June Reading Log

 

As I post this, I'm at youth camp, but the log waits for no one (plus I finished writing it on Saturday). Here's what was on the docket for the month of June!

RISE by Carly Parkinson with Nancy Scammacca Lewis

If you've been reading these logs for a while, you'll know that I'm picky when it comes to church health/growth books. A well-written book in this genre is a blend of the spiritual and the practical, incorporating both biblical principles and modern applications of those principles. Some miss the mark by veering too far in the spiritual direction, offering a sermon that inspires but leaves you with little in the way of pragmatic strategies. Others lean too far the other way, offering lots of corporate jargon, charts, and marketplace techniques, but doing so to the point that you wonder if the authors remember that a church is different from a business.

Rise, unfortunately, falls into that latter bucket, to the point that I almost DNF'ed it. The bulk of the book is chapters looking at different church archetypes, from the "troubled church" all the way to the "vibrant church," analyzing how churches get to where they are, what pros and cons exist in each archetype, and how to then get where they need to be. For a researcher this is probably fascinating, but for a pastor looking for a hand, I quickly identified the archetype that matched my church and then found reading about the others to be largely a waste of my time.

The last 40 pages or so offer the strategies promised in the book's subtitle, several of which, unfortunately, seem to be more about selling particular programs than anything else. What's more, these strategies commit the cardinal sin of church growth books: assuming every church has the resources and structure of a megachurch, when in fact few pastors reading a church growth book are in that situation.

As you've probably gathered, this is not a book I plan to keep on my shelf for long. I appreciate the research done by the authors, but just didn't find the conclusions satisfying.

I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Kate Baer

Following last month's review of The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, when I declared that "I still don't get poetry," my friend Kelley showed up to church the next Sunday with two books in hand, confident that the problem is neither me nor poetry in general, just my selection. And so far, maybe she's on to something!

I Hope This Finds You Well is a slim, clever collection of erasure poetry, in which the poet takes a selection of found text, then removes words, leaving behind the remaining words to form a new poem. In this case, Kate Baer takes as her initial text the comments left on her  blog—most critical, a few complimentary, all personal—and transforms them into beautiful words of affirmation, especially for women. The result is poetry that takes the ugliness of the Internet and redeems it into something uplifting. Recommended, unless you're prone to tell feminist authors why they're wrong online.

FOREVER WORDS by Johnny Cash

The second poetry book Kelley loaned me is a collection of previously unpublished poems and song lyrics by American music icon Johnny Cash. These are easy reading (especially after 5 months of W.B. Yeats), and you can't help hear Cash's voice as you read. Admittedly, some work better than others as reading material—song lyrics are meant to be sung, after all, not read silently—but nevertheless this was a fun, breezy collection.

I'll share my favorite snippet, from the undated "I Have Been Around":

I have been around

I have tasted rapture that could not again be found

I felt the power filling up

And I felt the power gone

I've been full but hungry

And abandoned to the bone

In the end I knew one thing to pull me through

I always come back around to you

'SALEM'S LOT by Stephen King

Hot on the heels of his debut novel Carrie, 1975's 'Salem's Lot was Stephen King's foray into a more traditional horror story. It tells the story of a small New England town—this is Stephen King, after all—which is infested by vampires and about the small group of brave townspeople who take them on. Borrowing heavily from Dracula—both Bram Stoker's novel and the subsequent film adaptations—the novel starts slow, steadily builds up steam, then erupts into a final 100 pages of nearly nonstop action.

While beloved by King fans, who often put this book in their top 10 of the author's works, I kind of had a hard time sticking with this one. It's hard to put my finger on the reason why, and it may have had more to do with my busy month than the book itself, but I wasn't sucked into this novel the way I was with Carrie, Misery, and other King classics. For me, this was a perfectly serviceable horror story, but one I wasn't sad to finish. It's also, incidentally, the first of King's novels to deserve the oft-level criticism that he's not good at writing endings.

I have yet to read any bad Stephen King books, and I know they're out there, but so far I would put this in the bottom half of what I've read. You've got to read it if you love King, but don't expect it to be your favorite.

CIVILWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE by George Saunders

My experience here mirrored that of reading 'Salem's Lot—this was an early work by an author I normally love, yet who in this case left me cold. The author in question this time was George Saunders, often regarded as America's best living writer of short stories. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is his first collection, made up of tales published in the early 1990s in magazines like The New Yorker and Harper's, including a novella, "Bounty."

Saunders is now well known for stories that blend satirical, comic prose with horrifying, dystopian situations. Sure enough, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline sees him trying his hand at that formula in virtually every story. But where his stories now routinely grab me from the get-go, these are harder to get into, with protagonists you never feel attached to and worlds that he's too slow to build out.

In short, this reads like a writer still finding his voice. By the time he published Tenth of December, he'd found it, and has been richly rewarded ever since. But these stories are rough drafts compared to those—he'd make it the mountaintop, but this collection represents him still climbing.

GOING SOLO by Roald Dahl

It took every bit of a month to get through this one, the second half of Roald Dahl's two-volume autobiography. Where the first volume dealt with his boyhood, Going Solo tackles his early adulthood, particularly his experiences in Africa working for Shell Oil and then his time flying with the Royal Air Force during World War II.

While that sounds exciting, I have to be honest—this one was a drag to get through. Dahl has an engineer's enthusiasm for aircraft, so you get lots of lengthy descriptions of planes, aerial maneuvers, etc. While that may interest some, I could see Katherine's eyes glazing over as I read the descriptions aloud (and I was as bored as she was!) Additionally, this book has longer chapters than most of his work and is nearly twice the length of his children's novels, making it a rough bedtime read. Andrew stuck with it the whole time, but he was the only one of the three of us who I think really enjoyed the experience.

Dahl's adventures overseas are interesting, but his storytelling in Going Solo is lackluster, something you'd never expect of the writer of James and the Giant Peach. I'd file this one (and, for that matter, Boy too) as "for completists only."

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR VOL. 1-11 by Mark Millar, Warren Ellis, Mike Carey, Adam Kubert, Greg Land, Pasqual Ferry, et al.

In 2000, Marvel debuted Ultimate Spider-Man, a reimagined, modern take on their most popular character, which sought to keep all the core elements of the character but without the burden of 40 years of continuity. Ultimate Spider-Man—and subsequent versions of the X-Men, Avengers ("Ultimates" in this universe), etc.—aimed to bring in new readers by shaking off the dust of characters who had started to feel, well, old. The trick was to match the original characters' ethos while updating it for the 21st century.

Ultimate Fantastic Four, unfortunately, failed to do that. The FF has always been about family, with Reed and Sue acting as mom and dad, Ben and Johnny as the lovable uncles, and eventually Franklin and Valeria as the bright young kids. Secondarily, it's about wacky science fiction adventures, superheroes as "imaginauts," to borrow Mark Waid's memorable term.

The Ultimate version of the characters manages to get this secondary theme, with the team traveling to the so-called "N-Zone" (an alternate dimension known as the Negative Zone in Marvel's primary universe), being visited by zombie versions of themselves from another world, and fighting off alien invaders that include Ultimate Thanos. The heroes themselves are part of a think tank for young prodigies, and the accident that gave them their powers, it is explained, is actually stretching Reed's brain in such a way that he is literally getting smarter every day. So if all you want is superheroes with a heaping spoonful of science fiction, Ultimate Fantastic Four has you covered.

But the book's core mistake—which was then borrowed in the universally reviled 2015 Fantastic Four film—is in making all the characters young adults. Instead of being parents, here Reed and Sue have just started dating. Instead of feeling like close friends and family with decades of history, here the four feel like the more traditional superhero team forced together by circumstance. And instead of the rivalry between Reed and former labmate Victor Van Damme—the Ultimate universe's Doctor Doom— carrying the weight of decades of stories, it feels more like an immature grudge match.

The Ultimate Universe was all about putting a fresh coat of paint on characters weighed down by the baggage of their history. But the problem is, the Fantastic Four are Marvel's First Family—their history is what makes them appealing. So in this case, reinventing the wheel winds up making it worse. Ultimate Fantastic Four, which continued until the entire Ultimate universe met an ignominious end, was one of the line's misfires—it's not bad, but it's not right.