Matthew Groves

An accessible way to meet two great minds in Church history at once!

As a scientist and a Christian, the Thomistic approach to nature and humanity's ability to learn about nature using our senses and Reason has had tremendous value for me. Whenever I have some kind of metaphysical question, I look to Thomas and his Dominican brothers for guidance, especially on the relationship between science and faith. I don't quite know enough philosophy to properly understand the tensions between Plato and Aristotle that come up in the book from time to time, but Chesterton makes it all very accessible without feeling like he's “dumbing it down” too much. And the handful of stories we do have about his background and youth add a significant amount of color to the picture, like the radicalness of his refusing his family's expectations to become a friar, and his resolute, life-long humility. As now, the messenger IS the message. Chesterton also takes a few swings at “contemporary” philosophers (written in the 1930s), which feels very prescient to our own age of relativism and nihilism.

St. Francis of Assisi makes a few appearances, and I loved learning about how different the two men were (a wild, mystical missionary and a mild, intellectual professor) in pursuing the same goal (a renewal of orthodox Christianity). As CS Lewis says, all the tyrants are monotonously alike, and all the saints are gloriously different.

After taking a class on Aquinas in seminary, I had the feeling that I'd just read all of the answers in the back of the Universe's textbook. A few details aside, that impression has only deepened with time, and I've tried to adopt his entire framework of virtues, the goodness of creation, and ends/”telos.” We aren't used to thinking this way in today's world, but Aquinas has given me an intellectual stability in my faith and I'm very glad I took the time to explore his life and mind.

If Just Mercy doesn't break your heart and convince you that our criminal justice system needs reforming, I don't know if anything ever will. Stevenson is a lawyer with a non-profit giving people legal help, and he gives dozens and dozens of similar stories that show our broken system: a young teenager, often Black, will commit a stupid crime, often unstable from their abuse in foster care; the prosecutor will succeed in illegally securing an all-white jury; the kid's court-appointed lawyer will be incompetent or wildly underpaid, causing them to completely mishandle the case and provide no adequate defense; the kid is sentenced to death before they've even gone to high school, and they spend decades in prison in terrible, abusive conditions. It feels like a depressing chain of dominoes, and at every step you think “Surely someone will step in and make this right,” but it doesn't happen.

As a Christian I was already disposed against the death penalty because the Gospel teaches us that no person is beyond redemption, but this book has further solidified my view. So many of the convictions may have been unjust for one reason or another, and even one innocent execution is one too many. And more generally, I really agreed with one thing Stevenson said: “The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit... [It's about] Do we deserve to kill?” I think not.

Building from that, he talks very compellingly about how faith informs his work, especially in a chapter near the end about how all people share the same brokenness. It's great stuff, and everyone should read it.

After a really slow start, Rhythm of War came together really well, did some new things that were refreshing, and makes me feel curious and optimistic for the concluding book #5.

Pros:
For the first three books, it was fairly easy to group people into “the good guys” and “the bad guys.” Some people had rough pasts, or were traitors, but the audience was generally aware of that and characters didn't really transition between groups. In this book, however, you have an unexpected burst of “gray” characters. The new Taravangian, Raboniel, Venli, and even the Honorspren are all a great introduction to the plot, since you're never certain what might happen with their motives and loyalties.

It could have been a little gimmicky, but returning to the same pivotal incident in multiple different flashbacks over the series from different perspectives has been a great development. And as a reader, you now know sooo much more than you did in the series preface, so it all fits together in your mind much better.

I thought the mental health stuff was going to be gimmicky, but I actually thought it felt authentic to the characters and thoughtful. Of course that kind of thing would happen to Shallan and Kaladin, and it's nice to see them “break script” from what has been expected of their characters since book 1. That's also true for Adolin, whose time without a sword was really good for both him and the reader.

Sanderson has always handled information/misinformation really well, sometimes hiding knowledge from the reader, or certain characters, or both (thinking back to Mistborn's great twists). There's a good dose of that here, and the story is stronger for it.


Cons:

SOOOOOOOO long. I get that Sanderson can write quickly, which is great, but I think this book would have been improved significantly if he cut out 80-100 pages before the halfway point. There's a really good plot development around the 50% mark which carries the rest of the story on a quick pace, but it took me weeks to get there.

A terrific, slim book that's very readable. Some great emphases on rejecting worldly/secular definitions of success, in favor of Christ's vision for intimacy, vulnerability, and self-sacrifice. I also really agreed with his view that the church can't be partitioned: that you can't just have more therapists and social workers and think they've replaced the church (although of course we do need more of them).

Some favorites:

“Too often I looked at being relevant, popular, and powerful as ingredients of an effective ministry. The truth, however, is that these are not vocations but temptations.”

“Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time, there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness full the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.”

