March Reading Log

     

March was actually a very disciplined, enjoyable reading month for me—I was reading from 4:30 to 7:00 5 days a week with very few exceptions, and I liked most of what I read. Take a look!

3 Articles I Like This Month

"King of the Canine Canon" by Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly. 30 minutes.

A delightful profile of John R. Erickson, whose Hank the Cowdog series of books was a bedtime favorite in my family and countless others.

"How the Public-Health Messaging Backfired" by Zeynep Tufecki, The Atlantic. 26 minutes.

For more than a year now, there have been two extreme approaches to the pandemic. The first, heavily influenced by former President Trump, thought the pandemic could be ignored and belligerently recoiled at intrusive societal sacrifices like mask wearing, social distancing, and shelter-in-place orders. The latter response, which began largely a backlash to the former, essentially said you need to stay home as much as humanly possible. As we now begin to approach the end of the pandemic (though we're not there yet!), the question should be asked: was there a better way? Was there room for nuance in our public health messaging? And as we march toward herd immunity, can we find some room between the extremes of ignorance and terror where common sense gets space to shine?

"Longing for a Shot at the Majors, but Sitting Out the Sabbath" by David Waldstein, The New York Times. 7 minutes.

Elie Kligman is an up-and-coming high school baseball star with dreams of playing in the major leagues. However, he is also an observant Jew, and refuses to play on Shabbas (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.) Baseball meets religion...this fascinating story was made for me!

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #21-45, Annuals 2 and 3

These issues of the legendary Lee-Kirby run sees the writer-artist team getting in a groove, the FF's identity solidifying, and several major characters (especially Doctor Doom) being fleshed out.

If the first twenty issues did a lot of world building, these see Lee and Kirby building on the foundation they had laid. The most notable example of this comes in the classic Annual #2, when they give a full-length origin story for Doctor Doom that never features the titular FF. The next annual is one of Marvel's most famous issues ever, in which virtually the entire Marvel Universe as it existed at that time shows up for the wedding of Reed and Sue Richards.

By and large, the stories are contained to one issue, and many feature guest stars (indeed, it was a marketing strategy for Lee to have new characters guest star in what was then Marvel's most popular book in the hopes of increasing the sales of the guest stars' books). Favorite villains (Doctor Doom, Mole Man, Puppet Master, Super Skrull) return and a few new baddies show up (the Frightful Four).

Jack Kirby's art improves over the course of these 27 issues, as his style moves from its look in the 1940s and 1950s to the cleaner look of the 1960s. Unfortunately, those improved pencils are marred by a series of bad matches on inking. Not until Joe Sinnott is paired with him in issue #44 do Kirby's pencils really start to shine (Sinnott is, FWIW, my all-time favorite FF inker and would remain on the book until even after Kirby's departure.)

I enjoyed these issues well enough, but it seems clear that Lee and Kirby had lots of irons in the fire as they were building the Marvel Universe from scratch; the FF in these issues seem to be less the focus than the Marvel Universe at large (a critique, ironically, that is made even today about both Marvel's comics and its movies.) I'm really looking forward to next month's batch of issues, which for my money are some of the best FF stories of all time.

INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE: ESSAYS ON THE BIBLE AND HERMENEUTICS by N.T. Wright

Regular readers of this monthly log know that N.T. Wright is one of my favorite theologians, something earned not only by the depth of his insights but also by his skill at turning a phrase. So when he released a three-volume collection of his essays and lectures (one dealing with his writings on Scripture, one on Jesus, and one on Paul), I eagerly borrowed my dad's copy of volume 1 and got started.

That was three months ago. And I'm only just getting around to finishing today. No promises I'll get around to volumes 2 and 3.

Unfortunately, most of these essays come out of an academic context, and while Wright at his worst is still a better writer than many academicians, the fact remains that the writing here is, in many spots, dry to the point of dusty. Scholars writing for scholars tend to get pretty verbose and pretty granular, and Wright is no exception here.

The second sin of the essays is another which is common to academic writing: the topics are so specific that one wonders if anyone could possibly care other than the author. This is certainly not true of every essay, but there were definitely a few clunkers which I read for the sake of completeness but was utterly uninterested by. For example, more than one of the essays were forwards for books by other scholars in which Wright spent more pages praising his colleague than talking about the book's subject—while I've spent enough times on the outskirts of academia to know that's part of the ballgame, it makes for tedious reading.

My final issue with the book is more my fault than Wright's, but is worth mentioning (it is, after all, my reading log): Wright's not saying anything here he hasn't said elsewhere. For any familiar with the "new perspective" he has spent his life championing—in which the work of both Jesus and Paul is inextricably tied to their identities as Jews—there's a lot of same-old, same-old in these essays. I've read literally thousands of pages written by Wright, so as I said, this criticism is probably more about me than the essays. But still, if I'm going to read 300 pages of essays, I'd like to learn something new along the way.

Is this a bad book? Absolutely not. N.T. Wright is a font of biblical insight, and even his weaker books are enriching. But is this, as I'd hoped, an accessible summary of his thoughts on the Bible? Not so much.

