May Reading Log

The 100 degree days have arrived, the air conditioner is on at all times, and the book stack is as high as ever. Here's how I started my summer reading:

5 Articles I Like This Month

"The Hardest Job in the World" by John Dickerson, The Atlantic. 55 minutes.

As the article's subtitle asks, "what if the problem isn't the president—it's the presidency?" In this lengthy but fascinating piece, newsman John Dickerson (co-host of CBS This Morning and former host of Face the Nation) analyzes the ways in which the presidency has become an unmanageable job for any one man to do, and offers insights into how minimizing the most powerful position in the world might actually serve the country—not to mention future presidents themselves.

"Are Kids the Enemy of Writing?" by Michael Chabon, GQ, 9 minutes.

Richard Yates once said that authors lose a book for every child they have. In this essay, Michael Chabon, author of fourteen books and father of four children, examines whether Yates was on to something—whether, to borrow from the article's title, kids are the enemy of writing, then ultimately asking himself the bigger question of what kind of legacy he wants to leave. Personal, beautiful, and affecting work from my favorite author.

"Mothers in Peril" by Ricardo Nuila, Texas Monthly, 24 minutes.

In Texas, the rate of mothers who die during or soon after birth is on the rise, including a startling spike from 18.6 deaths per 100,000 live births to 38.7 between 2010 and 2012. This piece investigates all the possible reasons for this, ranging from changes in data handling to socioeconomic factors to a state health care system that values babies more than mothers. One of best pieces of investigative journalism I've read in a long time.

"At Santa Fe High School, my daughter phoned: 'I'm hiding in a closet. I love you, Mom.'" by Deedra Van Ness, Houston Chronicle, 14 minutes.


A chilling, heartbreaking first-person account about the Santa Fe shooting written by the parents of a Santa Fe student. As difficult to read as it is necessary.

The Athletic

Not one great article, but a site full of them. If you're willing to pay for a subscription (mine cost $35 for the year), you have access to ad-free sportswriting by everyone from Ken Rosenthal to Bob Sturm to Jayson Stark to superstar-in-the-making Levi Weaver. This has become my go-to site for both local coverage of the DFW teams and national coverage, particularly of MLB. Best sports site since Grantland.

LETTERS & PAPERS FROM PRISON by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Reading diaries and collections of letters reminds me a lot of browsing at a used bookstore. The vast majority of what's there is filler (at least as far you're concerned), stuff you couldn't care less about. But then, every now and then, something jumps out at you that makes the whole experience worthwhile. Having to wade through the stacks of filler makes it all the more satisfying when you come upon something brilliant. So the real test of a collection of letters, diary entries, notes, etc., is 1) how much filler you have to sort through and 2) how brilliant the brilliant parts are. And according to both criteria, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters & Papers from Prison is the best letter collection I've ever read.

For those unfamiliar with his background, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and pastor who opposed the Nazis from the beginning of their rise to power. Eventually he became one of the leaders of the Confessing Church, a group of German Christians who opposed state control of the church and proclaimed that Christ, not the Fuhrer, was head of the church. For his opposition to the Nazis and his eventual work with the underground resistance in Germany, Bonhoeffer was jailed and ultimately executed in a concentration camp.

All the letters and notes in this volume were written during his time in prison as he awaited news of his fate, with most written to his best friend Eberhard Bethge and to his parents. Many of the letters are perfunctory, with him asking his parents to send him books, congratulating Eberhard on the birth of his son, etc. But especially in the later letters, Bonhoeffer delves into complex questions about Christianity's role in the post-war world, questioning how the church (particularly the German church) can move forward after its failures. His insights are fascinating, as is his writing. And even the "filler" letters, given his context are interesting in their own way—it's not every day you get to climb inside the head of someone taken prisoner by the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer has been compared endlessly to the apostle Paul, and while that's clearly a stretch, I better understand the comparison after reading this collection—both men were jailed and ultimately martyred for their faith, both men led their churches even from prison, and both men's letters continue to speak to us today. Like any letter collection, come to this one with a highlighter in hand, ready to sort the wheat from the tares—but you may be surprised by just how little you wind up throwing out.

