September Reading Log

 

I had a weird 10-day stretch this month where between busyness and laziness, I did very little reading. But in the 20 days that remained, I managed to knock a few things out. Take a look!

2 Articles I Like This Month

"The Last American Man" by Elizabeth Gilbert, GQ. 28 minutes.

A profile of Eustace Conway, a modern-day frontiersman who's equal parts Daniel Boone, Henry David Thoreau, and Davy Crockett. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live off the land, read this story.

"My Time with Kurt Cobain" by Michael Azerrad, The New Yorker. 30 minutes.

A personal account of a former Rolling Stone journalist's relationship with Kurt Cobain. A fascinating profile of a fascinating figure in rock history.

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #154-174, Giant-Sized FF #4-5

Ok, this is where the Bronze Age got fun. With Roy Thomas back on board as writer and artists from Don Perlin to John Buscema to an up-and-coming legend named George Pérez, this stretch of issues really embraces comics' ability to get wacky. You want a Silver Surfer ripoff named Gaard wielding a cosmic hockey stick? He's here. You want to see a golden gorilla in knight's armor jousting? Here's here too.

After the realism of the Gerry Conway stories (especially Reed and Sue's separation), which were compelling but kind of a drag, the zaniness of these stories is a delight. Thomas wastes no time getting the original band back together, casting Medusa aside so Sue can rejoin the family and putting Johnny back in his original blue costume. From there they encounter new villains and old (including some Easter eggs no one was exactly clamoring for) and save the world again and again.

In terms of ongoing, soap operatic elements, the two biggest both deal with a loss of powers. The first comes when the Thing is miraculously returned to human form, but able to remain on the team courtesy of a super-strong exoskeleton designed for him by Reed. Most issues you forget about the development altogether thanks to the suit's design (it looks exactly like the Thing's old rocky body), but it's an important change nevertheless. The other remains an ongoing plot point as of issue #174; Reed is slowly losing his ability to stretch for reasons that remain unexplained. Tune in next month to see how that gets resolved (if I remember to provide an update!)

All in all, these are comics that don't take themselves too seriously but aren't pressing for laughs either. Fun, imaginative storytelling with familiar characters—you can't ask for much more!

SCRAPPY CHURCH: GOD'S NOT DONE YET by Thom S. Rainer

This is not the first Thom Rainer book I've reviewed here—or the second, or the third, or the fourth. When I'm wanting some ideas, some motivation, and some insight regarding church growth, he's typically my first source. But as I've pointed out previously, the more you read of Rainer, the more you realize he's essentially recycling the same few points again and again.

Scrappy Church is no exception. If you've read Simple Church, Breakout Churches, Autopsy of a Dead Church, and the like, then you know what he has to say here. Churches need to focus outward rather than inward. They need to look for tangible ways to be welcoming to guests—improved signage, a welcome team, flyers and even gifts for guests, etc. Churches need to get out in their communities instead of waiting for their communities to come to them.

It's all the same stuff in Scrappy Church that you've read before. What makes this a good book for skimming (or reading word-for-word if it's your first exposure to Rainer) is its emphasis on following his advice without needing hundreds of members or a million dollar budget. Given that Rainer often seems to presume churches have those resources, and that this is a criticism I've leveled at him in the past, I was interested to read some of his ideas on growing the church without breaking the bank.

The book offers a few helpful anecdotes in that vein, but ultimately falls short of its intended purpose, relying mostly on vague principles rather than concrete action plans. It's a good conversation starter, but not much of a reference text. So if you like Thom Rainer, you know exactly what to expect here—just don't expect anything new.

KADDISH AND OTHER POEMS by Allen Ginsberg

Do you remember the first time you heard the Beatles’ “Come Together?” The song is basically a collection of nonsense phrases, from “toejam football” to “joo joo eyeball,” yet when you put it all together you can’t shake the feeling that there’s something going on in all that nonsense, that maybe if you listen again you’ll crack the code.

That’s essentially what it feels like to read the poems in Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, his second-most-notable poetry collection after Howl. Chock full of free verse and provocation, the poems range from clever to indecipherable for the uninitiated (like me)—but through it all, you never get bored, and you always feel like there’s something going on beneath the surface.

Most memorable in the collection is the titular “Kaddish,” a biographical, 50+ page ode to Ginsberg’s mother, who struggled all her life with mental health issues, including psychotic episodes. Intensely personal, the poem is a reflection on death, mourning, and estrangement, and is both painful and moving to read. It’s not an easy read (none of the poems in Kaddish are), but it’s certainly the simplest to interpret, and is considered by some scholars to be Ginsberg’s best work.