I came to be a big fan of The Goblin Emperor as I went. It has a good amount of political intrigue; not quite as complicated as GoT, but certainly enough to chew on and feel thoughtful (unlike Sanderson, for example). And being thrown into the machinations of the court puts you in the seat of the young protagonist himself, as you both try to keep up with the names and roles. It's deliberately open-minded without being preachy about it, and (didn't see this one coming) contains an unexpectedly thoughtful portrayal of an egalitarian political terrorist. There's a great exploration of insider-outsider dynamics as well, considering the emperor is of mixed heritage. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it's truly warm-hearted. There are schemers and no shortage of opponents, but the Goblin Emperor does a great job of portraying that, when you get down to it, most people aren't evil. Nobody's perfect, but there is kindness in the world, and a lot of people do try and help others when given the chance. Fantasy so often tries to overcome the trappings of being “just YA lit” by throwing in buckets of blood, sex, and cruelty (GoT is certainly guilty, no matter its other strengths). I love that this book overcomes that by instead having a pretty thoughtful political landscape filled by mostly decent people trying to do what's best for their houses and lands.

Cons: I know it's the point for us to empathize with the emperor at being overwhelmed by all the names, but they're just so weird. Having so many strange titles and invented names is a fantasy trope that the book did NOT avoid. But maybe I'm just close-minded and mentally lazy about new languages

I'm a sucker for short fiction, and Rash captures the intricacies of small-town life in the South with a winsome humor, without sugar-coating life's travails. The best short collection I've read since Stephen King's “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me.” Terrific.

I liked the Golden Compass trilogy a lot when I was younger and still have a hilarious, highly-rated review of the audiobook on iTunes. Pullman is of course still wildly anti-institutional, really hates the idea of theocracies, and has likely intended the whole series as an insult to the Catholic Church / Church of England. But after taking a religious history class on the Reformation era in grad school I re-read the trilogy and was very glad to see that Pullman has certainly done his homework and read extensively. He quotes LOTS of Milton, has given a lot of thought to the deeper claims of Genesis about human anthropology, and has a fascinating alternative history imagining John Calvin's papacy. We disagree a lot, but his level of thoughtfulness is a welcome distinction from some of the other garden-variety atheists popular today - cough cough Dawkins.

Some new levels of grayness really help complexify the world as well, like a character who's a righteous priest, and Lyra's new philosophies. She's been swept up in a reductionist cynicism about the world (what might be called an ultra-materialism), and she's miserably unhappy. What a brave new development, for a few reasons. First, it takes a big swing at some of the New Atheist crowd who would otherwise be very much in Pullman's camp. Pullman is such a brilliant storyteller that he sees the universe as being alive with meaning and imagination and story; he rejects boring literalism. So I really like his metaphysics even though it doesn't come from a Christian perspective.
Second, it's always tricky for writers to do a sequel series to a YA-style protagonist and figure out how to make them still a compelling character. (Harry Potter is a good example of perhaps stumbling in this in the Cursed Child, while Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead do a great job). This captures a bit of the quarter-life crisis / mid-youth crisis more appropriate for a college-age person trying to figure out their adult perspectives about the world, and sometimes that period includes some deep unhappiness. You don't always expect to see that in this genre, and I really appreciated it.

Along the way he takes a few swings at tangential topics like moral relativism and lots of postmodernism (more power to him), as well as some Trump-ey ideas like alternative facts, and even gets in the refugee crisis. And the book's universe is still very fun and creative, exploring a part of the world I don't know very much about (Turkey and the upper Middle East). Along with the Belle Sauvage, I've really enjoyed what he's done with the Golden Compass world, and that's more than I can say for a lot of the expanded content in most YA worlds. Good for him.

Everyone in America should read The Hate U Give before graduating high school. For someone like me who grew up in white America, this feels similar to Between the World and Me: it's not really my place to critique a book like this, since it's such an intimate look at growing up black in America that any critiques would just be a critique of the black experience. If you're white and are relatively new to conversations about race, or if you're not sure you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a great book to pick up and learn from. It's pretty breezy and you could knock it out in a weekend.

Note on the age-appropriateness of the subject matter if you weren't aware: there's a good amount of profanity throughout, as well as teenage sexuality, drug dealing, and violence. I would say that this shows police brutality and that we should be sure that kids don't have to engage with that, but then again, that's the whole point: America lets kids in certain neighborhoods deal with police brutality all the time, and it needs to change. Black Lives Matter.

Speaker for the Dead is one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a long time. It's very relevant to today's world in its consideration of who gets to qualify as a human, and it stands out for thoughtful inclusion of both scientific and religious ideas.

I just want to clarify up front: while this is technically a sequel to Ender's Game, it's pretty different. Ender's Game was fun and clever, but only “profound” in a few places. It fit the mold for YA fiction pretty well, even if it was a terrific book. But even the author himself says that the book was mostly an expansion of a single concept in a short story he wrote (what would military tactics look like in zero gravity?), and was intended as a prelude to a second book with a heftier story. That absolutely rings true for me.

Speaker for the Dead is not young adult sci fi. It's a thoroughly adult book that grapples with, just to name a few: genocide and its legacy, murder, challenges of cross-cultural communication, adultery, celibacy, religious devotion, evolution, and special relativity. There's a lot happening here, and does occasionally come across as overwhelming or at least a bit weird. There's a sympathetic portrayal of AI like the 2013 movie Her. There's a complex morality, where few of the characters fit into a clear good or evil role, like Princess Mononoke. There's the confusion of coming face-to-face with an entirely alien culture, like The Sparrow by Mary Russell. And there's the realistic trouble of having time-shifting affect your relationships, like The Forever War. There's the inclusion of genuinely religious people without caricaturing them as either fools or saints. And there's a pretty compelling mystery at the heart of the plot. But all of those references are high praise from me, and it all comes together really well.

