Christian Realism

The review is up at Infuze. Good book. I highly recommend it.

The subtitle of this one is ‘Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy’ and is an expose of significant liberal/left figures, showing how what they preach is in direct conflict with how they live their lives. This one stands out from others in that the author (Peter Schweizer) doesn’t pretend that conservatives are immune from behavior that is contradictory to their position. (For conservatives, it often amounts to failure to live up to the moral standards that they espouse. How many conservatives are on their second, third, or fourth wife?) Schweitzer’s point is not that it is only the liberals that are hypocrites — we all are hypocrites. Rather, the problem with liberal hypocrisy is that the liberal hypocrites are acting in direct contradiction of their ideas. Take the estate tax as one example: liberals, time after time, preach that the estate tax benefits only the rich and should be kept because the rich should support the poor through this tax. However, many rich liberals have found ways to get out of the tax (by creating trusts, etc.) Schweitzer’s point is not that they’re doing this, but that they’re doing this in contradiction to what they preach: it’s other people who should pay the tax, etc.

This was pure, out-and-out fluff, and I think I’m going to have more of these as the year rolls by: a Star Wars novel! This one was the first of a trilogy by A.C. Crispin, detailing the history of Han Solo up to the beginning of SWIV. This first novel of the trilogy gives us the basic background of Han’s life up until he was about 17 and then follows him through his first love affair and his first solo (er, no pun intended) adventure. The book ends with him enrolled in the Imperial Navy, an obvious set-up for the next book in the trilogy.

The plot was… OK, but the characterization was incredibly thin. I had a hard time believing that this was the same character that Harrison Ford so fully realized in the Star Wars trilogy.

So why am I wasting my time with these books? In no small part because every now and then I want just pure brain-candy. Like cotton candy, it looks good and is full of sugar and is fine every now and then, but you wouldn’t want to make a diet of it. Conversely, a diet of nothing but vegetables, while good for you, can also bore you.

There’s also the factor that I’m really interested in the idea of large, overarching narratives right now. Stories like those in the Star Wars novels work in no small part because they are part of a much larger narrative, a larger tapestry that you have already invested your time in coming to know. Stand-alone novels can be powerful, but they can also be left behind when you’re done. But a novel that’s part of a shared world has narrative depth that comes merely from the fact that it is part of a story that is larger than itself, and is that not what we all are? Part of a story that is larger than ourselves.

OK, I failed miserably last year with keeping track of the books I read on this blog, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll do better this year. Those books that I’m not reviewing elsewhere, I’ll review here.

First book read this year: The Runelords by David Farland. I’ll be doing a review of it for Greenman Review, most likely to be published within the month.

I’ll admit it: I fell off the log. I failed. I haven’t been keeping up on what I’ve been reading. But I have a good excuse (sort of)! For the first 6 months of 2006, I was busily putting together a catalog that usually takes two people two years. I finally finished it, and now I find that the rest of my life that I had to put on hold to do this needs catching up.

I’m not going to list everything I’ve read because, quite frankly, I’ve lost track, but here are some highlights:

• Very Short Introductions. This is a fascinating series being put out by Oxford University Press. (Web page here.) The series is about 200 volumes so far and consists of books written by ‘the experts’ about pretty much any subject you can think of, and many you never even considered. So far I’ve read four volumes and have thumbed through a number more. The series should be called the ‘Variable Short Introduction’ to be more truthful. Some of the books are incredibly concise overviews of a subject (e.g., the history of time), whereas others make you wonder if the authors, in their incredibly limited space (no volume more than 200 pages, most around 100-125) are ever going to get to introducing the subject (e.g., the classics). The volume on the Celts was one of the best I’ve read.
• An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. My brother-in-law (as well as Josh) have ben pestering me to read this. I did. It took me about 6 months and I was bored stiff. I appreciate what Pears was attempting to do — showing how reality and our perception of it can often vary quite a bit, while also carrying on a discussion about the reliability of narrators — but he could have at least created some characters that one would actually care about.
• Judgment of Paris by Ross King. My wife and I have been on a Ross King binge recently, having read Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. King writes a captivating non-fiction history whenever he puts his pen to it. He has that knack of not only getting his history right, but making it interesting and entertaining. Judgment of Paris is probably the weakest of his (so far) three history books, and it is quite entertaining. This time out, King is writing about the decade leading up to the first Impressionistic salon and the turmoil in France. He does it by following the lives and works of two artists: Eduoard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While he does a fair job at getting us inside Meissonier (and in the process, rehabilitating him from current opinions), he never gets around to doing the same for Manet, leaving us wondering what and why Manet was painting what he was. Instead, we read of Manet’s latest painting, it’s horrible reception, that’s it — no attempt to get us inside Manet’s head. Still, a fun read.

