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Going nowhere fast this year.
I'm a bit stressed because I'm in the middle of SO MANY BOOKS and, honestly, it feels like too many. Even given that I am always in the middle too many books, this is SO MANY.
Anyway, I end this set with a couple comics that were easily cranked out to create the illusion of progress.
The most exciting thing below, however, is a book yet to be released. But I'm excited to talk about it with you once you've had the chance.
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013) Love that Dog by Sharon Creech, finished March 11
I used to read this every semester with AP Lit but I left it behind some years ago. This semester I decided to try it out with the sophomores.
I think it was good? We'll be able to tell as the semester progresses and we see if it returns, into our conversations.
three noncontiguous days
014) Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper, finished March 21
I've written about this book at length here.
Let me just add that this could be an incredible animated HBO-level show. An updated Belladonna of Sadness vibe in terms of how fluid images overlap and become another. Would be amazing.
at most four weeks
015) Antelope Spring by John Bennion, finished March 24
This is a novel obsessed with opposites, starting with its very form. It's a novel about a man who would be alone in deserted space. Yet this novel provides him with all sorts of company, from strangers to his wife, from the living to the dead, from the Three Nephites (one of whom is a woman, did you know?) to cryptobiotic soil. He is visited almost nightly by his dead father, grandfather, and great-great-grandfather. He is visited by polygamists and an Army general. He is discovered by a brilliant Dutch philosopher/scientist.
Yet Antelope Spring, for all the noise and chaos, never stops being quiet and still.
The secret, perhaps, is our protagonist, Christopher Twist. He himself is a mess of (believable) contradictions, but he is the center of some sort of universal crisis. Are the Heavenly Parents considering divorce? If not, where are they? And in their absence (or battle or whatever), who will emerge victorious from this second War of not-just-Heaven?
Even the climax of the book (which I will not go into here) is successful in large part because of its intense quiet.
Protagonist Christopher is confused throughout. Some characters try to remove his confusion by giving him explicit instructions. He doesn't take well to that. Others trust him and believe that if he just behaves naturally, things will work out. (This is something the wiser characters also told the main character of Beauty and something dangerously close to Carl Cranney's biggest pet peeve since episode one.)
What I like most about this book, however, is not just how every potential level at which one might read it finds it engaging in the same psychological quandaries, but how these quandaries matter to the characters and the plot in the most fan-friendly (read: nonprofessorial) way of reading the story.
It shares a familial resemblance to the cheesy novels of the 1890s or 1970s that are deeply allegorical. Some of these, of course, were great. We are all either a fan of or love a fan of Looking Backward or Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But whether you think Mitch Albom is a genius or a hack, what makes the best of these books rise above those that embarrass us as we read them is probably threefold:
1. They are not so simple that their allegory can literally be understood in only one way
2. They introduce us to characters who, no matter how fantastical, are real (or become real) within the bounds of the story
3. Even if you take home a particular lesson, the story is bigger than that lesson and thus lives on, giving you cud to chew long after the final page has ended
Even though I just finished the book, I know Antelope Spring meets all three of these categories because I took so long reading it (letter-size single-sheets in a padded envelope cannot be rushed):
1. While there are a couple lessons the characters state and even learn over the course of the novel, the novel itself does not demand you accept them.
2. Although some of the simpler antagonists behave in peculiar ways, almost as if they are being marionetted, the oddness of all eternity within this novel makes us wonder just what forces may in fact be working on them. In other words, any artificiality is parcel.
3. I could give you plenty of examples, but Bennion's vision of an afterlife that is less "after" than simply more of the same—albeit ineffably separate (literally ineffable even to those afterliving it)—is both entirely different from anything I've ever heard in Church while completely Latter-day Saint in conception and execution. I think I'd be slightly disappointed and utterly unsurprised if the afterlife is exactly as presented in Antelope Spring.
But as a novel, I hear you asking, does it work as a novel?