I once heard a great definition of fascism as a “hierarchy of personhood.” I thought that was spot-on, in how certain people/political movements try to say that certain individuals don't deserve to be treated in the same way since they aren't “fully human.” I'm not certain how authentic this is, but Card pulls some Norse terminology for the four different levels of how we view outsiders: humans from our place, humans from another place, non-humans that are still people, or non-humans that aren't people. When humanity comes across an alien species, the arguments center on whether they ought to be treated as equals or not. It would do all of us some good to ponder how we as individuals and societies treat people of different races/religions/nationalities/immigrant statuses/etc.

On science, he's really done some good research. One of the most far-fetched items in the whole book is how relativity messes with time, but unfortunately that's the one that's actual modern physics. He employs just a few tropes of the genre (instantaneous communication across planets), but it's smartly framed as something that people don't even understand since we pulled it from alien technology. When biologists and anthropologists interact with the foreign species, all of their approaches and disagreements felt very realistic to me. There's a lot happening here, and Card has clearly read a lot about how science functions.

As a rite, the office of “Speaker for the Dead” is very compelling to me. Instead of traditional funerals, the Speaker will learn all about a person's life and lay it out in public for all to see. It's pretty harsh in some ways, but also shows how honesty is crucial to proper grief and healing.


In that vein, I'd like to say that the handling of religion in this is some of the best I've come across in any kind of fiction. Card is a Mormon, and it shows that he's a religious person. Along with Dune, it's been a great summer for me of religion in sci fi. There's a scene at the end of chapter 17 that's one of the best fictional descriptions of a religious service I've ever read. And there's a parable discussed that was wildly impactful on me. It's attested to a saint in the book's world, and I have great respect for Card that he was able to write something that felt plausibly saint-like. It's a play on the woman caught in adultery in John 8. I've copied the entire thing here:

–“A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.
The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. ‘Is there any man here,' he says to them, ‘who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, ‘We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, ‘Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, ‘Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

–Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, ‘Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,' they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.' As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,' he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.' So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

–The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.

–San Angelo, Letters to an Incipient Heretic”




SPOILERs for Ender's Game in this paragraph:
One thing I really appreciated is how Ender has aged. After unwittingly killing an entire species, the weight of that moment has transformed him in a thoughtful way. In the first book he was wicked smart and clever, but Speaker for the Dead portrays him as wise, which is a much more difficult trait to write. It seems really hard to age up a protagonist in a way that feels authentic to their earlier self but also realistic to possible growth (I think of the Harry Potter prequels/sequels, as well as the Golden Compass sequel, among others), especially coming from such a traumatic childhood. This is terrific. You can feel his sadness, and the growth and determination it brought him. The transition from Xenocide to Speaker for the Dead felt excellent to me.

Although she treats God a bit too anthropomorphically for my theology at times, KA has done an incredibly thorough reading of Genesis here and presented it in a very accessible format. It's a slim little commentary that reads more like Sparknotes than footnotes. You'll consider the stories of the patriarchs in new ways and learn something about at least one of the characters in Genesis that you hadn't seen before. A great read for anyone seeking more insights into some of the most influential/important stories in Christianity (or Judaism and Islam, for that matter)

I know that American Dirt, a story about a woman from Mexico who has to flee her home with her young son, has been controversial. And I have a whole host of thoughts about it, some of them contradictory. So here they are in no particular order:

On a literary level: I found the narrative to be absolutely riveting. It's gripping, and I sprinted through it in a way I haven't in months. I didn't think any of the characters were flat, I thought the villain was well developed, and it had a twisty story that didn't feel too manipulative/cliche. And on the author, the simple fact that a white lady wrote a story about migration isn't inherently bad, otherwise all of fiction would be limited to merely the author's own experiences (more on this below).


Cultural: all of the critiques of the publishing industry, and how a white lady ended up getting the biggest book of the year about migration, seemed pretty fair to me. I didn't feel like it was “trauma porn” like some people have said, but it does feel somehow off. This is heightened when the author shares anecdotes about how her husband was undocumented for a time, and she has a Puerto Rican grandma. It would have been fine for her to say, “these experiences made me realize how different my experience would have been with immigration if I wasn't white, so I wanted to explore that in fiction,” but the way she rolled out the tidbits instead came across like she was trying to claim personal credibility on the issue that she didn't quite have. This also comes across when most (but not all) of the Latina/x reviews I've seen have mentioned that she uses lots of stereotypes. I didn't see that in this, but also I don't know anything about what those stereotypes might be. I will say, a lot of critiques emphasized how she treated the US as a perfect haven for her; especially while America is in the middle of perhaps finally reckoning with its racist history, that feels resonant right now. However, I thought she struck a decent balance of recognizing that the US wasn't always kind to its immigrants, but also she knew it was better than taking her chances with the cartels.