I’m currently working through A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin and loving it. This is a slow-moving, massive story, but there are very few chapters, pages, paragraphs that seem superfluous. Who cares if it’s a doorstop? It’s a well-written doorstop.

Had I been doing a good job at keeping up with it, by now you would probably be sick of hearing that one of my goals for the year is to record every book I read, and comment on how it affected my life. Great idea, but it works a lot better if I post more than once a quarter. There are about a dozen books to report on, but I’m going to do a quick run on a stack of airport paperbacks; the rest will be addressed in another post. By airport paperbacks I mean the type of pop lit one would normally read on a long flight, its content serving primarily as distraction. Yes, that is a bit snobby, and no, not all of the books listed below should be dismissed so easily. But as it so happens, most of these were, in fact, read during a recent trip overseas.

One of my areas of interest is the horror genre, particularly where it intersects with the Christian faith. About a month ago I recognized that were I to speak with any authority on the subject, it would behoove me to break out of my “horror literature stopped with HP Lovecraft” fantasy world, and to read some contemporary works. So I conducted an in-depth analysis of the extant writing on the subject… well, actually, I started with some horror writers I like, and used their names as keywords to find relevant newsgroups, Web sites, and Amazon.com favorites lists. Armed with a dozen new names, I drove to the local Barnes & Noble to see what was in stock. My long-winded intro out of the way, here now is the list:

Mystery Walk by Robert R. McCammon. Two young men are bitter enemies: one can communicate with the restless spirits of the dead; the other is a faith healer and inheritor of an evangelistic empire. They grow up, they fight, and one of them dies, the end. Not bad, not offensive, not from a Christian worldview, but it didn’t bash Christianity either.

The Overnight by Ramsey Campbell. A really, really bad night at a bookstore. The intentionally funny parts of the story were quite funny, but I never really cared about any of the characters. Campbell’s previous work, The Darkest Part of the Wood was far more engrossing.

Revelation by Bentley Little. The devil pops up in Randall, Arizona, to start the battle of Armageddon. This book was so close. Change maybe 500 words and it would have been labeled Christian fiction… but toward the end it pulled one of those, “some call him Jesus, some call him Anansi, but we all believe in the same thing, so let’s sacrifice a goat” switcheroos. Darn.

The Doorkeepers by Graham Masterson. Six doors they stand in London town… It’s sort of like Tim Powers, only not as good. It’s about people who move between alternate versions of London. I believe they get from one reality to the next by falling through holes in the plot.

The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene. What if there was another great flood? Who would be around on the 41st day of rain? Giant tube worms from the bottom sea, that’s who!

Storm Front by Jim Butcher. Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, paranormal investigator. Sorta like Philip Marlowe with potions, unfettered by meaningless details such as an investigator’s license.

Even Vampires Get the Blues by Katie MacAlister. This half-elf runs a private detective agency, and she falls in love with one of her clients, a vampire who lost his soul because of a curse, and he’ll get it back if she can get him to fall in love with her, but in the meantime they are playing the “friends with benefits” game… AURGH! I ran out of reading material in Germany, and borrowed one of my wife’s books. MacAlister writes excellent dialog. She should use her powers for good, not for the creation of vampire/elf detective/romance novels.

That’s it for now…

Like Matt, I’ve gotten a bit behind on logging what I’ve read. So here goes.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. This was required reading for a class I’m taking in non-Western mythology. It is the Penguin Classics edition by Sandars, and did a pretty good job of putting the text into readable English. The story is deceptively short: the epic itself takes only 58 pages of the 128-page book. There is an excellent introduction with the history of the epic and its discovery, but for a critical edition, the lack of an index was disappointing (and annoying, when discussing the book in class).

