Just 5 books this month...and with a new baby coming tomorrow, I'd expect that to hold true for October too. Here's a look at what I was reading the past month.
3 Articles I Like This Month
"All-American Despair" by Stephen Rodrick, Rolling Stone. 38 minutes.
A heavy, personal piece about the disturbing suicide rate among middle-aged white men in the United States.
"Who Speaks for Crazy Horse?" by Brooke Jarvis, The New Yorker. 23 minutes.
In the Black Hills of South Dakota there exists an enormous stone monument depicting the Lakota chief Crazy Horse that dwarfs Mount Rushmore. This article tells the story of how that unfinished monument came to be and what it says about America's relationship with its indigenous people.
"Very Serious Journalism: I Raced Tim Dillard in the Rangers' Dot Race" by Levi Weaver, The Athletic. 7 minutes.
I think the title says it all, don't you?
A BASIC CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY by A.J. Conyers
As both a Christian and a pastor, there are times where I want a simple, concise explanation of one of the doctrines of our faith—not a long list of Bible verses or a theological tome from the 3rd century, just a simple, non-ideological primer on what Christians believe. To my delight, the late A.J. "Chip" Conyers left just such a text for the church, a cross between a systematic theology and a textbook that clocks in at under 250 pages and is accessible to laypeople and academics alike.
This was a book Truett Seminary was giving away by the stack a few months ago, and I couldn't be happier I picked up a copy. The church is in desperate need of voices willing to speak knowledgeably about the value of theology, and this book is a worthy tool for that effort. In search of good theology primers, too often we are forced to choose between resources which are too dumbed down (tracts, Wikipedia, popular but unworthy books by big names), too impenetrable (90% of books put out by publishers whose names end in "Academic Press"), or too lost in minutia, to say nothing of those which are ideologically driven or downright heretical. So A Basic Christian Theology is a breath of fresh air, a scholarly but readable book by a trusted author who isn't trying to win an argument, write a bestseller, or start a movement, but just teach the basics of what we believe.
Conyers divides the book into three sections: the first deals with God and His creation, the second with God and His redemptive purpose, and the third with God and His kingdom. Roughly speaking, this means he starts with Genesis and ends with Revelation, and the book progresses in a logical, understandable way. Conyers does a good job of explaining various famous heresies before laying out orthodox belief, and when it comes to beliefs where there is still no broad consensus (eschatology in particular) he does a good job laying out what different factions believe in an unbiased way before explaining where he personally falls.
All in all, this is a professional, orthodox, accessible book that I'd highly recommend to any believer wanting to brush up on their theology or learn a little more about how the doctrines of our faith have been revealed, debated, and confirmed over the centuries. For pastors and laypeople alike, I can't recommend it highly enough for your reference shelf.
THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt
This book, which set the literary world afire in 2013 and has since been adapted into a film that's currently bombing at the box office, is big. I mean that first in a literal sense—at 771 pages, this is the longest novel I've read in a while. I mean that secondly in terms of its scope—the story crosses continents and decades, and covers everything from fine furniture dealing to heroin overdoses. Finally, this book is big in its ambition, telling a story about grief, beauty, truth, and hope.
The protagonist of the story is Theodore Decker, whose life is changed forever when he survives a terrorist attack at an art museum, an attack that kills his mother. In the ensuing chaos, he takes a painting that the explosion had dislodged, a painting that travels with him for the rest of the book as a symbol of hope even as his world crumbles around him. The rest of the book follows his life as he moves from the Upper East Side to Las Vegas back to New York City. Along the way he befriends a Ukrainian ne'er-do-well, falls in love, and engages in the fraudulent sales of high-end furniture, all before his theft of the painting finally comes to a head in a climactic series of events in Amsterdam.
It's a story that moves remarkably quickly given its length, with an author who seems just as comfortable describing the lives of the rich and famous as drug-addled nights in Vegas. The characters are compelling—sympathetic even when they're not likable—and the dialogue feels authentic. Even in the slower sections of the book, I was never bored.
And, as you'd expect from a novel with this kind of scope and reputation (it won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among numerous other awards), it all means something in the end. While it borders on being self-indulgent, the novel's ending does a good job telling you what the point of the whole thing was, offering Tartt's thesis on the value of art. If you like novels that make you think but are also entertaining (which, for some reason, can be hard to find!), I recommend reading The Goldfinch.
DARK KNIGHTS: METAL by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, and Jonathan Glapion
The nature of popular culture is that it's cyclical—styles that you never expected to see again make their return 20 years later with only slight tweaks. It's the reason why Friends is one of the most popular shows on Netflix and why all Hollywood seems to make anymore is reboots (and superhero movies). But even knowing that, I never thought comics would decide to go back to the 1990s.