On the whole, I resonated with critiques of the publishing process that led to this book being pushed so hard, but I didn't resonate with the critiques of the book itself as much. I've certainly thought more about how inhumanely we treat immigrants, and how the US has a responsibility to help a region that we've destabilized over and over. And that's a good thing. However, the world shouldn't need white authors to speak to white readers about the experiences of non-white migrants; a more equitable world would let those people have their own microphone. The US is ~60% white today; by the 2040s that number is expected to dip below half. I hope publishing houses will move to better represent the country. A few years ago I saw a reading challenge to aim for 50% of your books each year to be written by people besides white men; it was very eye-opening for me to see how narrow a perspective I was getting across multiple genres (especially if you like sci-fi and fantasy). I encourage all my fellow white readers to try something similar, or at least keep an eye on your proportions. If anyone has recommendations of Latinx literature, I'd be glad to hear it.

I read Dune for three main reasons:
1) It's seen as a pillar of sci-fi and one of the most influential
2) I like the director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049) and am looking forward to his movie adaptation in December
3) I'd heard it had thoughtful things to say about ecology

I'm glad to say that each of these was fulfilled! I'm glad I read it, and it was thought-provoking. I think more than anything, Dune reminds me of watching the original Mission Impossible for the first time in high school and feeling like it was a little underwhelming and cliche. It was only later that I realized that Mission Impossible is the reason that those things became cliche; it's the origin. Dune is a bit similar. A dry, desert planet with a lonely boy who's the chosen one, fighting against an emperor? Dune did it before Star Wars. Beautiful landscapes of a desert that's as dangerous as the other people? Dune did it before Mad Max: Fury Road. Scheming house politics as members fight each other and try to get ahead and seize power? Dune did it before Game of Thrones. Dune didn't necessarily invent all of these ideas, and of course Dune has its own influences (Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind, and Islam in general). I wouldn't even say Dune is better at any of these things than the other works I mentioned. But lots of cultural works touching on any of these items owe Dune a great debt for putting these pieces together in a pretty compelling piece.

I'd also like to give great credit to Herbert for introducing thoughtful, deep engagement with both religion and ecology, not often found in sci-fi. There are plenty of interviews of him talking about environmental issues, and his language fits right in to today's world. He was an advocate for renewable energy back in the 1960s, and he spoke out about the ways that we extract resources from our environment, and how we can't keep that up indefinitely. The book dives into conversations about how people can and should interact with nature in a harsh environment. All of the considerations about the biology felt clever and thoughtful: how the Fremen adapted to preserve moisture, how their blood coagulates quickly, how tears/spitting are monumental occasions, the value of blood, etc. Similarly, the worms are pretty cool and make sense in the environment. It also takes the long view, a blessed thing in today's distracted culture. And although he mostly just pulled from Islamic ideas of a heroic, messianic “Mahdi” figure, Herbert was also really well-read and fairly thoughtful in his use of religious tropes. The world is set far in the future after humans have colonized space, so Earth's current religious systems have spread and morphed over time. He pulls from loads of current earth languages as well, so it doesn't feel too focused/targeted.


A few cons:

Dune is SUPER weird. Unlike most sci-fi, this future world is deliberately not very tech-heavy. It leaves room for a variety of human groups/cults/organizations that are enhanced/trained in ways that fill some of that missing space. Mentats are ration-worshipping human computers; the Bene Gesserit are witches/concubines who are kind of magical and have secretly been pulling the strings on a millennia-long breeding program; and a certain mineral called Spice gives people special reflexes. And that's not even the really weird parts, which I won't touch on for spoilers' sake. My friend Charlie called it “LSD sci-fi,” and that feels about right. Even the names are either basic Anglo names (Paul, Jessica, Duncan) or kind of out there (Thufir, Feyd-Rautha, Mohiam,

A few others: like lots of literature in the time period, women really get sidelined (ending scene?!?). There was plenty of raw material for him to work with (Jessica being Paul's main teacher and possibly teaching the Fremen after she wins her duel; Jessica v. her order; Chani's possible character arc after what happens to her father; the princess Irulan). I hope Villeneuve does a better job in the movie of developing the women, and I was glad to see Jessica's actress indicate she's optimistic. Herbert also goes waaaay overboard in coding fatness as evil. His descriptions of the Baron Harkonnen's weight are borderline comical. I understand the contrast with living on a harsh desert planet that sucks out your waterweight, but still.

I think this is tempered a bit by how much Paul buys into the Fremen way of life, and how they have a quite active role in their fate, but it still feels a bit white savior-ey.

On a more literary level, I was frustrated by his plotting a bit. The pacing was mostly okay (a little slow at the first third, then somewhat abrupt at the end), but throughout the book the audience doesn't have much information about what's going on. At best it makes you curious about what's happening (towards the beginning, when they're warned about going to Arrakis). But at worst it makes you lose all sense of the stakes of a situation (even with the glossary/appendices, I have no idea how the spice/worm/water overlap works). And the lack of a window into the proper politicking behind the scenes means that some major plot points feel a bit arbitrary (more late GoT than early GoT).

I'm glad I read it. I hope someone writes something about it in conversation with our climate crisis. And I think the movie's going to be great.

I got this book as a gift, and it checks a lot of boxes for me: it's about two boys exiled to the countryside during China's cultural revolution who come across some Western literature that changes their lives. It was a little clunky, but had a lot to like.

