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081) Original Grace by Adam Miller, finished September 7
This was a serendipitously confluent book to follow Meritocracy Mingled with Scripture. Both preach a similar love-your-neighbor gospel from the perspective of how God would manifest his love to us. They fit together nicely even though their rhetorical positions are deeply different.
Anyway, Adam Miller posits that we of the Restoration, for all our verbal rejection of Original Sin, still think and behave as if sin is the driving engine of life on earth and the source of our suffering. Then he suggests imagining what it would be like if we felt that grace was the engine of life—but not, of course, the source of our suffering. What would such look like in our lives if that's what we truly believed?
In the process, among other feats, he redefines justice as God's means of providing grace according to his law. And sin as a failed relationship to grace. When we fail to accept God's grace, that is sin. When we fail to provide grace to others when we see they are in need, that is sin.
Anyway, the thinking in the book is great, as is its use of analogy. Describing ongoing creation in terms of the spreading seafloor? Beautiful.
What I had no idea of coming into the book is how deeply Miller would rely on his father's telling of his own stories to provide a grounded structure for what could be untethered theology. Miller's father spent the final, painful years of his life sending long biographical and testimonial texts to his progeny and Miller relies on them to explain our relationship to God. It's quite a wonderful thing.
And all this in just 110 pages!
two weeks
082) The Skull Beneath the Skin by P.D. James, finished September 9
P.D. James has been on my to-do list for quite a while, but if you'd asked me to guess what I'd read first, I would have said Children of Men or Death Comes to Pemberley as we own both and I'm intrigued by both's premises. But this one turned up for free somewhere and I mean, come on.
Getcherself t'Etsy and buy this copy so you can open the front cover and see what that punchcut reveals.
Anyway, I've heard good things about James and I am happy I've finally given her a chance. Her work's a fancy mix of straight genre pleasures and "literary" thinking. The early chapters alternate povs like normal thrillering. In fact, most of the surface details feel like the cliches of the last 50 years of mystery and thriller. Which is why I didn't see how any of the characters could be the murderer without cheating. As we'd spent time inside everyone's head, it felt like she'd painted herself into a corner. But revealing that some core clues had in fact been red herrings, and having new information occur after the multiple-povs era had come to a close (and having that information be deeply impactful) allowed her to present a lot of twists and resolutions a) without cheating and b) alongside indirect commentary on society's true ills.
I wouldn't call it a masterpiece of modern literature or anything but it's surely a tour de force of what can be done withing the traditionalist restraints of a given genre. It was, in fact, pretty great.
I'm sad to see this was this detective's last outing.
a year more or less (perhaps quite a bit more or less)
083) Sock Monkey Treasury by Tony Millionaire, finished September 11
Tony Millionaire's work is so wonderful and strange. He writes wonderful things for children and drunken things for adults and then you have a collection like this which manages to be all these things and more, sometimes all at once.
He is one of American comics' great poets. A symphonist of violence and nonsense. A beacon of hope in a world gone mad.
Sometimes our world feels no more mad than Uncle Gabby's. And I would be happy to have him name the angel at the edge of the world.
two or three days
084) The Sleepover by Michael Regina, finished September 16
This is a surprisingly scary little middle-reader comic that manages to kill its monster and redeem her too.
Perhaps weirdly, it reminded me of My Best Friend's Exorcism.
Recommended!
an evening
085) The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare, finished September 23
We watched it a couple weekends ago, now I've read it solo, and I'm about to read it two more times with classes.
It's Shakespeare season!
friday monday tuesday
086 & 087) The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare, finished September 29
I always worry but it's always fun to read Shakespeare in class. Even a second-tier play? Absolutely. giving kids permission to notice Shakespeare's weak spots is empowering and, done correctly, only sets them up to look forward to more in the future.
four school days
088) The Iron Heel by Jack London, finished October 1
The Iron Heel is "a truer prophecy than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come," said George Orwell, and it's easy to see how this novel may have influenced Nineteen Eighty-four. It essentially tracks the early hears in which Big Brother (the Iron Heel) take over society, destroying much in their path, and setting up the systems of an Inner Party, Outer Party and the meaningless proles. The result of The Iron Heel, as recognized by the book itself, is centuries of Nineteen Eighty-four. But the rhetorical voice of The Iron Heel and Nineteen Eighty-four's appendix both offer proof-positive that the Iron Heel (Big Brother) ultimately must fail.
