March was a busy month, as I polished off 6 novels, 4 history books, 5 theological works, and 4 graphic novels, for a grand total of 19 books read in March.
April Fool's. You're too easy.
In reality, a lot of my reading time in March was devoted to whittling down my always insurmountable pile of saved magazine articles, op-eds, and blog posts to a more manageable size. Nevertheless, I still spent plenty of time with a book in my hand, whether it was an explanation of narrative preaching, a collection of baseball essays, a horror-crime noir comic series, or something else altogether. Enjoy the reviews!
OVERHEARING THE GOSPEL by Fred Craddock
I never met the late Fred Craddock, but he is nevertheless one of my greatest preaching mentors. Having been introduced to his work in seminary (he wrote our primary textbook for Preaching I), I am always on the lookout for his sermons (written or audio), articles, and books. So when I stumbled upon Overhearing the Gospel at a used bookstore, I couldn’t get the cash out of my wallet and into the cashier’s hands fast enough.
The book serves as an effective explanation and justification for his method of preaching, typically called ‘narrative preaching.’ Craddock is no fan of the sermon as argument, where you lay out your thesis in the first 5 minutes, prove it with 3 points, and then summarize and restate it in the conclusion. While it’s easy to take notes during that kind of sermon, Craddock says there is a better way: the sermon as story. The preacher, he argues, should not approach the sermon like a lawyer who’s out to prove a point, but like a storyteller who’s there to tell you good news. And especially in the 21st century (the book was published in 2002), when we are inundated with conflict every day, he says our congregations need to hear fewer arguments about Jesus and more stories about him.
Craddock leans heavily on the writings of Soren Kierkegaard to explain his method, returning time and time again to this quote: “There is no lack of information in a Christian land; something else is lacking, and this is a something which the one cannot directly communicate to the other.” To be an effective preacher today, Craddock believes, one must present the gospel message subversively and allow it to sneak up on the listener for maximum impact, in much the same way that Jesus did with his parables. The titular idea of the book is for the listener to ‘overhear the gospel’ in the narrative of the sermon, not be beat over the head with it from introduction to conclusion. And I’ll tell you this from personal experience: when you hear this kind of preaching done well, the sermon sticks with you in a way that most preaching rarely does.
As usual when I read Craddock, he altered the direction and style of my next sermon and had me pounding my head on the desk trying to make it work—his method of preaching is a LOT easier to understand than to implement. But after all, the best teachers challenge their students, so I’m continually grateful for books like this one that stretch my understanding of what a sermon ‘should’ sound like and force me to work harder at communicating as best I can. For anyone looking for a fresh perspective on preaching (especially if you’re unfamiliar with anything but the standard deductive, 3-point style), give this book a try.
HOW TO BE BORN AGAIN by Billy Graham
If you were to make a list of the 5 most influential preachers of the past century, Billy Graham would undoubtedly make the list, possibly at the very top. His evangelistic crusades, which he led from 1947 to 2005, reached millions of people for Christ and thrust his ministry into the national spotlight. For decades he was the unofficial "pastor to the presidents", having prayed with and provided counsel to every U.S. president from Truman to Obama. And along the way, he wrote over 30 books, including this one, first published in 1977.
How to Be Born Again is exactly what it sounds like, a primer on the biblical message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Divided into three sections--man's problem, God's answer, and man's response--Graham offers a compelling case for why each person needs to be born again, explaining with a diverse array of Bible verses and personal testimonies how God can change any individual's life if he or she will let Him in. Essentially, this book is a 183 page summary of his evangelistic sermons--and if you're going to read a 183 page sermon, you can do a lot worse than Billy Graham!
The book does have its drawbacks: the cultural references are dated and it tends to be repetitive. Furthermore, Graham is not breaking new ground; if you are a believer, you're probably not going to learn anything new about God from this book. But its core message is the timeless, biblical message of salvation, and Graham is a master preacher of that message. As in his sermons, his writing strikes a balance that lesser preachers and authors often fail to achieve: he is simple without being facile, folksy without being condescending, current (for 1977) without being overly political, funny when he can be and serious when he needs to be. Billy Graham has many imitators, but few preach the gospel with the grace and power God gave him throughout his decades of ministry. If you never heard him preach, want to know what his entire life has been about, or most importantly of all, don't know what being "born again" means, this book is a good place to turn.
THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST by Robert Frost
I am not a poetry guy, though not for lack of trying. Maybe it's the poets I've chosen to read, maybe it's a general impatience with how poetry is meant to be read (slowly and usually often loud), maybe it's just a lack of depth in my soul, I don't know. What I do know is that every morning I devote 15-20 minutes to reading poetry, and that a lot of mornings that feels like wasted time. Sometimes it's tempting to just throw up my hands and declare that poetry is just not my thing and leave the whole genre to more enlightened brains than mine.
So Robert Frost has my gratitude for restoring my belief that I can read and enjoy poetry. As I began reading his work (The Poetry of Robert Frost is a complete collection of all of his published poems), I was familiar with his greatest hits: "The Road Not Taken," "Mending Wall," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "Fire and Ice." So I had a general feel for the flavor of his poetry, but didn't know much else. What I was pleased to learn over the last 3 months as I slowly worked through this book was that Frost's poetry strikes an incredible balance between accessibility and insight; most of his poems can be appreciated by both the common man and the Ph.D in English.
Whether he's dealing with nature, religion, or politics (probably his three most prominent themes in my estimation) or something else altogether, Frost managed to make me think and feel, to admire his carefully chosen words and the meaning behind them. As best I can tell, that's the task of every poet--and Frost, one of poetry's household names, does it better than anybody else I've come across so far. When I was considering ditching poetry altogether, Frost reeled me back in...can't offer a much better recommendation than that.
SEASON TICKET by Roger Angell
I tend to group professional baseball prognosticators into four categories. The most common and least evolved of the species is the hot take artist--the newspaper columnist looking to stir up controversy, the sports talk radio host, and the ever-present ESPN talking head artist are all examples. These are the folks who watch 15 games a year, either on TV or from the press box, and then deem themselves experts. The second category is the beat writer, the person who is in the clubhouse every single day covering the local team, who doles out quotes, stats, and trade rumors whenever he or she can get them and offers opinions sparingly (at least before the advent of Twitter). Category #3, a recent addition to the world of baseball reporting, is the stathead. This is the blogger (since almost all of this writing is found online) who grew up on Bill James abstracts, thinks of Moneyball as a revered ancient tome, and talks more about WAR than General Patton did. They devote themselves to breaking down players, teams, and games according to the most minute statistical data available, and either work for Fangraphs or wish they did. The final category is what I might call the intellectual fan. These are the writers and broadcasters whose livelihood does not depend on baseball, but who use their broader platforms in the media to sneak in the occasional essay on the sport. George Will, Bob Costas, and Ken Burns would all fit in this category, and the most respected of all is the dean of baseball writers, Roger Angell.
Angell's day job for decades was fiction editor for the New Yorker, but he is better known for his sports essays, especially the ones about baseball. A far cry from either the strictly-the-facts game reports of the beat writers or the controversy-of-the-day hot take artists, Angell writes poetically about the sport, radiating a love for and fascination with the game that time has yet to diminish. Season Ticket is a collection of 15 of his essays from 1982-1985.
The writing is superb throughout (his reputation is well deserved), but for this reader in 2017, the book as a whole was hit and miss. Several of the essays amounted to summaries of particular seasons, which was probably fun reading the year they were published, but lacked relevancy 30 years later. The best essays were those in which Angell researched a narrow topic, like catchers or the National Baseball Hall of Fame. These were both fascinating and impressively prescient--in his essay on catchers, for example, he spends pages talking about we now call pitch framing, a current fad among statheads that he was extolling 30 years ago. There's also a long profile of former Kansas City Royals closer Dan Quisenberry that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I started this book on a plane headed to spring training and finished it the week before Opening Day, and every page made me long for the season to begin. If you like baseball writing, you can't go wrong with Roger Angell, and Season Ticket has some great stories to tell.
