January Reading Log

None of my New Year's resolution had to do with reading, but I kept up my pace this month. Here's a look at the articles and books I had my nose buried in this month!

5 Articles I Like This Month

"Colin Kaepernick Has a Job" by Rembert Browne, Bleacher Report. 41 minutes.

A well-written, insightful profile of America's most famous protester. Everyone's opinions on Colin Kaepernick seem to have been set in concrete long ago--which is ironic, since the main takeaway from the article is that Kaepernick seems to be using his exile from the NFL to learn and grow as much as he can. But whether you love Kaepernick or hate him, you probably don't understand him--Colin Kaepernick the man, not Colin Kaepernick the symbol--well enough to justify that admiration or that rage. If you're interested in having an opinion on him that's informed and not just loud, this piece is a good place to start.

"Generation Screwed" by Michael Hobbes, The Huffington Post. 35 minutes.

An in-depth explanation of the dire financial plight the millenial generation is facing and why everything from education to housing to retirement is considerably more difficult to attain than it was for our parents and grandparents. If you've ever used the words "participation trophy" in a derogatory sense, please read this. Please.

"The Man Who Made Black Panther Cool" by Abraham Riesman, Vulture. 15 minutes.

When you go see "Black Panther" in theaters next week along with the rest of the world, the basics--a superhero king of an African technological oasis--will come from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the character's creators. But most of the details will come from Christopher Priest, whose 62-issue run on the character in the early 2000s redefined T'Challa and, as the title of this article indicates, made him cooler than he'd ever been. This profile of Priest is an interesting slice of comics history and a good look at a creator finally receiving his well-deserved moment in the spotlight.


"Is 2018 the Year We Step Away from Social Media?" by Nicole Dieker, Longreads. 5 minutes.

If you're like a lot of people, myself included, then social media has become something that brings you aggravation far more often than pleasure. In a short thinkpiece, (which draws from 7 linked articles) Nicole Dieker talks about why we're on social media, why we're growing disenchanted with it, and what we can do to remove its influence on our lives without robbing us of its benefits. An especially good read for those considering giving up social media for Lent.

"Can You Say...Hero?" by Tom Junod, Esquire. 33 minutes.

You may have heard the announcement this week that Tom Hanks will be playing Mister Rogers in an upcoming movie based on his friendship with journalist Tom Junod. This is the article the movie will be based on, and it'll make you fall in love with Mister Rogers all over again.

(RE)UNDERSTANDING PRAYER: A FRESH APPROACH TO CONVERSATION WITH GOD by Kyle Lake

How do you pray? Eyes open or closed, hands clasped together or raised toward heaven, silently in your car or audibly in your prayer closet, for a few seconds or for hours at a time? Does every prayer start with thanks "for this beautiful day" and end with the request that God "lead, guide, and direct" you? Maybe most importantly, does prayer sometimes feel like a weird waste of time, like you're just talking to a wall?

Kyle Lake, the founding pastor of University Baptist Church in Waco, wrote (Re)understanding Prayer in the hopes of getting readers to deconstruct and reconstruct their assumptions and beliefs about prayer. He accurately points to the various cliches that permeate the prayers we hear every week in church (and probably use ourselves) and insightfully describes the insecurities that most Christians have about their own prayers, all to make the point that when we pray, it's often more about sticking to a script than about real conversation with God. Furthermore, he says people use prayer more like a tool than a dialogue, believing that every decision they make has One Acceptable Answer and that prayer is how God reveals that Answer, known in church-speak as "God's will." Lake, pointing to biblical examples, offers a less frustrating, more holistic model for seeking God's will in prayer, one that is based in the idea of a relationship with God instead of getting quick answers.

(Re)understanding Prayer is like a funnier, more accessible version of Hearing God by Dallas Willard, a book which helped me (re)understand prayer before I ever read this one. If prayer is something you struggle with, I'd start here and then go to Willard as a supplement. Lake writes with the sensibility of the cool young pastor he was, and you're likely to find yourself laughing, nodding along, and thinking as you read his writing. And hopefully, by the time you've finished the book, you'll want to go spend some time in prayer. I know I did.

THE PREACHING LIFE by Barbara Brown Taylor

If there was an official Truett Seminary reading list, Barbara Brown Taylor would be guaranteed to make the list. In my three years of seminary, I lost count of the number of professors, chapel speakers, and fellow students who recommended her preaching and writing. Yet amidst all that praise, somehow she never made it onto the "Required Books" section of any of my syllabi, meaning I left Truett with a healthy but completely uninformed respect for her abilities, vowing to check out her work when I got a chance.

Turns out, yep, she's pretty great.

The Preaching Life is really more like two short books in one, the first a series of musings on worship, Scripture, and preaching based in Taylor's life and theology, the second a collection of her sermons. Part one made for an excellent introduction to her ways of thinking and communicating, blending biblical thought with lived experience beautifully, with a mastery of language that made me jealous.