Pros:
A quick, breezy read. It's easy to sympathize with and cheer for the main characters in their ordeal. It's also pretty funny at times, like a scene in the middle where they find themselves to be impromptu dentists. The magic of reading is also handled quite well, like a long scene in the middle where a boy tells the story of the Count of Monte Cristo over many nights. The romance is sweet, if a bit uncomfortable at times, and I thought a plot point towards the end about women's health issues was handled well and provided a real lens into the era.

I also learned a lot more about the Cultural Revolution, which I didn't know very much about besides the scenes in Three-Body Problem. I also thought that, similarly to Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin, this book did a pretty good job of 1) revealing the fundamental absurdity and arbitrariness of draconian, authoritarian governments, and 2) still having a serious enough tone at times to point out the real consequences of such regimes.

Cons:
Aesthetically, I think this is one of those books that loses something in translation. Some of the phrasing is a little clunky, and there's a bit in the middle where the narration style switches abruptly to an interview format, which really confused me. I'm sure it's much more cohesive and prettier in the original language.

Pretty standard coming-of-age stuff here, a quick and mostly enjoyable read. Deeper than your typical teen lit, getting into real questions of suffering and struggling to find your life's purpose.

Pros:
pretty funny
engages with religion thoughtfully in unexpected ways
the characters all feel like real people with their own quirks and issues
having grown up on a boarding school campus myself, the “campus vibe” felt really spot-on

Cons:
has the “let's include drugs/sex to feel edgy” vibe common in teen lit
She kind of falls into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope

Hawking is a rockstar of the science world. He's probably one of the few modern physicists that most people can name, and not just because of his iconic wheelchair and popular books: Hawking has been at the very front of our growing knowledge about the universe over the last handful of decades. Something you may not know is that he's quite funny as well. See this interview from British comedian John Oliver:

JO: “You've stated that there could be an infinite number of parallel universes. Does that mean that there's a universe out there where I'm smarter than you?”
SH: “Yes, and also a universe where you're funny”

So I was very glad to receive this as a seminary graduation present, and it's a perfect fit for me: one of the great minds in modern science engaging with the big-picture questions that I entertain a lot. And aside from an early chapter about religion - pretty disappointing that he engages with straw men arguments - this is excellent stuff: incredible writing about the future of science and technology and how they'll affect the human species. He's also my level of an optimist: he still believes in growth and change, but doesn't undersell the challenges we face. This is best summed up in my favorite line: “
“Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure wisdom wins.”

A handful of other things I think he's really right about:

He believes in space exploration without falling into the rich scientists' trap of ignoring problems here on earth.

His thoughts on the importance of increasing science education as technology encompasses more of our lives is spot-on: “A world where only a tiny super-elite are capable of understanding advanced science and technology and its applications would be, to my mind, a dangerous and limited one... [that likely would have bad priorities]”

As our tech has become exponentially more powerful over the last few centuries, the stakes keep rising (the invention of the first few guns was high-stakes for a region, but the atomic bomb is high-stakes for whole countries). And with the coming advent of AI, we really need to be ready. As he puts it, “The advent of super-intelligent AI would either be the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. We cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” It's the only threat comparable to climate change, and we need significantly more research done NOW on how to make sure its goals are aligned with ours.

His discussion of the weirdness of quantum mechanics in the essay called “Can we predict the future?” is one of the better short intros you'll find on the topic.

Cons:

His first chapter, called “Is There a God?” was really disappointing to me. Over and over again, I found myself asking, “Has he actually spoken to any educated Christians?” Look, religion is something that speaks to the deepest sense of what it means to be a human. Anyone is allowed to have opinions about it, regardless of their background or pedigree. I'm not asking for him (or anyone) to take full classes on Thomas Aquinas, which is a luxury not available to all. But he repeatedly leaned on tired cliches and betrayed that he was talking about the “old wizard in the sky” kind of God. I wanted some Christian in his life to take just a moment to say, “I don't believe in that God either.” I'm glad this was the only chapter like that, but wish it was later in the book so I could recommend it to others more easily.

Great fun. With Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, you generally know what you're going to get: breezy, thoroughly enjoyable satire, ranging from fairly dumb humor to really perceptive skewering of society. If you haven't read one of them, just pick one that sounds interesting and go for it. Mort is about a schmuck of a teenage boy who nobody will take on as an apprentice, but he lucks into becoming the assistant Grim Reaper, who it turns out is ready to pursue some earthly hobbies after all his years on the job. Good old Mort accidentally rips a hole in the fabric of reality while harvesting souls one night, and hilarity ensues. All good stuff. I also really liked Small Gods if you're more interested in the idolatry side of the religious conversation instead of the existentialistic side. Enjoy.

Although he betrays in a few places that this was written by a British man in the 1940s (the language is a bit stuffy, a he makes a few side comments that lean on gender stereotypes), overall this is as good as any modern definition of the Christian faith, a sort of Nicene Creed for today's world.

