Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

.

It's 2025, friends. A time in which, as Maria Dahvana Headley said of 2020 in the introduction to her Beowulf translation, "everyone, including small children, has the capacity to be as deadly as the spectacular warriors of this poem . . . to slay thirty men in a minute [is] no longer the genius of a select few but a purchasable perk of weapon ownership."

In other words, the modern world is nothing like the ancient and we have solved all our problems and it's happily ever after for humanity.

Ha ha ha.

Anyway, looks like I'm starting the year off, literarily, with the appropriate measure of optimism.

.

001) Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, finished January 1

I heard of this in a car ride back from a union meeting when two of my colleagues suddenly started quoting it and praising it and recommending it and wishing they could teach it (having read it, I don't see why not) and talking about all the people they'd given copies to.

So I went to the library and got it.

And I had a great time too, though I'm not sure I'll be quoting it or forcing it on people. My time wasn't that great.

Afterwards, I read the acknowledgments and then the intro and those were useful and provocative as well.

My first interaction with Beowulf came through a Childcraft Annual (which I just learned continued publishing through 2022! I wish I'd known!) and, like Headley in her introduction, those early illustrations still define how I see—in my case—Grendel. It's what I always picture, no matter the translation. Even after Headley made me see Grendel and Beowulf as the same size.

This book is awesome, by the way. I also read a translation of Chaucer (don't worry—not the Wife of Bath) and Shakespeare and Dickens in their own words. I learned about etymology and how English both conquered and was conquered. I loved this book and reread it often. I'd argue it might be the seed of me today but I loved Prehistoric Animals and Mathemagic just as much and, well, you don't see me digging in Montana or chalkboarding at Oxford, so who knows.

From reading that excerpt over and over (and forgetting it's just an excerpt?) and reading bits and pieces in various classes over the years, I failed to remember it was not my first time with the entire text when Seamus Heaney narrated his translation to me one long, solo car trip circa 2005—which was an amazing experience. It's a terrific storytelling, he's a terrific storyteller, and I had no idea there was anything after Grendel's mom! Beowulf gets old? And fights a dragon!

Great stuff.

And I haven't really touched Beowulf since then. Until now, with this fresh translation. Which I also loved and enjoyed. And which I now commend to you. Bro—tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

under a week

002) Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell: Volume Three, finished January 1

We picked this up at Comic-Con in July but didn't get around to giving the kids all the books we picked up until yesterday (Christmas Observed 2024) and this is the one someone left within my reach.

We got this one because Son Three liked the first volume we got on our last San Diego trip (precovid). We was excited to get this one. I hope he likes it.

Me? It was . . . fine. It has the same problems most comics anthos have (and the same promise). This one started strong but it got to the point where two in a row ended with THE END? and that's about it, you know?

two days

003) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), finished January 8

This is a fascinating little book. A lot of the comparisons are made to Henry James, by which I think people mean Turn of the Screw. Because it's a literary ghost story. Sometimes I wonder if Turn of the Screw is the only "genre" work some people have read.

Anyway, the title and cover may be why I bought this book

so I guess I should be annoyed now, after the fact, that the title in Spanish is something more like Rescue Distance which is probably a better title. It's a more precise title, anyway.

Fever Dream sets us up to wonder if that's what we're reading. And we kinda are. But, as David would say, that's not the important part. The ending's a bit confused, so I'm not sure what the important part is, but I'm not sure the book even agrees with itself on that point.

Anyway, it seems like a ghost story, but as we come to understand more of what's happening, we realize that nothing here need be supernatural. Some of the stuff is difficult to explain away with natural events, but the most terrifying aspects of the story not only can be but just are. Real things are the horror here.

But the playing-around-with of language and ideas makes it all the more effective. May trick you into caring in a way that a straight treatment might not have.

It's good. It's short. Support novellas.

(Although, friend publisher, something I can read in the same amount of time I could watch the movie, maybe shouldn't cost as much as a hardback of 500 pages.)

Other things connected to Turn of the Screw: The Other Typist | The Innocents^thub | The Grownup^thub

three days

004) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, finished January 11

I reread this in preparation for reading volume two, now out.