But part two was where I really got my money's worth. Much like Fred Craddock, her preaching mentor, Taylor has a gift for retelling biblical stories in plain language, pulling in everyday illustrations in a way that they connect naturally, and bringing it all home at the end in a way that fits perfectly while still utterly surprising you. Equally impressive is her diction-- no words wasted or out of place, no cliche employed unless for a purpose. These sermons are a treasure, and had me rushing to YouTube to see if I could watch her preach any of them.

It's been said that the best argument in favor of female preachers is watching a gifted, Spirit-empowered woman preach. If you're on the fence about women in the pulpit, read this book and try to tell me Barbara Brown Taylor needs to keep her ministry in the church nursery. So glad Truett pointed me her way, and I look forward to watching and reading many more of her sermons.

PRACTICE RESURRECTION: A CONVERSATION ON GROWING UP IN CHRIST by Eugene Peterson

Every Christian is tasked with growing in Christ, but many are never taught how to do so. While churches have classes and how-to manuals for evangelism, discipleship and spiritual formation tend to be be treated like givens. Go to church, read your Bible for 10 minutes a day, pray when you wake up and when you go to bed, and voila...you're spiritually mature now. Right?

With the epistle to the Ephesians as his guide, Eugene Peterson seeks to provide guidance on Christian growth in Practice Resurrection, the fifth and final volume in his series on spiritual theology. What emerges is, in large part, a love letter to the church, without whom Peterson says spiritual formation cannot fully occur. The church Peterson describes is not the lofty, invisible, eternal church, accessible only with heaven's eyes--to this reader's great relief and appreciation, Peterson makes it abundantly clear that the church God works through is the church as we know it, with all its gossip and immaturity and frustration. The church is far from perfect, Peterson says again and again, but it is ours, and it is God's, and that counts for something. Instead of abandoning the church, he calls believers to embrace it, to seek community instead of isolation so that we can all grow together in Christ.

As in previous volumes, Peterson displays a knack in Practice Resurrection for making the abstract concrete, bringing the heavenly into the neighborhood. Whether with an anecdote, a well-crafted sentence, or a simple point you'd never considered, he has a gift for bringing making the spiritual accessible and desirable. This was my favorite of the five volumes in his series on spiritual theology, and the one I am most likely to read again in a few years. If you only read one book by Peterson, this is the one I'd recommend.

THE COOPERSTOWN CASEBOOK: WHO'S IN THE BASEBALL HALL OF FAME, WHO SHOULD BE IN, AND WHO SHOULD PACK THEIR PLAQUES by Jay Jaffe

I've been to Disney World, and it's great, but it's not the happiest place on earth. Cooperstown, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, is the happiest place on earth. I've been multiple times and fully intend to go again (and again and again and again)--for someone who loves the history of baseball even more than the game itself, nothing can match the Hall of Fame.

So The Cooperstown Casebook, the deepest dive into the Hall's history, players, and standards I've ever seen, was catnip for me. Jay Jaffe, a writer for Sports Illustrated (who I shouted out in the "Articles" section of November's reading log) probably knows more about the Hall than anyone, and it shows in this dense yet immensely readable book.

The first section of the book is a series of scattered chapters dealing with the Hall's storied but inconsistent history and standards, explaining everything from the Hall's origins to the voting process that elects Hall of Famers (which has evolved numerous times over the years) to the Hall's treatment of suspected performance-enhancing drug users. These assorted chapters were my favorite part of the book and worth the price of admission. Jaffe does a great job of mixing history with opinion (and believe me, he has opinions, usually stated with trademark snark), and makes stories of bureaucracy far more entertaining than they should be.

The second and longest section of the book works better as a reference than as something to read straight through, though I did the latter anyway. In this section, Jaffe lists and ranks current and potential Hall of Famers by position, offering a couple of paragraphs for each player along with their relevant stats, explaining in his analysis whether the player raises or lowers the standard for his position in the Hall. For each position, Jaffe also gives an extended profile of one or two players, similar to the ones he does each year for players on the Hall of Fame ballot. This part of the book gets a little tedious and repetitive after a while, but you can't argue with the information (and like I said, I'm not sure it's meant to be read straight through anyway.)

Overall, it's hard for me to imagine that there's a big audience for a book that's this obsessive about the National Baseball Hall of Fame...but I'm definitely in that audience, so what do I care? As a compilation of advanced stats, baseball history, and trivia, this book was basically written for me. Highly recommended, but only for serious baseball nerds.

THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker

I'm a big believer that, before seeing a film adaptation of a book, you should read the book first. This week, I applied that rule to musicals as well, since tomorrow night Lindsey and I are going to see The Color Purple, the first show of this Dallas Summer Musicals season. The Color Purple, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is one of those modern classics I've considered picking up many times, only to put it back on the shelf, so the upcoming performance was just the nudge I needed.