Coming to Lewis a bit later than most of the people in my theological circles, I think as strictly speaking “apologetics,” I'd still be more likely to hand someone Screwtape Letters if they didn't know anything about Christianity since it takes a more creative route. But the straightforward logic in Mere Christianity is great stuff for conveying the intellectual tradition of the faith in accessible language for laypeople. His approach to all people having a conscience, science as a source of knowledge, and the shortcomings of society's definition of “progress” are very sound. I was also a bit surprised by his heavy emphasis on sanctification, the process of leaning into virtues that reinforce each other and make us more holy over time. Lewis has become an evangelical saint, and evangelical traditions don't always lean into sanctification language, so I really appreciated its presence here. Reminds me of the Hebrew word timshel, which appears in Steinbeck's East of Eden and a Mumford and Sons song: “And you have your choices / and these are what make man great / his ladder to the stars.”

I particularly appreciated his ecumenical spirit, which is both always generous and particularly suited for today's world, when denominational affiliation means less than it used to. He also uses lots of practical metaphors, and he comes across as authentically humble.

A good read for someone with major doubts (either within the church or outside it), or someone who just wants to have a better understanding of the intellectual foundations of the Christian faith.

I loved, loved, loved The Night Circus. I loved it so much that I pre-ordered The Starless Sea, which I think was my first pre-order since Deathly Hallows. It had a lot going for it: her tremendous pedigree, an intriguing premise (someone finds a library book describing an obscure event in their childhood they never told anyone about), and a setting I loved (a massive, magical underground library). And it's true that her same pretty writing and imagery is still here, and that she has a great understanding of books and curiosity.

But overall, this was a frustrating experience. I thought about quitting a few times mid-read (which I haven't done since high school), and I really wish I had. It took forever to get through the 500 pages, which should have been my sign. I had no investment in the characters, even the “main” one. I think she was going for a mysterious approach for them, or even a “see yourself filling the role” protagonist. But instead I felt like I didn't know them at all, or have any real grasp of what they wanted. I hoped that without interesting characters, the plot would drive the action, but I was really disappointed to find out that wasn't true. There were lots of pretty interludes in the form of short stories / parables, but the main plot never really got moving. I think the “plot” was supposed to be poetic, but instead it all just felt arbitrary since I didn't have any real information or buy-in. And also, in a smaller annoyance, there are so many run-on sentences that it took me out of the writing a lot.

If you want to read beautiful, aesthetic, fantasy-tinged romantic literature, go read The Night Circus instead. If you want to read an enchanting story about stories, read Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield, or maybe Stephen King's Wizard and Glass or The Name of the Wind by Pat Rothfuss instead. I still believe in Erin Morgenstern, and I'll read her next book. But I don't recommend this one.

Science communication of this level of physics is an odd niche. This isn't a textbook, which a college class would work from. And it's not a science popularizing book, like Brian Greene's, which are for laypeople to get a good feel for the topic. Instead it's a pretty slim volume that doesn't try to get into the nitty-gritty too much (not many equations and no practice problems). I think it would be a good read/gift for someone who's an undergrad physics major, since they already have a lot of the pieces this book assumes, but don't have all of them.

2021 re-read update: When my grandkids ask me about COVID-19, I think the first thing I'll tell them is that I read Station Eleven in December 2019, and it 100% freaked me out. I'm not sure how many people read this in the months before our actual outbreak, but it's a special kind of surreal to read a richly imagined book about a respiratory virus from central Asia killing the world, and then watch it happen in real time. I understand if few people want to read it until long after COVID has passed, but I found a second read highlighted everything I enjoyed about it the first time: the beauty of her prose, the haunting nature of the scenery, the kaleidoscope of characters interacting and piecing together, and the centrality of the important things in life: survival is insufficient. In a strange way, I also found it comforting in COVID, and it strengthened my resolve on the hard days of quarantine/distancing life, knowing just how much worse it easily could have been. Everyone should read it, but maybe not RIGHT before a global pandemic.

Original review from 2019:

I loved Station Eleven. I somehow didn't realize that the central premise is a post-disaster story (which is revealed very early), so the book's setting up of the societal collapse hit me harder than for most people. (It does also go to show you how we shouldn't pigeonhole books by genre, and instead let them surprise us). A lot of familiar elements are there, from films like Contagion describing a medical outbreak, or grim survival like The Road, or both like The Stand. And while it didn't shy away from showing the despair of living through – or dying during – the collapse of civilization, I appreciated that this wasn't the main tone. The book's motto is “survival is insufficient,” so it felt appropriate that the book feels more melancholy and wistful (and occasionally generous and warm) than just bleak. The main characters are all performers, so the focus is on making the world worth living in through their art.

Structurally, the plot points also tie neatly together, like a quilt where all the patches match up just right. It sometimes feels like an I Spy, where you see connections between characters separated by decades and continents. Flashbacks and key items all feel intertwined, without feeling too contrived.

I also liked her writing, with its beautiful, flowing long sentences. There's a chapter late in All The Light We Cannot See that's composed of a montage of long sentences, and Emily Mandel reminded me of that a bit. It's the first book in a while I've sprinted through, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I highly recommend it.

A good thriller; twisty but not manipulative, I liked quite a few of the author's phrases and metaphors throughout, and a pretty good take on small town America (a little dramatic, but hey, it's a drama).