A BURNING IN MY BONES: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF EUGENE H. PETERSON by Winn Collier

*I wrote a brief review of this book for the Baptist Standard. So as to neither plagiarize nor repeat myself, allow me to simply link to that review here.*

THE BLOODY CROWN OF CONAN by Robert E. Howard

My journey through the original Conan the Barbarian stories continued this month with this volume, which collects the three longest Conan stories Robert E. Howard wrote. Instead of short stories, these are at least novellas (in fact, "The Hour of the Dragon" is long enough to be considered a full-blown novel), which offers better pacing and more room for characterization. While the third and final volume (which I'll read next month) sees Howard return to the short story format, I liked these longer tales.

"The People of the Black Circle," one of the most popular Conan stories, is unique in its setting: Vendhya, Howard's Hyborian Age version of India. The story's Eastern setting gives it a different feel than your typical Conan story, even if the content is pretty rote. When the Vendhyan queen tries to coerce Conan into killing her sorcerous enemies, he instead kidnaps her. However, when her enemies try to attack her, Conan gets swept up in the intrigue. Ultimately the two fall in love (or at least attraction) only to be separated by her queenly duty when her enemies are defeated and the time comes for her to return to the throne.

"The Hour of the Dragon" was my favorite of the three stories, though it was not particularly original. Reading as almost a greatest hits collection of Conan motifs, it begins with the resurrection of an ancient and malevolent sorcerer who seeks to conquer King Conan's land of Aquilonia. Only by retrieving the Heart of Ahriman, a magical gem, can Conan hope to defeat the sorcerer. The story sees Conan acting as a king, a barbarian, and a pirate at various points, and if it doesn't always flow seamlessly, it's a rolicking good time.

"A Witch Shall Be Born" is the shortest and weakest of the three stories. In the story, a queen is replaced her twin sister, a witch, and Conan winds up leading the rebellion against the new queen. While the story has its moments—most notably when Conan manages to somehow escape his own crucifixion—it's not one I'd be likely to reread.

Conan's original adventures come to an end next month as I tackle The Conquering Sword of Conan. 

TOM SAWYER ABROAD by Mark Twains

TOM SAWYER, DETECTIVE by Mark Twain

In 1894, plagued by money troubles, Mark Twain returned to the well of his most popular characters, writing two new novella-length adventures featuring Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The stories had several things in common: both were homages to popular genre novels of the time, both traded realism for fantasy, and both have been largely forgotten by history. And now, both have been read by yours truly.

Tom Sawyer, Abroad borrows heavily from two things: Twain's own travels (which he chronicled in The Innocents Abroad) and from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. In the story, Tom, Huck, and Jim (the latter two showing little of the character development from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) sail to the Middle East in futuristic hot air balloon, where they encounter everything from packs of lions to Bedouin bandits to the pyramids of Egypt. If you're thinking, "that doesn't sound like a Tom Sawyer book"....yeah. You'd be right about that.

Tom Sawyer, Detective stays in the American South, this time so that Tom and Huck can play Sherlock and Watson by solving a murder mystery. While slightly more grounded than Tom Sawyer, Abroad, it's also less interesting, and a more blatant ripoff of popular novels of its day.

In modern terminology, these books are cash grabs, pure and simple. But with Twain at the wheel, even unimaginative pablum isn't bad reading. If you're looking for a fitting sequel to the classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you're better off pretending these don't exist. But if you just like the characters and don't mind turning your brain off, these aren't the worst way you could spend a few hours.

ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS VOL. 6 by J.M. DeMatteis, Don Perlin, et al.

My journey with America's favorite non-team continued this month as Doctor Strange, Hellcat, Daimon Hellstrom, Valkyrie, Gargoyle, and others continued battling the forces of evil and gelling as a group. As was often the case with The Defenders, these issues are classics, but they're fun enough.

What sets these issues apart is how much time is spent on individual character arcs, particularly those of Hellcat and Daimon Hellstrom. Multiple issues leave the rest of the team out in the cold as fan favorites make the book their solo act. I'd like to say that's because the characters are just so beloved or so interesting that they demand more attention, but the reality is that writer J.M. DeMatteis was running out of ideas (as he would later admit) and found it easier to write solo arcs than keep the non-team together.

That creative burnout is what leads to the radical change in the last issue of this volume, in which original Defenders Doctor Strange, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Silver Surfer, and the Hulk are told by an alien prophecy that the team as constituted must break up or else doom Earth to total devastation. In the wake up the non-team disbanding, longtime X-Man and Avenger Beast convinces his buddies Angel and Iceman to join him, Valkyrie, Gargoyle, and ex-Avenger Moondragon in a more formal arrangement than the famously ragtag Defenders ever had. Equipped with a headquarters, charter, and stable roster, the New Defenders would last another 27 issues (and one more Essential volume) before the title was finally cancelled.

As I forecasted last volume, Essential Defenders Vol. 6 sees the title in its twilight, deprived of the goofy fun that made it a cult hit in the 1970s. It's not bad, but nothing I'll revisit. On to volume 7 next month, and then my time with the Defenders draws to a close.