The Color Purple is the story of two African-American sisters raised in the 1930s South, one who remains there her entire tortured life and the other who becomes a missionary to Africa. Told as a letters to one another and to God, the book deals with everything from abuse to family to race to feminism to faith, all with a distinctive dialectical style reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston. Celie, the older sister and main protagonist of the story, is a tragic but inspiring character who I won't soon forget.

I didn't pick this book because of the Me Too movement, but boy did that make it it resonate. Abuse and sexual assault are ever-present realities in Celie's life, and it is through the help of women in her life that she is able to persevere and even find joy in a life mostly full of misery. Anyone who struggles to understand the anger that sometimes undergirds feminism will get an education after walking through Celie's life, a life in which virtually every man she encounters hurts her in some way or another.

The Color Purple is a pretty easy read once you get used to the style, but it is not light reading. The subject matter, as you have surely gathered, is adult, and while never exploitative or sensational, Walker is not afraid to describe the reality of what Celie experiences. But for all the sadness in this story, it is balanced by glimmers of hope, turning what could have been a depressing story into an inspiring one. The Color Purple is a classic for a reason...I'll be interested to see how it works with music and choreography!

ESSENTIAL SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Dick Ayers

Every war movie since Vietnam has essentially had the same message: war is hell. In these movies, fear is emphasized over heroism, horror over brotherhood, grim nihilism over duty. But dip into your grandpa's black-and-white movies and you'll find war movies of a different sort, from epics with casts of thousands to screwball comedies. Before Vietnam muddied the waters in the public consciousness, for better and for worse, fictional war stories were less about sending political messages than providing exotic stages for old-fashioned entertainment.

Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, a Marvel WWII comic running from 1963-1981, is firmly planted in that old-fashioned template, telling corny, bloodless war stories for kids, stories that have more in common with Indiana Jones than Platoon. Starring an ensemble cast led by Nick Fury (20 years before, as a colonel in the 1960s, he would be appointed Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.), the book takes Fury's commando squad across the European theater, Africa, Japan, and even, in one special issue set years later, into Korea, where they help score a victory against the Commies in the Korean War. Fighting villains like Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, a Nazi fencing champion, Fury and his Howlers brawl their way through the war with humor, swagger, and rarely more than a scratch to show for their efforts.

The first few issues of this series are rough going, with way too much going on and too many practically identical characters, but after four or five issues, Lee and Kirby (the Dynamic Duo of comic creators) hit their stride, with Kirby soon thereafter passing the art baton off to Dick Ayers. For anyone who's read the Marvel comics of the early 1960s, these will fit right in, albeit without the superpowers: lots of screwball comedy and plenty of action. This isn't Lee's best work, or Kirby's, but it's certainly not bad--just reliably entertaining self-contained action stories, surely worth the 12 cents readers were plunking down at drug store counters in 1963.

Anyone looking to this comic for an exploration of the morality of war should look elsewhere. Anyone looking for complexity or socio-political themes should too. But if you want a good adventure story, you could do worse than opening to a random story from this book.

SILVER SURFER VOL. 4-5 by Dan Slott and Mike Allred

You may remember that vol. 1-3 of this series were given to me by my brother as a birthday gift last October (actually, come to think of it, if you do remember that, you're way too invested in these reading logs). Anyway, come Christmas, he helped me out by finishing the collection with the final two volumes of this 32-issue run by Dan Slott and Mike Allred. And if the first three collections convinced me this series was good, the final two convinced me it was great.

This iteration of the Silver Surfer is one who explores the spaceways with a companion, Dr. Who-style. But where Dawn Greenwood began the series seeming to be little more than comic relief, by the beginning of vol. 4 she has developed into a fully formed character, still full of jokes, but also of heart. In fact, early in vol. 4, she and the Surfer confess their love for one another, a revelation that, far from the melodrama usually associated with typical comic book romances, feels perfectly natural. The two make a wonderful pair, and their friendly chemistry is a delight to read.

Most issues in this two volumes are self-contained, with Dawn and the Surfer encountering everyone from an evolved Galactus (now the Life Bringer instead of the World Devourer) to his old love, Shalla-Bal, to the holo-light beings of Inkandessa. But truthfully, the adventures are secondary to the slow, deliberate character work being done, as the Surfer and Dawn grow individually and together. All of this culminates in the series finale, which I won't spoil, but is one of the best final issues I've ever read. I didn't cry, but I wouldn't judge anyone who did.

The best descriptor for this series, especially as it progressed and found its footing, is pure joy. The writing is light, funny, quirky, and doesn't take itself too seriously. The art is retro, imaginative, and bursting with bright colors. Imagination leaps off every page. And most importantly of all, by the end it has made you feel something. You can't ask for much more from a comic book than that.