LEARNING TO WALK IN THE DARK by Barbara Brown Taylor

When you think of darkness, your response is almost certainly negative. Literally, darkness is something we fear as children and subsequently eliminate as adults. Metaphorically, darkness is representative of fear, chaos, and sin. Darkness, says the conventional wisdom, is bad.

But in Learning to Walk in the Dark, world-renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor argues that darkness is not something to be eliminated from our lives, but learned from. Pushing back against what she calls "full solar spirituality," a sort of keep-on-the-sunny side faith that either refuses to acknowledge life's dark patches or regards them as failures of faith, Taylor seeks to redeem darkness as a natural part of life, and one that teaches us things we cannot learn in the light.

That's a simple premise that is beautifully made in the first 50 pages...but the book runs nearly 200. Undergoing experiments from spelunking in a dark cave to watching the moon rise, Taylor spends the book better acquainting herself with literal darkness in order to better understand spiritual darkness, and while her writing is never anything short of a pleasure to read, her insights are few and far between, especially as the book progresses. I approached this book with a highlighter in hand, but didn't need to take the cap off once in the last 50 pages.

As befits her vocation, this book is basically one long sermon, with exegesis, illustrations, and applications sprinkled throughout in the pursuit of one Big Idea. For me, this particular sermon was a little longer than it needed to be, and I didn't have to take many notes, but its core idea was gold. Not Taylor's best work (the reviews I glanced at tend to agree), but worth a read for anyone wondering what the darker parts of life can teach us about God and about ourselves.

PURITY by Jonathan Franzen

On most lists of "greatest living novelists," Jonathan Franzen is in the top 5, if not occupying the #1 spot. The Corrections and Freedom were both rapturously praised in literary circles, were both Oprah's Book Club choices, and were witty, brilliant encapsulations of the decades in which they were written. So I decided to make this month Jonathan Franzen Month in the ol' reading log by knocking out the other two Franzen novels I owned—his most recent novel and his first.

Purity, unfortunately, does not come close to measuring up to Freedom or The Corrections. Where those books told small stories about big ideas, Purity ambitiously goes big, globe-hopping from the U.S. to late-1980s East Germany to the jungles of Bolivia, dealing with everything from murder to Wikileaks-like hacking. The plot is difficult to describe in a sentence and stretches over decades. The problem is that, for all its size and scope, I just didn't care.

Purity, for all its narrative ambition, deals with a small cast of characters, who over the course of the novel are revealed to be far more connected than they first appear. The heroine is Purity "Pip" Taylor, an archetypal struggling millenial; the hero is Andreas Wolf, a Julian Assange cipher with a dark past. A pair of fearless journalists also make the scene, along with an heiress who conforms to every stereotype of an artist you've ever heard. And for all the time we spend with these characters, watching their lives intertwine with one another's, at no point did I start to care about them as people. The characters driving Franzen's plot are the weak link in this novel.

Franzen has a decent enough story. He has some interesting points to make about life in the Internet age, about truth, and about moral purity. And few people, if any, can make sentences sing like he does. But told through these unlikable, melodramatic characters, the good in this novel gets lost in the bad. I've seen this book on clearance at a number of used bookstores, something that always irked me, since I bought it the week it came out for full price...now I understand why so many Franzen fans were comfortable selling their copies for store credit. It's not awful by any means, but you've got at least 2,000 pages of Franzen you should read before you worry about picking up Purity.

THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CITY by Jonathan Franzen

Woof. This was a first novel, and it read like one. The Twenty-Seventh City is actually the closest thing to a thriller Franzen has ever written, but it's not thrilling. It has the largest cast of characters, but you never feel like you get to know any of them. It has perhaps the most ambitious plot, but fails to pair that ambition with results. Simply put, this book's not very good.