MY BOOKSTORE edited by Ronald Rice
The very existence of this monthly reading log probably tipped you off to the fact that I like bookstores. Few places are as capable as a good bookstore of of simultaneously relaxing and energizing me, of emptying my mind of the day's stresses and filling it with the musings of a good author. Give me a few shelves stacked with books, a comfy chair, and perhaps a cup of coffee, and I can lose a morning (and some cash) in no time.
My Bookstore is a celebration of the local, independent bookstore via a collection of essays by various professional authors about their own favorite bookshops. Each essay highlights a different locale, from the large and famous (Powell's, the Strand, Politics and Prose) to the stores familiar only to their loyal patrons. From tales of cats roaming the store (bookstore owners, for some reason, almost universally love cats) to stories of booksellers advocating for local authors, each author lovingly defends not only his or her preferred bookshop, but the very institution of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, making a case for its importance to the community and the broader cultural landscape.
The book is meant to be read an essay at a time, not in large bites, and you will enjoy it more that way, because it gets pretty redundant otherwise. You quickly start to pick up on repeated themes and motifs: the saintly and determined bookseller who helped put the author on the map, the store that serves as the center of a town's culture, the bookshop that has endured the dual assaults of Amazon and Barnes & Noble with some combination of local appeal, capitalistic brilliance, and personal touch. So my favorite essays were the ones that strayed from these templates, whether it was the rhyming ode to one store or the rambling letter to another. But whether you're reading one of these outside-the-box offerings or one of the more boilerplate essays, you'll find yourself wanting to hop in the car and head to your own local bookstore for an hour. Or in my case, three.
P.S. At the back of the book, all 84 stores are listed by state, a convenient checklist to consult whenever you're about to travel. So far I've only been to 3: Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Brookline Booksmith in Boston, and City Lights Books in San Francisco. I've got some traveling to do!
FATALE VOL. 1-5 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are one of the most reliable collaborative writer-artist teams in comics, churning out hit after hit, from the just concluded Hollywood murder-mystery The Fade Out to their currently running serial killer crime drama Kill or Be Killed to their best-known and longest running series to date, Criminal (which I own but haven't read yet...stay tuned in a future month.) For March, I chose to dive into their most polarizing series, Fatale.
Fatale is a tribute to the femme fatales of classic noir tales, and features just about every trope of those stories, from murder to sex to cults to Lovecraftian monsters. The plot revolves around Josephine, a woman cursed to never grow old who has a strange hypnotic power over men, able to get them to do whatever she asks with a word. Her power comes from her connection to a monstrous demon and his followers, who are out to kill her even as she seeks a cure for her curse. Each volume of the story finds her falling in with a different unwitting man, from a World War II GI to a 1990s grunge rocker, who all try to protect her from her terrifying pursuers, only to meet doom themselves.
If my description thus far hasn't tipped you off yet, this book falls firmly in the Adult category (for language, violence, nudity, drug use, you name it). And while I'm no prude about what I read, a lot of it felt gratuitous--perhaps intentionally, since classic noir gleefully exploited taboos to lure in readers. Whether purposeful or not, I wouldn't have complained if Brubaker and Phillips had offered a PG-13 version of this book instead of the hard R that they produced; frankly, the deluge of adult material distracted from the story they were telling.
And as unnecessary as I found all the R-rated stuff, the story was ultimately my biggest problem with this book. Phillips' art is beautiful, Brubaker writes excellent dialogue and paces his story with customary mastery, but the plot and its resolution leave the reader with way too many unanswered questions. I'm fine with some ambiguity, especially in a story where the supernatural has a role to play, but more world building was needed in this book. I never learned the origin of Josephine's curse, never really got a feel for how she was connected to her enemy, and left the final volume feeling more puzzled than satisfied. I don't need to know every detail of a story's mythology, but I need some kind of foundation, and Fatale's was not firm. Brubaker and Phillips are a great team, and this book isn't terrible, but it's definitely my least favorite thing I've read from them.