The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler. A supernatural thriller in which Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, H.P. Lovecraft, and Marie Laveau try to recover the lost Book of Enoch while Aliester Crowley lurks in the shadows. I shall review the book by way of analogy. Wheeler’s The Arcanum is to Charles Williams’ War in Heaven as the movie Van Helsing is to the movie Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart by Noel Carroll. This is the book I’ve been looking for. An intelligent examination of the horror genre: what horror is, why it is effective, and why we read it. Some of the philosophical musings went right over my head, but I think I’ll read this book again some day.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton. There is a micro-genre of stories about people having philosophical awakenings after their experiences in the first World War, and this was recommended to me as one of the best. A hijacked airplane is flown to a remote village in Tibet called Shangri-La. The four passengers on the plane adapt to Shangri-La in different ways, and the main character, Conway, develops a special relationship with the High Lama. Some of the philosophy seemed a little woo-woo New-Agey, but the story was interesting — especially the ambiguous ending — and certain passages about the escalation of violence in society seemed almost prescient.

A New Kind of Christian by Brian McClaren. This is the first book of McClaren’s trilogy about pastor Dan Poole, and consists mostly of conversations between Poole and his daughter’s high school science teacher, Neo. Poole is a fictional character, but the the evolution of Poole’s thoughts about the church and Christianity are meant to mirror McClaren’s own process. I had mixed feelings about this book; some of the questions it raised were ones I’ve had myself. And I appreciated much of what was said about Christianity in a post-modern culture. However, I thought the book spent a lot more time talking about what is broken, and less about what we should be doing. In that respect, I enjoyed a more recent McClaren book, A Generous Orthodoxy, which I felt was more positive in tone.

One other thing that occurred to me while reading the book was a question of who the book was for. It just seemed that someone would already have to be open to certain aspects of pomo theology to move past the first couple of chapters. But the book raised enough good points that I think I’ll continue with the next two volumes in the series: The Story We Find Ourselves In and The Last Word and the Word After That.

I’ve gotten a bit behind on logging what I’ve read, but most of what I’ve read either has not inspired much comment from me or I’ll be reviewing it elsewhere, so this will be mostly a laundry list with short comments about what I’ve read this past month:

• Nightwatch by Terry Pratchett. It’s Discworld, do I need to say more? Fun and thought-provoking. Will be reviewed in forthcoming issue of Deep Magic.
• Sorcery and Cecilia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. An epistolary Regency-era novel about people being turned into trees and magic-possessed chocolate pots. Lots of fun. I’ve got the sequel (recently published) loaned to me by a friend in my soon-to-read pile.
• The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The grand-daddy of Gothic novels. I was summarily unimpressed, other than finding it interesting where all the tropes originated.
• Magic Street by Orson Scott Card. Card finally does contemporary fantasy. It was slow starting, but ended well. Good book.
• The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston. I started reading this one, but couldn’t get into it sufficiently. I sent it back to the library and will try to get into it again sometime this summer.
• The Early History of Rome by Livy. For the boys’ schoolwork.
• The Best Things in Life by Peter Kreeft. A set of Socratic dialogues between Socrates and some moderns. Also for the boys’ schoolwork. When Kreeft is at his best, the dialogues are captivating, but when he’s got an axe to grind, suddenly there aren’t many questions and Socrates is suddenly pontificating instead of probing. Uneven.
• The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable by F.F. Bruce. Yes.

I’m sure there’s something else I’m missing, but I don’t have my pile in front of me to check.

I think that brings me up to 13 books for the year. Still working on An Instance of the Fingerpost in between other stuff. The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award long list has come out, so I’m busy with that.

Three more books read, bringing the total to six this year:

(1) Biblical Eldership by Alexander Strauch. Not much to comment on: I read it as part of the ‘leadership training’ at church. I’ve done pretty good studies of this subject in the past, so there was very little new material; most of it was review.