The Twenty-Seventh City tells the convoluted story of a political conspiracy orchestrated by the new police chief, a plot that winds up employing everything from kidnapping to sex to terrorism to accomplish its intended goals. Featuring everyone from the chief herself to the local power brokers to an Indian gun-for-hire, the story is ultimately meant to serve as a sort of parable for big city governance and corruption.

Sounds pretty interesting, right? It would be, if you ever felt like you a grip on what was happening. Unfortunately, there are two big problems. First, The Twenty-Seventh City suffers from War and Peace-itis—there are so may characters that it takes you several hundred pages to have a grasp of how they all relate to one another and who matters most. Second, instead of employing a normal narrative style, Franzen writes more experimentally, abruptly shifting from a character's inner monologue to narrating the events of the plot (a technique he has all but abandoned since).

It all adds up to a soup of words, characters, and plot that left me feeling much more appreciative of Purity, the work of an author who's now had time to hone his craft. There are sentences that sing in The Twenty-Seventh City, raw talent on display, but the end result is a mixed bag. When I squint hard enough I can see what he was going for, but 517 pages is a long time to squint. Jonathan Franzen is a supremely gifted writer, but this book is for completists only.

JACK KIRBY'S FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS VOL. 1-4

In 1970, Jack "the King" Kirby, the Lennon to Stan Lee's McCartney, rocked the comic book world when he moved from Marvel to D.C. Upon his arrival there, he proposed to the brass at D.C. a bold new initiative, a sprawling epic that came to be known, for no clear reason, as "the Fourth World." This new superhero mythology would stretch across four different titles—The New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson (yes, you read that correctly)—and would tell the story of two worlds at war with earth as their battleground, with every issue written and drawn by Kirby. It would be epic, dynamic, and action-packed...and unfortunately, unfinished. Due to low sales, the Fourth World titles were all cancelled by 1973.

However, with hindsight, many Kirby fans have come to consider the Fourth World to be arguably his best work, and certainly his most distinctive. With an inker as his only collaborator on all these titles, the Fourth World books were Kirby's best chance to really let his imagination go wild. So I spent the last two months feasting on the Fourth World Omnibuses, collections that print every Fourth World issue, in full color, in the chronology in which they were printed. Let's go title by title.

The flagship book, and easily the best, is The New Gods. This book is the grandest in scope, telling the story of Orion, a noble but savage warrior from the peaceful world of New Genesis, and the cold, cruel Darkseid, ruler of Apokolips. Each issue deals with the cold war Darkseid has begun against New Genesis, a war launched on Earth, and with Orion's attempts to foil Darkseid's plots. Most of the Fourth World mythology comes from this book, and both the art and the characters are better here than in any of the other Fourth World books.

The Forever People is my second favorite title. It deals with a group of superpowered New Genesis teenagers, not-so-sneakily based on the hippies of the time, and their own fights against Darkseid and his minions. Unlike The New Gods, this book forced Kirby to work with a group dynamic, and while the results are mixed, there's enough imagination in here to power the book, especially in the early issues.

Mister Miracle may be the character who has endured best, along with his eventual wife Big Barda. Mister Miracle, a.k.a. Scott Free (yes, really), is an escape artist raised on Apokolips. Eventually it would be revealed that he and Orion had been switched at birth as part of a long-ago pact between New Genesis and Apokolips, meaning that Orion was Darkseid's son and Mister Miracle the son of Highfather, ruler of New Genesis. This book is the most superhero-y of the four, which may also explain why it lasted the longest, with Mister Miracle continuing 7 issues longer than the others, albeit by essentially scrapping all the Fourth World connections.