I should say now that The Iron Heel is a thrilling read. It feels so relevant to 2025 that the simple plot is no barrier to rushing headlong through the pages in thrall. The description of income disparity is now. The description of institutions that see as their first duty the continuance certain economic benefits for certain portions of society is now. The frustration and anger is now. The inability of many who are doomed to recognize their doom is now.
There are some parts, naturally, where London guessed wrong. He almost made me a Marxist as his charismatic lead explained the theories, but it went off the rails just as Marxism went off the rails IRL. But we tend to forget how close to accurate it was. Violence did break out between labor and capital. The change of our economy from agrarian/rural to tech/service creates different outcomes that weren't so easy to see in 1908, but the mirror and warning are just as relevant and prescient. This book has aged well, in short. Sure it's been eclipsed by Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four, but perhaps its time to put an American novel back in the conversation.
One wild example of how the book is now is the characters' discussion of the 1903 militia bill which allows the federal government to nationalize the state militias and turn them against the citizens of another state. Talk about a Trumpy idea.
The novel purports to be a manuscript written in the 1930s and covering the couple decades prior presented by a scholar 700 years in the future after the Brotherhood of Man brings about a socialist utopia. (One thing I admire about this book is it has optimistic dreams of a utopian future, but the path to utopia is paved in a dystopian pessimism; the contrast serves the aims well.) The future editor of the manuscript has voluminous footnotes, some of which were funny to me (did you know grub means food? fake means false???) and others which astonished me, such as this quotation from Abraham Lincoln:
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”Abraham Lincoln, ladies and gentlemen.
The book is filled—by both the manuscript's author and its editor—with quotations real and part of the fictional world. And, in one case, part of a poem London put in the novel in part with hopes that this would uncover the author's identity. (No luck.)
I'm now going to share two quotations reasonably construed as spoilers but which, together, demonstrate how well the book can unsettle a reader.
1__________________________________
The oligarchs...were going through a remarkable...development.... They were taught, and later they in turn taught, that what they were doing was right.... They looked upon themselves as wild-animal trainers, rulers of beasts. From beneath their feet rose always the subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever stalked in their midst; bomb and knife and bullet were looked upon as so many fangs of the roaring abysmal beast they must dominate if humanity were to persist. They were the saviours of humanity, and they regarded themselves as heroic and sacrificing laborers for the highest good. They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would ingulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.... In short, they alone, by their unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly believed it. I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel.... [F]or the great majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with anything less than the right.... [S]o with the Oligarchy. Prisons, banishment and degradation, honors and palaces and wonder-cities, are all incidental. The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy today lies in its satisfied conception of its own righteousness.
2__________________________________
The inner doors to the entrance were locked and bolted. We could not escape. The next moment the front of the column went by. It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic—a fascinating spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in concrete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivorous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood—men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death’s-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends,crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde.
__________________________________
Whhhoof!
Besides the fact that these are individually terrifying for distinct reasons, the way they fit together like pieces of a puzzle only heighten the total horror.
I occasionally think I want to start a collection of public-domain classics with an essay or three giving the text a strict Latter-day Saint reading and hoogolly but would this book be part of the series.
The socialists preach and atheistic gospel that, save missing God, sounds very much like what the Book of Mormon and Doctrine & Covenants teach about wealth and its distribution among the rich and the poor. That deserves serious consideration.
But then the Iron Heel and the socialists both get engaged in secret combinations—and what happens next? Hundreds of year of death, violence, and misery.
Yeah. If there was money in it, I probably have twenty pages exploring this. I suppose I could try floating such an essay in Ships of Hagoth or Wayfare to see if there's interest. Would you be interested?
I should go through these writeups and see if I can re-identify others that would be part of the collections....
