Hannah Coulter is, I haven't read it.
But this book has also done something very few others have done: made me truly ponder if my way of life is the right one.
When most people imagine an old man in rural America griping about how times have changed, it's common to assume he's perhaps acting out of a misplaced nostalgia, and that he's wrong to want to emulate the past. But Wendell Berry has struck firmly on something that I think he's 100% right about: for most of human history people have lived in much tighter social networks than we do now, and the jury is out on if the modern way of life is a clear winner.
Of course, lots of good things have come from the modern social model! People can move to find education and work that's a better fit with their interests, specialized research has flourished (especially medically), and traveling to meet people different from ourselves is a good thing.
However, people today lack a sense of deep local ties to specific places and people, and I have to believe that's centrally related to the widespread sense of loneliness and isolation in society, especially among young people. (Social media surely contributes as well). Some people find small towns stifling, and they can be, but regular interaction with people who have known you and your family for decades surely helps people feel less invisible and like more of a true member of a community.
I'm an example myself, having parents who moved a bit away from home for school and jobs, and now I've moved even farther from home for the same reasons. But this book makes me think about how the Fear Of Missing Out that can drive a lot of our personal interactions also plays out on a larger level. FOMO makes us always wonder if there are “better” things to be doing, people to be meeting, and places to be living. And when you're looking over your shoulder at other opportunities, you aren't as present and committed to the relationship – to a person or to a community – right in front of you, and you can more easily let yourself bail on them. And if you start treating some relationships as “bail-able,” it's easy to let yourself treat more and more things that way. In some ways that's the point of marriage: to agree together not to look out for shiny new options, but to get to the unglamorous work of building the relationship that's right in front of you. As Berry says about residents of the town in the book: They were not striving to “get someplace” because “they think they are someplace” already.
All monks take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but some take a fourth one that's less well-known: stability. It means that you never leave the grounds of the monastery you've entered. Chastity is often seen as the most “outdated” in today's world, but to most people similar to myself - young, college-educated, and living near a city - I think stability may well be the hardest to entertain. Thomas Merton said that taking the vow of stability makes the monk “renounce the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.'” If you're always looking for perfection, you aren't content with the imperfections around you. When you're looking around for the Next Big Thing that you could have, you aren't investing in what you do have right in front of you.
Hannah Coulter demonstrates a special kind of love that is only possible when you are known deeply; not just your quirks as a person, but your whole world and context. I don't have the answers here: I'm not planning to move back to my home area and become a farmer. But I know that I long for feeling deeply known and loved, and Wendell Berry has captured that more than anything else I've ever read. I do know that I believe the solution going forward lies in long-term, deep investment in relationships with people and places, and the kind of trust and mutual reliance that only builds up over time. Perhaps we all ought to take a type of vow of stability.
This whole trilogy was a blast. Fun, quick, packed with style, and full of enough ideas to separate it from the bulk of the genre. There were a few twists without it feeling too arbitrary, and I appreciated how her attention to detail wound a lot of the plotlines together. There were also a handful of places where her prose rose to a level of beauty not often found, reminding me of Name of the Wind or Night Circus. I'm a fan.
Pros: just as pretty, stylish, and dramatic as the first one, but perhaps even a bit more fun (the tournament is a blast). Reminds me of how aesthetically pleasing the Night Circus is. I also really appreciated the relationship between the brothers; they're not rivals, or power beholden to each other like lots of fantasy would have. They really love each other, and it gives the whole book a warm-hearted twinge that drives it all.
Cons: a little bit of a bait and switch from the last book's finale, but I do sympathize that it's hard to have a plot with high stakes in book 2 of 3 (you need it to have its own problems but still tie in well with the other two). Schwab solved this with a blatant cliffhanger, which I don't love, but who am I to judge
VE Schwab comes highly recommended, and she even attended the school where I teach!
Pros: This book was fun, had some unique wrinkles and a lot of style, and I plan to read the trilogy. In today's world where Marvel and everyone else has stumbled onto the idea of a multiverse and doesn't really know what to do with it, having only 4 Londons felt like a good number to me. It kept a decently manageable scope, while also giving space for vividly different worlds to explore.
Cons: I'm not someone who's desperate for an encyclopedia describing how every magical interaction works, but one of the rules of fantasy that I think shouldn't be broken amounts to this: you can only use magic to solve a plot problem if the audience understands the limits of what that magic can do. A few places in the plot here, the magic's open-ended sense of possibility felt merely arbitrary, which robs some of the story's drama and resolutions of their proper weight and makes the magic feel more like a deus ex machina.
Laudato Si isn't the only reason I became a Catholic, but it's a big one. As someone who has worked as a climate activist and read a lot in the genre, for my money this is the best thing anyone's written about the climate crisis and its underlying problems.
As a teacher, I'm supposed to affirm “don't teach them what to think, teach them how to think.” But in this case... just about every line is what I hope everyone will come to think about the climate crisis and our way forward. Francis pulls on the rich history of Catholic Social Teaching and Liberation Theology, his own experience growing up in the Global South (he's Argentinian), and delivers a profound critique of the Western individualistic, consumeristic mindset.
It's also fairly short (~100 pages) and is pretty accessible. Highly, highly recommended.