October Reading Log

Can't say I did much reading the first two weeks of October (can't imagine why!), but I'm back in the swing of things now. Here's a look at what I read the past month!

1 Article I Like This Month

"Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction" by Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books. 25 minutes.

One of the dictums of woke culture is that you cannot speak honestly about the experiences of another person, that only they can tell their story. How does the novelist respond to such dogma? Zadie Smith, one of the world's most prominent novelists, answers in this essay.

TILL ARMAGEDDON: A PERSPECTIVE ON SUFFERING by Billy Graham

I'm on record as saying that Billy Graham, though unquestionably a dynamic preacher and faithful evangelist, left something to be desired as a writer. In reading How to Be Born Again, Angels, and even his autobiography Just As I Am, I found Graham to be stretching his material for the sake of lengthening the book and thought his folksy, oft-imitated preaching style didn't translate well to the written word. However, Till Armageddoon, Graham's book about the problem of pain, is the best of the bunch, a well-constructed and biblical take on suffering that held my attention longer than his other offerings.

Those looking for anything new regarding the subject matter should look elsewhere—the question "why does a good God allow people to suffer?" is one people having been asking since the Fall. The task of anyone tackling this question is not to provide new answers, but to communicate the biblical answers in a persuasive, compelling way. Graham, with his trademark mixture of biblical support, anecdotes, and humor, does this well, with chapters that feel like sermons (which I mean as a compliment, since Graham is probably the most famous preacher of the last century.)

The book's structure is part of its strength, with a progression from the problems of the world to the problems of individuals and ultimately to the hope found in Christ. Unlike Angels, which felt like a grab-bag of topics and lacked what I would consider sufficient biblical support, Till Armageddon always feels on target both in its mission and its foundation.

Preachers and teachers will find a collection of quotes and sermon illustrations worth borrowing, as well as an accessible resource for laypeople struggling with the problem of pain. And for anyone who's ever struggled with God's role in our suffering, going to Billy Graham for answers is certainly not a bad starting place!

THE PEARL by John Steinbeck

When Lindsey, Katherine, and I came home from the hospital, I knew I wanted to get back to reading, but also knew I needed something short and sweet, something I could easily pick up and put down at a moment's notice. In other words, that was not a week to start a giant biography. So I turned to The Pearl, a Steinbeck novella I had intended to read several months ago.

The Pearl is a moving, fable-like story about a Mexican fisherman who finds the Pearl of the World, a treasure of incalculable value, and how that little pearl manages to become a source not of hope, but dread. It's a simple but moving story (perfect for a sermon illustration) about the corrupting power of wealth and where happiness truly comes from.

Steinbeck's writing is beautiful throughout the story, vividly describing the Gulf Coast of Mexico one moment and succinctly describing the thoughts of the protagonist and his wife the next. With scarce dialogue and a simple plot, Steinbeck nevertheless manages to clearly communicate the story's themes without ever spelling them out. The Pearl is a short, tragic parable that can be quickly read but not quickly forgotten.

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the nation's best essayists, if not the best essayist. Over the last decade, his writings on race in America have provoked discussion, debate, and even a Congressional hearing. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy collects Coates' best-known writings from 2009-2017, i.e. the Obama presidency, a time that saw the dream of a post-racial America (a dream Coates never entirely bought into) give way to racial division and white supremacy.

As I've written in the past, Coates is a provocative thinker and writer, whose perspective as an African-American makes him decidedly more pessimistic (he'd say realistic) on race than I am. But even as you feel your blood pressure rising midway through one of his essays, you have a hard time arguing with him. When he points out that the glories of American capitalism would have been impossible without the evil of slavery, he's saying something we've tried to ignore for generations, something that is no less true for being inconvenient. When he points out that white America has consistently rejected the best and brightest of black America in their time, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama—it hurts because you know he's right.

We Were Eight Years in Power is comprised of an essay from each year of the Obama presidency, along with an epilogue leading into the Trump presidency. Prior to each essay, Coates offers an introduction about what prompted him to write the given essay, along with what he thinks about it now (like most writers, his thoughts about his past work are pretty critical.) These insights into both his process and the evolution of his thinking are fascinating glimpses into a brilliant mind, and make the book worth its price tag even if you've already read the articles themselves.