April Fool's. You're too easy.
In reality, a lot of my reading time in March was devoted to whittling down my always insurmountable pile of saved magazine articles, op-eds, and blog posts to a more manageable size. Nevertheless, I still spent plenty of time with a book in my hand, whether it was an explanation of narrative preaching, a collection of baseball essays, a horror-crime noir comic series, or something else altogether. Enjoy the reviews!
OVERHEARING THE GOSPEL by Fred Craddock
I never met the late Fred Craddock, but he is nevertheless one of my greatest preaching mentors. Having been introduced to his work in seminary (he wrote our primary textbook for Preaching I), I am always on the lookout for his sermons (written or audio), articles, and books. So when I stumbled upon Overhearing the Gospel at a used bookstore, I couldn’t get the cash out of my wallet and into the cashier’s hands fast enough.
The book serves as an effective explanation and justification for his method of preaching, typically called ‘narrative preaching.’ Craddock is no fan of the sermon as argument, where you lay out your thesis in the first 5 minutes, prove it with 3 points, and then summarize and restate it in the conclusion. While it’s easy to take notes during that kind of sermon, Craddock says there is a better way: the sermon as story. The preacher, he argues, should not approach the sermon like a lawyer who’s out to prove a point, but like a storyteller who’s there to tell you good news. And especially in the 21st century (the book was published in 2002), when we are inundated with conflict every day, he says our congregations need to hear fewer arguments about Jesus and more stories about him.
Craddock leans heavily on the writings of Soren Kierkegaard to explain his method, returning time and time again to this quote: “There is no lack of information in a Christian land; something else is lacking, and this is a something which the one cannot directly communicate to the other.” To be an effective preacher today, Craddock believes, one must present the gospel message subversively and allow it to sneak up on the listener for maximum impact, in much the same way that Jesus did with his parables. The titular idea of the book is for the listener to ‘overhear the gospel’ in the narrative of the sermon, not be beat over the head with it from introduction to conclusion. And I’ll tell you this from personal experience: when you hear this kind of preaching done well, the sermon sticks with you in a way that most preaching rarely does.
As usual when I read Craddock, he altered the direction and style of my next sermon and had me pounding my head on the desk trying to make it work—his method of preaching is a LOT easier to understand than to implement. But after all, the best teachers challenge their students, so I’m continually grateful for books like this one that stretch my understanding of what a sermon ‘should’ sound like and force me to work harder at communicating as best I can. For anyone looking for a fresh perspective on preaching (especially if you’re unfamiliar with anything but the standard deductive, 3-point style), give this book a try.
HOW TO BE BORN AGAIN by Billy Graham
If you were to make a list of the 5 most influential preachers of the past century, Billy Graham would undoubtedly make the list, possibly at the very top. His evangelistic crusades, which he led from 1947 to 2005, reached millions of people for Christ and thrust his ministry into the national spotlight. For decades he was the unofficial "pastor to the presidents", having prayed with and provided counsel to every U.S. president from Truman to Obama. And along the way, he wrote over 30 books, including this one, first published in 1977.
How to Be Born Again is exactly what it sounds like, a primer on the biblical message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Divided into three sections--man's problem, God's answer, and man's response--Graham offers a compelling case for why each person needs to be born again, explaining with a diverse array of Bible verses and personal testimonies how God can change any individual's life if he or she will let Him in. Essentially, this book is a 183 page summary of his evangelistic sermons--and if you're going to read a 183 page sermon, you can do a lot worse than Billy Graham!
The book does have its drawbacks: the cultural references are dated and it tends to be repetitive. Furthermore, Graham is not breaking new ground; if you are a believer, you're probably not going to learn anything new about God from this book. But its core message is the timeless, biblical message of salvation, and Graham is a master preacher of that message. As in his sermons, his writing strikes a balance that lesser preachers and authors often fail to achieve: he is simple without being facile, folksy without being condescending, current (for 1977) without being overly political, funny when he can be and serious when he needs to be. Billy Graham has many imitators, but few preach the gospel with the grace and power God gave him throughout his decades of ministry. If you never heard him preach, want to know what his entire life has been about, or most importantly of all, don't know what being "born again" means, this book is a good place to turn.
THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST by Robert Frost
I am not a poetry guy, though not for lack of trying. Maybe it's the poets I've chosen to read, maybe it's a general impatience with how poetry is meant to be read (slowly and usually often loud), maybe it's just a lack of depth in my soul, I don't know. What I do know is that every morning I devote 15-20 minutes to reading poetry, and that a lot of mornings that feels like wasted time. Sometimes it's tempting to just throw up my hands and declare that poetry is just not my thing and leave the whole genre to more enlightened brains than mine.
So Robert Frost has my gratitude for restoring my belief that I can read and enjoy poetry. As I began reading his work (The Poetry of Robert Frost is a complete collection of all of his published poems), I was familiar with his greatest hits: "The Road Not Taken," "Mending Wall," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "Fire and Ice." So I had a general feel for the flavor of his poetry, but didn't know much else. What I was pleased to learn over the last 3 months as I slowly worked through this book was that Frost's poetry strikes an incredible balance between accessibility and insight; most of his poems can be appreciated by both the common man and the Ph.D in English.
Whether he's dealing with nature, religion, or politics (probably his three most prominent themes in my estimation) or something else altogether, Frost managed to make me think and feel, to admire his carefully chosen words and the meaning behind them. As best I can tell, that's the task of every poet--and Frost, one of poetry's household names, does it better than anybody else I've come across so far. When I was considering ditching poetry altogether, Frost reeled me back in...can't offer a much better recommendation than that.
SEASON TICKET by Roger Angell
I tend to group professional baseball prognosticators into four categories. The most common and least evolved of the species is the hot take artist--the newspaper columnist looking to stir up controversy, the sports talk radio host, and the ever-present ESPN talking head artist are all examples. These are the folks who watch 15 games a year, either on TV or from the press box, and then deem themselves experts. The second category is the beat writer, the person who is in the clubhouse every single day covering the local team, who doles out quotes, stats, and trade rumors whenever he or she can get them and offers opinions sparingly (at least before the advent of Twitter). Category #3, a recent addition to the world of baseball reporting, is the stathead. This is the blogger (since almost all of this writing is found online) who grew up on Bill James abstracts, thinks of Moneyball as a revered ancient tome, and talks more about WAR than General Patton did. They devote themselves to breaking down players, teams, and games according to the most minute statistical data available, and either work for Fangraphs or wish they did. The final category is what I might call the intellectual fan. These are the writers and broadcasters whose livelihood does not depend on baseball, but who use their broader platforms in the media to sneak in the occasional essay on the sport. George Will, Bob Costas, and Ken Burns would all fit in this category, and the most respected of all is the dean of baseball writers, Roger Angell.
Angell's day job for decades was fiction editor for the New Yorker, but he is better known for his sports essays, especially the ones about baseball. A far cry from either the strictly-the-facts game reports of the beat writers or the controversy-of-the-day hot take artists, Angell writes poetically about the sport, radiating a love for and fascination with the game that time has yet to diminish. Season Ticket is a collection of 15 of his essays from 1982-1985.
The writing is superb throughout (his reputation is well deserved), but for this reader in 2017, the book as a whole was hit and miss. Several of the essays amounted to summaries of particular seasons, which was probably fun reading the year they were published, but lacked relevancy 30 years later. The best essays were those in which Angell researched a narrow topic, like catchers or the National Baseball Hall of Fame. These were both fascinating and impressively prescient--in his essay on catchers, for example, he spends pages talking about we now call pitch framing, a current fad among statheads that he was extolling 30 years ago. There's also a long profile of former Kansas City Royals closer Dan Quisenberry that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I started this book on a plane headed to spring training and finished it the week before Opening Day, and every page made me long for the season to begin. If you like baseball writing, you can't go wrong with Roger Angell, and Season Ticket has some great stories to tell.