(2) All of Grace by Spurgeon. Another book as part of leadership training. Spurgeon always strikes me the same way, no matter what I read by him: very theologically sound, but not very deep. This book was no exception. Spurgeon is more homiletic and devotional in his style, so I always end up wondering why I just read 100 (or whatever) pages of something that I could paraphrase in about 3 pages, if I got verbose.

(3) Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. OK, I admit, I succumbed and finally read the book. Man, what a royal waste of time. This was agenda-driven pablum if there ever was some. I’m not even ranting about how Brown’s agenda goes against both history and what I believe. Sure, that irritated me, but I was prepared for it. I was also prepared for it being poorly written, but the first sentence totally floored me: “Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” That has got to be the worst example of info-dumping I have ever encountered. As one of the editors of Deep Magic I have the fortune of reading lots and lots of very poorly written submissions, and this opening sentence had me grabbing my red pencil immediately. “Renowned curator” has absolutely nothing to do with showing the reader what’s going on, but everything to do with cramming info into the reader’s head. Two sentences later we get, “Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved…”. Why tell us his age? What does that have to do with anything at this point? Simply put, there’s no reason, other than Brown needs us to know that information and he’s not talented enough to give it to us any other way than this info-dumping.

(Spoiler warning: if you haven’t read the book, the following might ruin the one little joy the book holds: a plot that keeps you only somewhat interested.)

What I found just as irritating is that the whole ‘mystery’ in this novel is totally unnecessary. Sauniere, upon realizing he’s dying (a bullet wound to the stomach was his first clue), realizes he needs to impart the information on where to find the Holy Grail, but he does this in such a cryptic way that the rest of the book is our hero and heroine trying to discover this while the villain tries to discover it also. There’s this sense of urgency that what Sauniere is revealing is information that dies with him if he doesn’t pass it on. But when all is revealed in the end, we learn that there’re a whole bunch of people who know exactly what Sauniere was trying to hide. In other words, the whole plot is about as pointless as you can get.

It’s obvious that Brown’s whole point is to put forth his silly ‘goddess worship is really what Christianity was about until it was taken over by those golly-gosh-darn mean men’ agenda. And this is what irks me the most: it’s nothing but blatant proselytizing! Chick tracks have more artistic merit than this book does. It’s reduced to nothing more than a bludgeoning over the head for the reader. And this is exactly what I find wrong with so much evangeli-fiction that is published today; it’s just the shoe is on the other foot.

First, before I get into the books I’ve read this month, let me set one thing clear: we’re not becoming a book review site. I’ve had some requests for us to review a book. That’s not what we’re doing, but if you want to send us a free copy of your book, more power to you. What we’re up to is just chatting about what we’ve read this year.

OK, so on to what I’ve been reading. January has been a very strange month for me in that I haven’t gotten a whole lot read. Usually I read anywhere from eight to 10 books/month, but I only got through two in January. One reason is that I was busy catching up with a huge pile of magazines that consumed a good chunk of my month. Also, I seemed to be busier than usual, but I’m not sure why.

Anyway the two books I’ve read this month were Uncommon Dissent, edited by William Dembski, and Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method by Henry Bauer. I’m putting together a class on Intelligent Design with another guy from church (who is a science teacher) and my role is to discuss the metaphysical side of the issue: how much is the ID debate actually not related to science per se but actually a discussion of what constitutes science and what the philosophical/metaphysical foundations of science are and should be. I’ve got an hour and a half of teaching time to answer those.

I’ve read quite a bit about ID, even before I set out to teach this class, and Uncommon Dissent is one of the better books I’ve read. It’s not about ID itself, but about intellectuals who don’t find Darwinian evolution intellectually satisfying, and their reasons why. It doesn’t set ID as the answer but allows the authors to put forth their own ideas, some of which contradict with each other. I highly recommend it.

The other book (Bauer) was good. It reflects a heavy influence of Michael Polanyi in its discussion of how science is actually conducted (in comparison to the myth about the scientific method). It’s not an unimportant subject, especially as our culture becomes more and more a culture of the expert. Again, I recommend.

What’s next? I’m picking my way slowly through Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost as well as a couple books for leadership training at church.