Virtually everyone will find something in Coates' writing to be aggravated by, but if you go in with an open mind, you will also find yourself enlightened and convicted. For those who want to think critically about race in America, We Were Eight Years in Power is not to be missed.

PASTORALIA by George Saunders

George Saunders, whose novel Lincoln in the Bardo might be my favorite book I read this year, made his name writing dark, comic short stories that manage to speak volumes about the human condition without ever becoming preachy. Pastoralia collects six of these stories, featuring an eclectic assortment of characters haunted by their own insecurities.

The longest of these, the eponymous "Pastoralia" is about two cave people in a modern museum, and is remarkable lesson in world building for any writer—picking up details as you go along, you're always intrigued by the world Saunders describes but are never spoonfed unnecessary information about it; the characters always come first. This knack for making the weird accessible is employed again in "Sea Oak," a story about a small, miserable family who sees their dead relative return to life as an angry, bossy, zombie.

But what I appreciate most about Saunders' writing, here and elsewhere, is his ability to make you empathize with his characters, even the ones who aren't necessarily likable. The protagonist of "The Barber's Unhappiness," for example, is a shallow, insecure little man, but when he decides to go through with his date with a girl he'd considered dumping because of her weight, you are rooting for the couple to work out despite misgivings about him. In "The End of FIRPO in the World," the main character is a mean-spirited boy racing his bicycle around his neighborhood, yet instead of holding his grievances against him, you find yourself pitying him. In Saunders' world, there are no perfect people—but that's all the more reason for us to try and understand one another.

The writing is brilliant in these stories, bending grammatical rules in a way that feels loose but never off-the-rails and that helps communicate the story instead of just seeming pretentious. I've become convinced that George Saunders is one of America's best living writers, and Pastoralia did nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.

ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN AMERICA VOL. 5 by Jack Kirby, John Warner, Tony Isabella, et al.

When Jack Kirby, the co-founder of what we now call the Marvel Universe, moved to DC Comics in 1971, it was a paradigm shift in the comics landscape, an event that DC marketed for months with full page ads proclaiming "The King Is Coming." But when that selfsame king returned home in 1976, there was considerably less fanfare. It had become clear to everyone by this time that Kirby was no longer at the peak of his powers, and his age was finally starting to show in his work, where both written and penciled attempts to portray the culture of the 1970s came off as laughably stilted. The Kirby who, alongside his collaborator Stan Lee, breathed life into Thor, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Black Panther, and many more was gone. But as this Essential volume shows, even Kirby in his twilight was more interesting than a lot of what Marvel had to offer in the Bronze Age of Comics.

The early issues of this volume are a clear example of Marvel throwing work at whomever was willing to take it that month, with a rotating cast of writers and artists putting out subpar work. The stories are bland, the dialogue is trying way too hard (especially attempts to have Falcon talk in jive, which, um, have not aged well), and Frank Robbins' art is some of the most amateurish I've seen from a Marvel comic book.

But then the page turns, and Kirby is in full control of the character he and Joe Simon created in 1941. Writing and drawing every month (something Kirby insisted on by this time, despite being considerably more talented at the latter than the former), these issues are not as high quality as Kirby's Silver Age material. But especially compared with the issues that immediately preceded Kirby's arrival, they crackle with imaginative energy, dynamism, and out-and-out fun.

Kirby's first story is an extended one dealing with the threat of the "Mad Bomb," a weapon of mass manipulation which threatens to turn the United States into a nation of raging psychopaths. This bomb is, naturally for a story written in the bicentennial year of 1976, the creation of a secret society of British royalists intent on reclaiming the U.S. for the aristocratic class. When Cap and Falcon, aided by agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., finally lay siege to the castle where the secret society is headquartered, Kirby makes the battle feels as momentous as it is ludicrous...and if that's not good comics, I don't know what is.

The remaining Kirby stories are shorter and covered in a collection I previously read. In a special bicentennial issue, Cap travels through time to witness some of America's most notable moments. In a two-part story, Cap meets the Night People, Dickensian social rejects living in a dimension terrorized by monsters. And in the finale, Cap and Falcon face off against Agron, a being of pure energy who time travels from the future to occupy a golem-like body and cause chaos.

1970s Kirby stories are Marvel are all zany, unfiltered imagination. Critically speaking, they're kind of a mess, with stilted dialogue, rushed art, and thin plotlines. But they're fun...and at the end of the day, isn't that what comics ought to be about?