SPOILERS:

I thought the central reveals about her relationship with her mother and the younger sisters was handled really well; everything we know about this mom leads us to believe she's capable of things like this, but we don't see it coming. A good gradual reveal as the protagonist figures it out.

The Traitor is the kind of book that's best if you know nothing going in. So I'll simply say: its character arcs, complex political intrigue, and scorching take on colonialism's corrupting power make it one of my books of the year. Don't read any spoilers below (and especially not the short story), go read it now.





SPOILERS:

The Traitor does a lot really well. First, it's rare to see a story progress and realize that its being told from the villain's perspective. Not a “conflicted hero” (Harry's struggles with his Voldemort impulses), or an “anti-hero” (Clint Eastwood), it's an unfiltered villain and you don't realize it until the end. It's like reading a book told from the perspective of Walder Frey and the finale is his victorious Red Wedding. It's the mark of a great plot twist that it feels completely surprising and brutal in the moment, but completely inevitable on a second read (Lyxaxu's attack feels so out-of-the-blue at first, but then later you think “ahhh of course he's the one who would have figured it out”). All the best twists feel in-character, and that, when you really stop to think about it, nothing else could have reasonably happened. This feels like that.

I really appreciated having no idea of what would happen; I respect Dickinson enough to think there's no “plot armor” and that Baru really could just get assassinated and die at any point, or that she could win the rebellion and rule with her lover, or take a political marriage, or still be an Imperial agent. Right up until the end I felt like it could have gone in any direction, and that's a great accomplishment as a storyteller.

It's also great to see thoughtful, complex political turmoil. Too often fantasy-inspired fiction has really bad politics, where the characters feel like paper cutouts and there's zero intrigue or depth in the political mechanisms (like Sanderson's writing in the Stormlight Archive, which I otherwise enjoy a good amount). This instead feels like real political turmoil, where each character has deep and well-understood motives that drive all their actions (closer to Game of Thrones). When characters scheme in The Traitor, you see what they're doing and why they act that way. The web of connections and rivalries between the dukes/duchesses feels like the inheritance of decades of squabbling, just as it should. Stephen King once said something like “I don't want the reader to feel like if they took a wrong turn, they'd come out a side door and be off set. I want them to feel like every nook and cranny has some unnamed character's whole world hidden behind it.” The Traitor feels like this.

Baru's character arc is great, just a trainwreck of watching someone slowly throw away everything they hold dear. This underlines a really thoughtful critique of empire and colonialism, and eugenics (reminds me of Fifth Season in that way).

I also thoroughly enjoyed the repeated tie-in of the examples of how the empire deals with its political prisoners: let them escape so thoroughly that they think “they'd never let me get this far” and THEN re-capture them. That's exactly what the empire did with the rebellion, and the connections with individual prisoners and the cult “honeypots” drives home the message well. When you're fighting the empire, they're all Fools Rebellions.

Like “Once Upon a Time in the North” and “La Belle Sauvage,” the Collectors is a great little addition to the world of His Dark Materials. Elsewhere Pullman has called these little tidbits “lantern slides” and I think that's about right.

I haven't read the new one yet, about adult Lyra, but I think the approach in these is better: an interesting tangent, or a fleshing-out of the world, instead of a direct sequel. Sequels are tough because you're unwrapping the tidy bow you wrapped up last time, and re-introducing new stakes and something new about your character. But who doesn't want to hear about Lee Scorseby and Iorek fighting back in the good old days for 100 pages? Or how Ms. Coulter's haunting effect on powerful men lasts long after she's left them behind? This is the way to expand a universe. Think of it as the “Beedle the Bard” approach as opposed to the “Cursed Child,” or perhaps HBO's Watchmen show. If you liked the Golden Compass trilogy, a Bill Nighy narration of this short story is a no-brainer.

PS: yes of course I wish he hated religion less, and I'd be glad to talk about it if you want to. Look up his interview with Rowan Williams, a leading Anglican theologian, for a worthwhile conversation about this

Once Upon a River pulls together some of my favorite things about fiction, and I loved it.

Pros: An evocative premise. I feel like the best books start with a question, either implicit or explicit. Setterfield has a great one: what's the story of this drowned girl who came back to life?

I love good storytelling and stories about stories, and Setterfield is great at both. Her placement of a storytelling tavern at the center of the plot is brilliant, allowing her to stew in the questions and thought processes of the audience vicariously as The Swan's residents attempt to piece together their observations and conjectures. She absolutely nails the sense of place and nostalgia for small close-knit communities, and the bar setting reminds me of the best in that sub-sub-category of “bar-based small town camaraderie, like the bar scene in Stephen King's Wizard and Glass and the frame story in Name of the Wind.

Speaking of place, she's an expert at reinforcing ties to the local geography. Coming from rural America and having a strong connection to a certain patch of nature and its ecosystem, I love this emphasis for a book set in the 1800s. Rural America may be stuck in the past, but this example is one for the better, and I resonated strongly with her characters' rootedness in their place. She also continually references the river in a way that makes it feel like its own character in the story, akin to how Hogwarts feels like an active participant in the plot of Harry Potter. She uses current- and flood-based metaphors throughout, almost always without feeling tacky, which has the effect of binding together the whole story. For “river-based fiction,” I love it on par with Phillip Pullman's Book of Dust prequel to the Golden Compass and the underwater city scene in Ponyo.