MY BOOKSTORE edited by Ronald Rice
The very existence of this monthly reading log probably tipped you off to the fact that I like bookstores. Few places are as capable as a good bookstore of of simultaneously relaxing and energizing me, of emptying my mind of the day's stresses and filling it with the musings of a good author. Give me a few shelves stacked with books, a comfy chair, and perhaps a cup of coffee, and I can lose a morning (and some cash) in no time.
My Bookstore is a celebration of the local, independent bookstore via a collection of essays by various professional authors about their own favorite bookshops. Each essay highlights a different locale, from the large and famous (Powell's, the Strand, Politics and Prose) to the stores familiar only to their loyal patrons. From tales of cats roaming the store (bookstore owners, for some reason, almost universally love cats) to stories of booksellers advocating for local authors, each author lovingly defends not only his or her preferred bookshop, but the very institution of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, making a case for its importance to the community and the broader cultural landscape.
The book is meant to be read an essay at a time, not in large bites, and you will enjoy it more that way, because it gets pretty redundant otherwise. You quickly start to pick up on repeated themes and motifs: the saintly and determined bookseller who helped put the author on the map, the store that serves as the center of a town's culture, the bookshop that has endured the dual assaults of Amazon and Barnes & Noble with some combination of local appeal, capitalistic brilliance, and personal touch. So my favorite essays were the ones that strayed from these templates, whether it was the rhyming ode to one store or the rambling letter to another. But whether you're reading one of these outside-the-box offerings or one of the more boilerplate essays, you'll find yourself wanting to hop in the car and head to your own local bookstore for an hour. Or in my case, three.
P.S. At the back of the book, all 84 stores are listed by state, a convenient checklist to consult whenever you're about to travel. So far I've only been to 3: Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Brookline Booksmith in Boston, and City Lights Books in San Francisco. I've got some traveling to do!
FATALE VOL. 1-5 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are one of the most reliable collaborative writer-artist teams in comics, churning out hit after hit, from the just concluded Hollywood murder-mystery The Fade Out to their currently running serial killer crime drama Kill or Be Killed to their best-known and longest running series to date, Criminal (which I own but haven't read yet...stay tuned in a future month.) For March, I chose to dive into their most polarizing series, Fatale.
Fatale is a tribute to the femme fatales of classic noir tales, and features just about every trope of those stories, from murder to sex to cults to Lovecraftian monsters. The plot revolves around Josephine, a woman cursed to never grow old who has a strange hypnotic power over men, able to get them to do whatever she asks with a word. Her power comes from her connection to a monstrous demon and his followers, who are out to kill her even as she seeks a cure for her curse. Each volume of the story finds her falling in with a different unwitting man, from a World War II GI to a 1990s grunge rocker, who all try to protect her from her terrifying pursuers, only to meet doom themselves.
If my description thus far hasn't tipped you off yet, this book falls firmly in the Adult category (for language, violence, nudity, drug use, you name it). And while I'm no prude about what I read, a lot of it felt gratuitous--perhaps intentionally, since classic noir gleefully exploited taboos to lure in readers. Whether purposeful or not, I wouldn't have complained if Brubaker and Phillips had offered a PG-13 version of this book instead of the hard R that they produced; frankly, the deluge of adult material distracted from the story they were telling.
And as unnecessary as I found all the R-rated stuff, the story was ultimately my biggest problem with this book. Phillips' art is beautiful, Brubaker writes excellent dialogue and paces his story with customary mastery, but the plot and its resolution leave the reader with way too many unanswered questions. I'm fine with some ambiguity, especially in a story where the supernatural has a role to play, but more world building was needed in this book. I never learned the origin of Josephine's curse, never really got a feel for how she was connected to her enemy, and left the final volume feeling more puzzled than satisfied. I don't need to know every detail of a story's mythology, but I need some kind of foundation, and Fatale's was not firm. Brubaker and Phillips are a great team, and this book isn't terrible, but it's definitely my least favorite thing I've read from them.
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