For those who follow these things less closely than I do (i.e. 99% of you), the 1990s were an age of maximum profits and minimum creativity, a time when comics embraced every x-treme, sensationalistic tool in the toolbox in pursuit of a buck. It was a time of holographic variant covers, heroines with anatomies that even Barbie found unrealistic, and heroes strapped with guns as big as cars. And then it all came crashing down. The speculator bubble, which depended on readers buying special issues in the hopes they'd be worth something some day (think Beanie Babies) burst, and the industry took nearly a decade to recover, both creatively and financially.
Well, in Dark Knights: Metal, the '90s are back for some reason, and I can't say I enjoyed it any more this time around. As the title indicates, this is a story that takes the DC Universe and goes full throttle with it, embracing the metal spirit in a way that makes the characters nearly unrecognizable and makes the story a complicated, over-the-top mess.
Plot-wise, it's the story of a dark multiverse invading the DC universe, led by the evil Barbatos, and the Justice League's attempts to ward off dark mirror images of themselves. Sounds simple enough, but it's definitely not. Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, whose run on Batman in the last decade was one of the most beloved in the long history of the character, can't help but weave some of the mythology from their Batman run into this story while also trying to alter the already-convoluted continuity of the DC universe. By the end, I was hanging onto the plot by my fingernails, if I was hanging on at all.
Stylistically, this wasn't my cup of tea. It was just too much. Plot-wise, same thing: too much. Character-wise, the gripe remains the same: nobody gets to stand out because everybody needs a moment. Too much, too much, too much. But hey, that's what the '90s were all about. if you liked that era, maybe you'll like this. I'll just be sitting over here waiting for the next pop culture cycle.
THE SHERIFF OF BABYLON by Tom King and Mitch Gerards
Without question, Tom King is one of the biggest names in comics right now, and The Sheriff of Babylon is arguably what put him on the map (though it was unquestionably 2016's The Vision and 2017's Mister Miracle which made his popularity explode.) It combines both King's fascinating background—he joined the CIA on September 12, 2001—and his auteur sensibilities to craft a complex, multilayered story as murky as the war it portrays.
The story that King and artist Mitch Gerards—who would later collaborate with him on Mister Miracle—are telling is that of an Iraqi police trainee who is murdered in 2004 in the Green Zone and how his American trainer (a military contractor), a former Iraqi policeman, and an influential, enigmatic Iraqi woman work to solve the case. While in many ways the story is a straightforward crime thriller, its setting keeps things off balance throughout the investigation, all the way until the ending, which is appropriately nebulous.
Many of King's now-trademark tics—especially 9 panel grids—are present in this volume, to mostly great effect. And while The Vision and Mister Miracle show King putting it all out there creatively, The Sheriff of Babylon is understandably more restrained, letting both the story and Gerards' fabulous art do the heavy lifting. Nevertheless, it's fun to see the King-Gerards team flex their muscles in a way that would pay off when Mister Miracle, my favorite comic of the decade, rolled around.
If I had one complaint about The Sheriff of Babylon, it is that you spend large stretches of the book unsure exactly what's going on. But that complaint is mitigated by 1) the mood that King and Gerards set 2) the compelling characters and 3) the knowledge that the story's lack of clarity is intentional, a commentary on the story's setting. If you want to read an excellent graphic novel without a cape in sight, I recommend The Sheriff of Babylon.
The Omega Men concludes my run through Tom King's oeuvre, and after a rough start, it mostly sticks the landing. In this 12-issue maxiseries, King tells the story of two groups: the Citadel, an interplanetary conglomerate who have virtually enslaved the planets in their solar system, and the Omega Men, a small group of revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the Citadel. Thrown into the mix is Kyle Rayner, the White Lantern, who seeks a third way that will spare the system a bloody war.
Let's start with the big weakness of the series: there's not a lot of character work going on in this story, which is strange given the incredible work King would later do with The Vision and Mister Miracle in that regard. While King tells us the motivations of the various Omega Men, I didn't really come to identify or empathize with any of them. Only Kyle Rayner, the lone character readers would have recognized going in, is particularly easy to relate to, and that has more to do with prior familiarity than anything in this story.
As for the book's big strength: like any good sci-fi/fantasy novel, King uses the far-flung setting to ask a big, relevant question: what's the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? His final answer to the question is necessarily ambiguous and, especially after reading The Sheriff of Babylon, feels tied to King's own experiences serving overseas.
The Omega Men is definitely a rougher work than what Tom King would deliver later with The Vision and Mister Miracle, both of which are masterpieces in their own rights. In fact, I almost gave up on this story after the first two issues, having found them virtually impenetrable. But for readers willing to persevere through some initial confusion, the result is a nuanced story about war and peace. Not a game changer, but a solid sci-fi story worth your time.
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