Mechanically, Setterfield has written a mystery, but she's managed to reveal information to the audience in natural ways, so that we can follow clues without being spoon-fed the big reveal. Even mysteries I really like (like JK Rowling's Cormoran Strike series) can fall into the “villain gives monologue for no reason besides reader comprehension” trope, and I salute her for pulling off the plotwork to avoid that problem.

Her prose also has an enchanting richness to it, similar to Erin Morgenstern's Night Circus, that completely won me over. And I have a soft spot in my heart for books that absolutely nail the last few pages, or “dismount.” The Road, for instance, or Stand By Me. I thought she certainly stuck the landing.

Cons:

I will say, it was slow in the middle. The entire back of the book cover is the premise, so after the first hundred pages I was in the fascinating place of having no idea where the story would develop. And the last 150 or so kept me steadily churning through on curiosity and suspense. But for all the gushing praise I had above, it took me over a month to finish. I did have a busy month, and I think she wrapped all the strands together in the end, but the story loses momentum a bit in the middle. The premise, execution, and climax are all great, but I don't think it needed to be 450 pages long. We perhaps could have done with a few less chapters about each of the ensemble protagonists.

On the Enneagram overall:
For starters, I really do think the Enneagram is more useful than the various other personality tests. Whenever I take one of the tests (Myers Briggs, StrengthsFinder, etc.) they only feel superficially helpful. It's good to pause to consider the answers to their various questions, but it always feels like it's regurgitating information I just gave it: “Do I like reading? Yes I do. Look at that, it says I'm a reader!” But the Enneagram does get over that basic level by focusing instead on underlying desires and fear, rather than just personalities. The Enneagram doesn't repeat the things you just told it, it helps you puzzle out your motives, which is much more helpful. You could be an introvert, extravert, or whatever and be any of the 9 Enneagram types. It's the first typing system that felt insightful, like I actually learned something about how I engage with the world on a deeper level. It's been useful for both my own reflection and for relating to other people.

On this book:

This isn't a typical 3-star review. There's some good things here, and even some great things. Most of my 3-star reviews are mixed, in the sense that “I liked the plot, but the dialogue is meh.” This was different. A third of it was great, but the rest was really a slog. For me, the E has value because it is explanative. With a little bit of research, I felt like learning that I'm a Type 1 was really illuminating. Although I knew that coming in, this book's overview sections on the different types was a really good intro (“Nature or Nurture?” and “How do I find my type?” in Chapter 2, the type-by-type summaries in chapter 5.). But the real goal of this book is to give you the “next steps” past that initial discovery of your type. To that end, I found a few flashes of great things, but also a lot of impatience and disappointment.

I'd like to give full credit for leaning into the Enneagram from an explicitly Christian perspective. I thought he had a pretty good introduction to contemplative practices overall (“Why Contemplation?” and “The gifts of solitude, silence, and stillness” in chapter 7; intros to Centering prayer and the Examen in ch10). And the best part of the book included some really practical thoughts on how to think about your spiritual development based on some of the attributes of your type. His recommended “prayer postures” in particular stuck with me, and I thought he had an excellent Biblical passage discussing them, with Christ's temptation in the desert. (“Praying with our centers” in chapter 7 and especially the “From complexity to practical spirituality” in chapter 8). And he begins in chapter 9 to give a type-by-type discussion of spiritual practice. Or so I thought! After over 200 pages of prelude to what is presumably the purpose of the book judging by its subtitle, this crucial chapter is painfully short. At the end, I felt like I really only got a paragraph or two of spiritual advice in the whole book.

It felt like the final chapters (9 and 10) were the heart of where the book was going, and had good thoughts, but were less than 10% of the pages count (and well over half of them were for each of the other types, which I didn't read much of).

I think part of my problem might be my impatience with the material he spent the rest of the book on. For chapter after chapter, he would dive into the Triads and Affect types, etc. I felt like very little of those chapters resonated with me; I would read “1s are like this” and think “nope, I don't think I'm like that.” And since there's no argument to it, just explanation, I never felt persuaded by them. He treated them all as some revelation to humanity, but they mostly felt arbitrary to me. This was NOT helped by his sections on the history of the Enneagram. I happened to study Evagrius in a class in seminary, and it's definitely true that his eight evil thoughts (later revised as the 7 deadly sins) were prevalent throughout church history. But that's a far stretch from seeming to claim his heritage as vindication of the Enneagram as a source of ancient wisdom (and let alone Homer's “the Odyssey”). At its worst, this felt hokey and borderline pseudo-scientific, especially on some of the numerology.

I'll try to be openminded going forward and be aware of those traits within myself, but so far have not. I still like the Enneagram overall, and this book prompted some good conversations. It just didn't have nearly as much of “finding your unique path to spiritual growth” for me as I expected and hoped for. Maybe I'll see my triad attributes at some point and give the book an extra star.

[Insert joke about an Enneagram 1 critiquing an Enneagram book for being too touchy-feely and not having enough practical advice for what to do]