I’m not really a poetry guy, and this book didn’t change that, but it was a challenging, fascinating read nevertheless. If you’re interested in poetry generally or the Beats in particular, you’re welcome to borrow my copy.

THE END OF THE END OF THE EARTH by Jonathan Franzen

As a novelist, Jonathan Franzen is a contender for America's greatest living writer. Freedom is one of the best novels I've ever read, and The Corrections is, in the judgment of many, equally masterful. I eagerly await the arrival of Crossroads, the first in an upcoming trilogy of novels, which comes out October 5. There are few literary novelists who manage to combine big ideas, deep insights, and beautiful prose quite like Franzen.

Unfortunately, as an essayist he leaves something to be desired. While his deftness with the English language remains as impressive as ever, the missives in The End of the End of the Earth failed to connect with me, and ended up less of a treat than a homework assignment.

The primary issue is his subject matter, which, in roughly half the essays, is his love of birding. Franzen is not shy about his deep love for the hobby, and readers of The End of the End of the Earth get more than their fill of plumage descriptions and listings of species. In the best cases, like in "Save What You Love," birding is a launching point for a bigger argument, such as that essay's case that, in the wake of climate change's overwhelming danger, something as seemingly insignificant as conserving bird habitats is not only valuable, but more useful and more ethical than he oft-cited advice to buy better lightbulbs and more fuel-efficient cars. But too often, the essays in this book seem like prose versions of the lists he keeps of birds he's seen, merely narrative accounts of birding expeditions. Some may be captivated enough by his writing to enjoy that; I found it tiresome.

The secondary issue with Franzen's nonfiction is the remove from which he writes. As a novelist, he has a gift for putting you in the mind of his characters, for establishing a point of view that you understand whether you like the characters or not. But as an essayist, the infamously prickly Franzen has to say what he thinks, and the perspective, try as he does to ground himself in his Midwestern everyman-ness, is of a literary snob. Franzen is a left-winger who is apologetic about it, an elitist who wants to pretend otherwise, a member of the literati who seems uncomfortable with that undeniable fact. The result is a frustrating, not particularly likeable narrator, one whose melancholy feels more annoying than deep.

I remain thrilled to read Crossroads as soon as I get my hands on a copy, as well as any other work of fiction Franzen puts in front of me. But the next time an essay of Franzen's drops in The New Yorker or The Paris Review, my inevitable reading of it will be more out of a sense of obligation than joy. Franzen is a brilliant novelist, but his batting average on essays is too low for him to be in my lineup.

THE JOY OF KEEPING SCORE by Paul Dickson

When I was really getting into baseball as an 8-year-old, one of the things my dad taught me was the basic rules of how to keep score. Showing me both the standard notations and giving me room to make up my own, he was introducing me to a side of baseball nerd-dom I would never leave. Since that time, not only have I filled up a scorebook, I have created my own.

So The Joy of Keeping Score, a slim, photo-heavy history of the practice, was right up my alley. Containing everything from a glossary of scorekeeping symbols to evidence of the earliest scorecards, it tells you just about everything you ever wanted to know about baseball scorekeeping, and all in 100 pages. For a baseball fan mourning the oncoming end of the regular season, it was a nice September tonic.

Paul Dickson, a popular baseball historian, has done fans a real service with this book. If you've ever used the tear-out scorecard in your program, this book will give you a better idea what to do with it.

ESSENTIAL HUMAN TORCH VOL. 1 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, et al.

The early 1960s was a period of transition for the company that would soon be known as Marvel Comics. While Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and company were starting to introduce the world to dynamic new characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the Avengers, they were still figuring out their style. The company hadn’t yet fully developed its ethos, something that would be well established by the end of the decade. So those comics of the early 1960s remained largely kids fare: simple, self-contained, unchallenging stories of good guys, bad guys, and hijinks, largely indistinguishable from the output of the Distinguished Competition.

In that respect, the comics found in Essential Human Torch are very much of their time. The book collects every one of the Torch’s solo adventures in Strange Tales, where the teenage hero was afforded the opportunity to have adventures away from his teammates in the Fantastic Four (at least until the end of the run, when he began teaming up with the Thing regularly.) Every story is largely the same—the Torch is confronted by an unthreatening crook in a costume, uses some combination of his powers and his wits to foil the villain, and gets home in time to make up with his girlfriend, Dorrie Evans. The stories have the easy familiarity and simple structure of a syndicated sitcom, and are about that level of fun—nothing worth saving, but a pleasant way to spend half an hour.

By 1963, Marvel was ready to move on, convinced that Peter Parker, not Johnny Storm, was the teenage superhero worth placing their bets on. Johnny remains an iconic member of the Fantastic Four, but no serious attempt has been made since to give him a long-term solo title. Some guys just work better on a team than flying solo.