Anyway, I'd like to say more about things important (female narrator!) and trivial (Danites!), but when I started this journey I wrote one paragraph per book and I still recognize that as wisdom.
perhaps as long as ten days
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
Love, Beauty, and a complete lack of sasquatch
013) Love that Dog by Sharon Creech, finished March 11
014) Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper, finished March 21
015) Antelope Spring by John Bennion, finished March 24
016) Shelley Frankenstein by Colleen Madden, finished March 28
017) Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew #21: Double Take, finished April 5
018) The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clark, finshed April 8
019) Rave by Jessica Campbell, finished April 13
020) The Creeps: A Deep Dark Fears Collection by Fran Krause, finished April 14
Do not ask what she does with the babies.
027) Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, finished April 21
028) Somna: A Bedtime Story by Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay, finished April 23
029) Shadow Life by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu, finished April 24
030&031) The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, finished April 25
032) Raised by Ghosts by Briana Loewinsohn, finished April 26
033) Ephemera by Briana Loewinsohn, finished April 26
Brighter and brighter until we all get our heads lopped off
034) Brighter and Brighter until the Perfect Day by Sharlee Mullins Glenn, finished April 27
035) Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett, finished May 3
036) The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, finished May 5
037) Equus by Peter Shaffer
038) Travesties by Tom Stoppard, finished May 8
039) The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between by Stacey D'Erasmo, finished May 10
040) A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, finished May 16
Criticism & Comics
041) Arts and Inspiration: Mormon Perspectives, edited by Steven P. Sondrup, finished May 18
042) The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, finished May 19
043) Odessa by Jonathan Hill, finished May 22
044) Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder by Tula Lotay and Scott Snyder, finished May 22
045) Bingo Baby, finished May 26
Books on the Fourth of July
046) Final Cut by Charles Burns, finished May 28
047) Fever Beach by Carol Hiassen, finished June 12
048) How to Talk to Your Succulent by Zoe Persico, finished June 17
049) Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours by Bianca Stone, June 24
050) Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel, finished June 25
051) The Serial Killer's Son Takes a Wife by Michael Libling, finished July 3
An old friend makes some introductions (and more)
052) The 5th Generation by Dale Jay Dennis, finished July 7
053) To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, finished July 10
054) Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout, finished July 25
055) Meet Monster: The First Big Monster Book by Ellen Blanca and Ann Cook, illustrated by Quentin Blake, finished July 26
056) Last Pick by Jason Walz, finished July 29
057) Death Comes to Eastrepps by Francis Beeding, finished August 2
A lot of comics and then not Twain
058) Gilt Frame by Matt Kindt and Margie Kraft Kindt, finished August 2
059) Monkey Meat: The First Batch by Juni Ba, finished August 3
060) Abbott by Saladin Ahmed and Sami Kivelä and Jason Wordie, finished August 4
061) Mendel the Mess-Up by Terry LaBan, finished August 9
062) Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees by Patrick Horvath, finished August 9
063) James by Percival Everett, finished August 13
The last books read before school starts
064) Stranger Planet by Nathan W Pyle, finished August 13
065) Jumping Jenny by Anthony Berkeley, finished August 13
066) Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, finished August 18
Two dozen is a reasonable number of eggs, too many donuts
067) Monte Cristo by Jordan Mechner and Mario Alberti, finished August 20
068) What We Don't Talk About by Charlot Kristensen, finished August 21
069) The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Lynn Solotaroff), finished August 23
070) The Village Beyond the Mist by Sachiko Kashiwaba (translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa), finished August 23
071) Meritocracy Mingled with Scripture by Justin Pack, finished August 24
072) God's Man: A Novel in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward, finished August 27
073) He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel and Not a Word in It—No Music, Too by Milt Gross, finished August 27
074) The City: A Vision in Woodcuts by Frans Masereel, finished August 27
075) The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk, finished August 28
076) Destiny: A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel, finished August 28
077) The Piano Lesson by August Wilson, finished August 29
078) Passionate Journey: A Vision in Woodcuts by Frans Masereel, finished August 30
079) Madman's Drum by Lynd Ward, finished August 30
080) Murder Mystery Mystery Murder by Ben Abbott, finished September 3
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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