And then there's Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson...yikes. Legend has it that Kirby went to D.C.'s publisher and told them to give him their lowest selling title and he'd turn it into their best book. The tale is apocryphal, both because Kirby never actually made such a deal and because this couldn't possibly have been D.C.'s best title. There's imagination on display, to be sure—this title was never more interesting than when Kirby was in control of it—but this book is a mess. Too much going on, too many characters, and notoriously bad dialogue make for a painful reading experience. The art's pretty though (you never have to worry about that with Jack Kirby.)

The Fourth World isn't for everyone. Kirby had a tin ear for dialogue, his art is an acquired taste (though once you've acquired it, you'll never go back), and if you prefer the simplicity of superheroes to mythology, you may want to look elsewhere. But there's no denying the impact that this big, unfinished epic has had on comics. Long live the King.

MONSTER MASTERWORKS by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, and Bill Everett

In interviews over the last 5 decades, Stan Lee has often bemoaned the state of Marvel Comics prior to the day that he and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four (and thereby the Marvel Universe.) "We were turning out comics by the carload, but nothing was really happening," he once said. Mostly, "we were blithely turning out merry little monster stories." Well, Stan the Man may not have much affection for those monster stories, but somebody did, because this volume collects eighteen of those 1950s-era stories. And I loved them!

Monster stories are one of my favorite sub-genres (I've seen the original Godzilla movie, Goijira, 3 times and counting), so this trade paperback was made for me. Every story is written in the now-familiar cadence of Stan Lee, with stories illustrated by artists who would some day bring the world Spider-Man (Steve Ditko), Daredevil (Bill Everett), and...well, everyone else in the Marvel Universe (Jack Kirby). The stories run as little as 5 pages and no longer than 15, since these stories were found in anthology magazines.

Divided into three sections (Alien Invaders, Man-Made Monsters, and Ancient Menaces), the book features monsters with names like Tim Boo Ba, Kraa the Unhuman, Zzutak, and, most famously, Fin Fang Foom. Everything from the art to the storytelling to the moral at the end of every story is the kind of dated, cheesy kid's stuff I eat up. These stories, as Stan's quotes indicate, weren't particularly ambitious. But boy were they fun.

So if you've every wanted to know how humanity could outwit a gigantic sea monster or what a Transylvanian village would do to defend itself from a giant amoeba, this is the book for you. Try not to smile while reading, I dare you.

THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL by Jim Starlin

Some characters are better dead than alive.

That sounds meaner than intended, I promise. But the truth is that, for the first 15 years of his existence, the alien (Kree, for those keeping score at home) captain Mar-Vell, known on Earth as Captain Marvel, was a B-level character in every sense. He didn't have much personality, he didn't have any standout villains or supporting characters, and he never really made much of an impact on the Marvel Universe. He was the kind of character who might guest star in an Avengers issue and make you say, "Oh yeah, I forgot about him! Does he still have his own book?"

But that all changed with the 1982 graphic novel, "The Death of Captain Marvel." In this story, readers learn the final fate of Mar-Vell—he finally falls, not in battle with Thanos, but of cancer. With fellow heroes from the Marvel Universe at his bedside, a weakened Mar-Vell slips into a coma and dies in his sleep. Before this climactic scene, readers get a sort of retrospective of the character's history, written and illustrated by Jim Starlin, who had a lengthy run on the Captain Marvel title in the 1970s, along with one final confrontation with Thanos (albeit via a hallucination). By the time Mar-Vell's mentor (appropriately named Mentor) announces, "He's gone," you have come to deeply respect a character you likely never cared for previously.

The story, as well as the touchingly human way in which Mar-Vell dies, was so well-told that Captain Marvel remained dead for nearly 5 decades, putting him in league with Uncle Ben, Thomas and Martha Wayne, and Bucky Barnes (er, scratch that), as characters who simply were not allowed to be resurrected. Having finally gotten around to reading this story, I now understand why. It's a short story about an otherwise forgettable character, but this is how you do a proper sendoff. Before you see the Brie Larson-helmed Captain Marvel movie next March, give this story a shot to see what the original Captain Marvel was all about.