It's still incredible.

maybe two weeks 

005) You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, finished January 12

This is a Scholastic comic version of one of the sillier Peanuts specials, the one on Motocross.

It's a fun read but make no mistake: it's very silly.

This is not the reason I say things like "Peanuts is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American art and lit."

under ten minutes

005) Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is by Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens, finished January 24

I really liked this book, even if it did not entirely make sense. What I mean is, it's chockfull of excellent points, moments, pages, paragraphs, ideas. But I'm not sure the book as a whole has a coherent thesis. All the good ideas do add up to something akin to what the title promises, but you can assemble a punch of pieces you found on the battlefield without getting your boyfriend back.

Anyway, as I said, I really liked the book. I could quote stuff off of almost every page with delight. Plus, it's short. So it's overall coherence isn't a deal breaker. If I'd read five hundred pages and ended with a "Wut" or an "And so—?" I might be angry. But not with something as skinny as this.

The book is split into three parts. The first two talk about modern ideas (rationalism, scientism) allegedly in conflict with faith and reveals how they too are rather faith-like; the third is about faith.

Incidentally, although the book is not written in a way to be explicitly LDS, it does cite more LDS folks that you might normally expect from any other book published by a non LDS press for a non-LDS audience. Plus, it references the Book of Mormon a couple times (sans citation).

Let's a have a couple of those quotations, shall we?

Cleaving to the impactful reality of an original experience is not a natural response; it requires an act of will and fortitude. Hence the definition of C.S. Lewis has sound neurological bases: "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."

(and then the Ginvenses immediate disagree with Lewis; which is something they do a lot: use science to show that science is limited, etc etc)

"I had brought him lunch, and as we sat at the table sunlight fell upon a crystal in [his wife] Phyllis's collection, scattering patches of rainbow color over the walls and ceiling. 'There!' said Wayne [Booth], 'don't you feel grateful?' 'It's beautiful,' I said, 'and it makes me happy, but I don't feel grateful. I wish I did. I'm glad that you do.'"

The difference between these two men, between appreciation of beauty and feeling gratitude for that beauty, is the recognition of an agent behind that beauty....

[second brackets mine]

No matter how firm a conviction of genuine faith is, it participates in an essential humility. That is because faith is an expression of our weakness. Faith makes us vulnerable. If you have faith in something you don't fully understand—like God, or his canonized Word—then you cannot say ahead of time where that faith will take you. That can be scary. Presumptuous certainty sheilds us from that risk. The risk is that our faith might be wrong, certainly, but more importantly the risk is that our faith might grow into something difference and take us to unforseen destinations....

Presumptuous certainty is not exaggerated faith in God. It is idolotry. We turn our conception of God—our expectations of who he is, what he is like, and what he would do—into an idol. Idols are inanimate objects, and so they are safe. God is a living being, and so a relationship with him carries risk. When we live by faith, we live precariously.

Ironically, the expert they cite here uses Christopher Hitchens as an example of the dangers of presumptuous certainty. Lol.

Perhaps the most useful takeaway from the book for me personally is not easily quoted. The elephant-and-the-rider metaphor comes from another book, but they put it to great use here. In short, the animal, subconscious mind is the elephant. Our conscious self is the rider. And that's why we can't always control what we do. There's so much going on below the surface.

I think most of us know this, but the Givenses explain this excellently and briefly and honestly the book is worth grabbing just to ingest this summary.

If you need more convincing, you might consider the much finer review that talked me into reading it.

a couple weeks

006) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two by Emil Ferris, finished January 25

Another monster volume, but there are striking differences between the two. Karen seems more grown up—less child, more adolescent. More grown into her wolf body. The book is filled with moments where she says she'll tell us later. It would be an interesting critical experiment to follow up on all those.

Unfortunately for Karen, as secrets get revealed, the explanations are not happy. We never hear the end of Anka's story. But, in a real way, we hear the beginning of Karen's. Even as she leaves all the beginnings she's been making with her friends behind.

It's a truly awful story, but it filled me with empathy for people who find themselves in a series of horrors such that they have no options short of letting the monsters win or becoming a monster themselves.

I hope they find peace.

two weeks