February Reading Log

 

Plenty of reading this past month, from a lot of different corners of the literary world. Take a look!

3 Articles I Like This Month

"The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism from Itself" by David Brooks, The New York Times. 19 minutes.

A profile of the evangelical thought leaders—people like Beth Moore, David French, Russell Moore, Kristen Kobes Du Mez, and others—who have split from their institutions since the Trump presidency and are now doing their best to reflect upon what it really means to be an evangelical Christian and determine whether the movement can be redeemed.

"MLB’s Owners Had Every Advantage, and Still It Wasn’t Enough for Them" by Ken Rosenthal, The Athletic. 6 minutes.

With any labor dispute, there is a tendency to cast blame on both sides, to assume they are equally at fault for not reaching a deal. But as Ken Rosenthal, arguably baseball's most respected reporter, makes clear in this article, that is not the case with the current MLB lockout. If you want to know who to blame, it's not the players—it's the 30 billionaire owners who, having routed the Players Association in the last round of collective bargaining, decided they'd rather cancel games than lose a single advantage they'd gained.

"Does My Son Know You?" by Jonathan Tjarks, The Ringer. 11 minutes.

The writer, who is facing terminal illness, offers his thoughts on the importance of fatherhood, friendship, and what he wants to leave behind for his son. A guaranteed tearjerker.

Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #251-270, Annual #17

This run of issues begins with an ambitious 6-issue quest through the Negative Zone, where writer-artist John Byrne presents six single-issue stories about the FF encountering various alien beings, borrowing elements from classic stories ranging from Lawrence of Arabia to Star Wars. While the attempt to expand upon the mythos of the Negative Zone is admirable, this story is, to my mind, the rare misfire in the Byrne run; rather than adding anything to readers' conception of this part of FF lore, it demystifies something that had once been a playground for wild ideas.

Thankfully, when the FF return to earth, Byrne follows it up with two classic stories: one in which Doctor Doom imbues Galactus' former herald, Terrax, to battle the foursome, and another in which Reed Richards is put on trial by various galactic races for the crime of saving Galactus' life in a previous Byrne issue. These issues are Byrne at his best, borrowing the best of the Silver Age and then putting his own modern spin on it, offering thoughtful and imaginative stories that leave the reader in awe.

After all that cosmic grandeur, this run of issues ends with a much more grounded, emotional story. Sue Richards, having learned she is pregnant with her and Reed's second child, experiences complications with her pregnancy, much like she did before their son Franklin was born, and Reed enlists some of the best minds in the world to try and save her and the baby. Ultimately, he determines that the only man who can help her is the criminal Doctor Octopus, and convinces him to set his villainy aside and help Sue. But, in a devastating final page, Reed learns they've arrived too late: Sue has suffered a miscarriage.

All in all, this run of 20 issues contains some of John Byrne's most influential stories ("The Trial of Reed Richards" has a strong argument for being the best issue of his entire run), even as some tales are better than others. Here you see a writer and artist at the peak of his powers, reviving a title that had gotten stale in the 1970s and making it his own. Looking forward to finishing his legendary run in March!

WHOLEHEARTED FAITH by Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu

In the "ex-vangelical" community (those who have left evangelicalism for mainline denominations or, in rare cases, left the faith altogether), Rachel Held Evans has become something of a saint, especially since her tragic, unexpected death in 2019. During her life, Rachel (I'm abandoning my normal journalistic policy of referring to authors by their last names; for fans of Rachel Held Evans, she was always just "Rachel") was at the forefront of what is popularly known now as "deconstruction." She spent years deeply examining the evangelical subculture she grew up in and found it wanting—even as she found Jesus more captivating than ever. Indeed, what set Rachel apart from all the other exvangelicals (many of whom I greatly admire) was that her anger at evangelicalism's flaws never overwhelmed her love for Jesus—even when institutional Christianity seemed a lost cause, she never stopped believing the gospel of Jesus Christ was good news.

Wholehearted Faith, a posthumous patchwork of her writings lovingly stitched together by friend and editor Jeff Chu, continues the journey of reflection, deconstruction, and rebuilding begun by her previous works, Searching for Sunday and Inspired. But where those books often focused on what she used to believe, this book is more forward-looking, reckoning with her evangelical background but not dwelling upon it. Wholehearted Faith is less about breaking down an old belief system than about asking questions, occasionally finding answers, and more frequently finding rest in the mystery of God.

In other words, Wholehearted Faith finds Rachel more at peace than she was in her previous books, no longer grief-stricken at the state of an evangelicalism she was desperately trying to hold onto, but instead divorced from it and content to simply be in Christ. It sees her finding refuge in God's love when the world seems out of control, in the community of faith when she feels most alone. It is, as Rachel always was, profoundly meaningful, searching, and honest.

For conservative evangelicals, I highly recommend reading some of Rachel's work for the piercing yet kind ways she brings to light weaknesses you may never have considered. For moderate and progressive Christians, I recommend her writing for the balance it strikes between fearless prophetic critique and gentle wisdom. And for unbelievers, I recommend reading Rachel because she was a living example of what the old hymn promised, in paraphrase of Jesus: "they'll know we are Christians by our love." Read Wholehearted Faith and be blessed.