I think you mean do the characters live on the page and do their conflicts hold real weight and do their choices matter and did I care what happened to them as it inevitably did? Yes. There are a handful of moments where a character utters a phrase or smiles in a way that made me see the generational gap between the author and his character, but those moments are few, insignificant—and my biggest complaint. So much happens in this book. And yet, what really matters, is that nothing happens in this book. That's the paradox of mortal life on Earth.
Antelope Spring is a book that embraces fiction's potential for paradox. And for that I love it and submit that it is an appropriate book for this our moment.
Or perhaps any moment.
For always there is war. Even though it seems nothing is happening.
UPDATE FROM THREE DAYS LATER
My wife and I just returned from the temple where we helped people do sealings for their departed. On our drive back, she told me that she knew that some of those we served through ordinance had been waiting and were happy to finally be gifted with these particular blessings. The conversation reminded me of Antelope Spring which, among everything else it is, is one of the great Mormon novels in terms of exploring the veil. Just what is it, just how it works, just what it is for. It doesn't answer any of these questions, mind, but it does ask them exquisitely well.
about three months
016) Shelley Frankenstein by Colleen Madden, finished March 28
This was a fun little book that made me laugh out loud multiple times. I'd avoid reading it through any lenses and some of its story elements might be a little troubling to an overachieving college student, but if you read it as a small child it is utterly delightful.
one sit
017) Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew #21: Double Take, finished April 5
We were at the library looking for something else when I saw a long line of thin yellow books. Sure enough, Nancy Drew. But this series (from the late oughts) stars third-grade Nancy, George, and Bess. Which means it's aimed right at my daughter who is in second.
I loved Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys when I was in elementary school. I read all the Hardy Boys probably multiple times and all of Nancy at least once. (By "all of" I mean the series that are now the "classics" they sell. They did start another series when I was in around sixth grade; I read one but I didn't think it matched the ethos.)
These books are right in keeping with what I loved about those books and Daughter has taken right up with them. She's already read maybe five of them and insisted I read one. Which is just what I was hoping. I have nothing against comics, obviously, but I also want her to dig prose. And now we're planning to go to the library Tuesday and check out as many as we can for our upcoming roadtrip.
Thanks, Nancy! You've done it again!
not very long but over more than one day
018) The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clark, finshed April 8
I love this little tale to be sure, but it's kinda fascinating to read a book where the story is about the same length as the afterward. In which she talks a bit about creation and influence and such. She's a charming host.
I think I'm going to try to trick my second-grader into reading this.....
one sitting
019) Rave by Jessica Campbell, finished April 13
It's about twenty years ago. An evangelical teenage girl believes what she's taught the same time she doesn't. It's classic teenage doublethink and it leads to disaster.
This is a very quiet story. A big fragmented. And it captures well the length of a teenage day or week. While reflecting how short those years can turn.
We are who we make ourselves to be.
But we only have so much control over the raw materials.
two days
020) The Creeps: A Deep Dark Fears Collection by Fran Krause, finished April 14
I think I might remember this strip from the Tumblr era but regardless, it's a good read. People send in their irrational fears and Fran turns them into comics. Most of them are fears collected in childhood, but clearly some people are still creating little anxieties for themselves.
one swimming lesson
earlier this year..........
Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!
001) Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, finished January 1
002) Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell: Volume Three, finished January 1
003) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), finished January 8
004) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, finished January 11
005) You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, finished January 12
005) Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is by Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens, finished January 24
006) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two by Emil Ferris, finished January 25
Maybe we should just pretend this set begins and ends with Wednesday Addams
007) Chas. Addams Half-Baked Cookbook, finished January 29
008) Monica by Daniel Clowes, finished February 3
009) The Unexpurgated French Edition of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, finished February 19
010) Peach and the Isle of Monsters by Franco Aureliani and Agnes Garbowska, finished February 20
011) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished February 28
012) Comic Poems edited by Peter Washington, finished March 7
PREVIOUS OTHER YEARS IN BOOKS
2007 = 2008 = 2009 = 2010 = 2011 = 2012 = 2013 = 2014 = 2015
2016 = 2017 = 2018 = 2019 = 2020 = 2021 = 2022 = 2023 = 2024
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