GENTLE AND LOWLY: THE  HEART OF CHRIST FOR SINNERS AND SUFFERERS by Dane Ortlund

To many, God is perceived as a stern taskmaster, a no-nonsense judge who is just waiting for you to mess up. But in Christ, we see the heart of God: as Jesus says in Matthew 11:29, he is "gentle and lowly in heart."

Gentle and Lowly, regarded by many as a modern devotional classic, plumbs the depths of Scripture and the writings of Puritans like Thomas Goodwin to describe the heart of God, how his intolerance for sin never overrides his love for sinners. Over the course of 23 chapters, author Dane Ortlund touches on God's mercy from every conceivable angle in a way that feels focused without being redundant.

Ortlund's Reformed views are on full display—the only outside scholars he references are, by design, Puritans—but they never distract from his central theme, one which can be embraced by Calvinists and Arminians, Protestants and Catholics, evangelicals and mainliners alike. God loves us—it's as simple as that. 

MACBETH by William Shakespeare

One long-term reading goal of mine is to make my way through the complete works of Shakespeare, and with the arrival of Joel Cohen's The Tragedy of Macbeth on Apple TV+, Macbeth seemed a good place to start. While we read several of Shakespeare's plays in school, this was one of the more notable omissions, and I was both excited and apprehensive to dive in.

Macbeth, for those unfamiliar with it, is a play about the peril of unchecked ambition, the power of guilt, and the vagaries of destiny. It tells the story of the Scottish lord Macbeth who, compelled by a premonition, the urging of his wife, and his own ego, murders the king of Scotland and becomes king himself. Having committed this act, he finds himself plagued by paranoia and shame, ultimately descending into tyranny and meeting his own bloody end.

It's a play which, like all of Shakespeare's best works, is rich in both theme and language, the kind of archetypal story that has been referenced ever since to describe the inordinately ambitious. Phrases like "the end all and be all" and "the sound and the fury" originate with this play; Macbeth's monologue following his wife's death is one of the most famous passages in English literature. But what may have impressed me most was Shakespeare's ability to set a mood—the whole play resonates with a sense of foreboding doom; without ever describing it, you can nevertheless feel the fog and the darkness that surrounds his play.

I read from was the Arden 3rd edition, which I learned at London's Globe Theatre is the definitive scholarly edition of all Shakespeare's works. Containing more than 150 pages of notes in the introduction and appendix in addition to hundreds of footnotes, I would certainly recommend this edition to any diehard reader of Shakespeare (for my part, I skimmed the introductory notes.) But whether you read from that edition or from a free one online, either way I recommend making sure this play doesn't slip through the cracks...it's one of Shakespeare's finest.

SHOELESS JOE by W.P. Kinsella

While the film Field of Dreams has a special place in my heart (I've seen it at least 10 times, and have cried every one of them), I'd never before made time to the read the novel it was based on. With Major League Baseball mired in a lockout, this was a good month to remedy that oversight.

Shoeless Joe tells the story of Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice command him to plow his cornfield and build a baseball stadium so that disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson will have a place to play. This turns out to be only the first of a series of mysterious commands, all of which culminate in baseball-oriented closure for a series of men, from Kinsella to Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger to the oldest living Chicago Cub. It's a novel about fathers and sons, about dreams and faith, and about nostalgia and sentimentality.

And as it turns out, the movie is a pretty faithful rendering of the novel—a few characters were cut out, yes, and the studio was too nervous about lawsuits to use real-life figure J.D. Salinger (they opted for a proxy character, "Terrance Mann")—but in plot and tone, Shoeless Joe and Field of Dreams are of one piece. If you thought the movie was overly sentimental dreck, you're going to think the same thing about the book. If the movie touched your heart, the book will too.

It's not a flawless book by any means—the movie successfully tightened up a few areas where the book had too much fluff—but for those who like baseball and don't mind being romantic about it, Shoeless Joe is worth a read.

ESSENTIAL GHOST RIDER VOL. 4 by J.M. DeMatteis, Michael Fleischer, Bob Budiansky, Don Perlin, et al.

In the mid-to-late-1970s, Ghost Rider was an amalgam of several big trends of time: a little bit of horror here, a little bit of stunt biking there, a little bit of superhero adventure on the side. So when those trends became less trendy, what happened to Ghost Rider? It turns out that, after 80+ issues, the answer was to cancel the title, giving Johnny Blaze the happy ending he'd been seeking for years.

Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 4 rides out the end of that run in much the manner that the third third volume set up, with Johnny Blaze and the demon Zarathos (a.k.a. the Ghost Rider) in a Jekyll-Hyde, Bruce Banner-Hulk style relationship. With the former champion stunt biker now working for a traveling carnival, Blaze must fight day in and day out to restrain his demonic alter-ego, a struggle he inevitably loses around page 15 of each issue, just in time for Ghost Rider to tackle the villain of the day.

As that description indicates, it's pretty formulaic, but it's not badly written or drawn. And there are a few highlights in there, my favorite when Johnny mystically faces off against Zarathos for a motorcycle race through Hell. But by and large, this is the last gasp of a book that never quite figured out what it wanted to be beyond a marketer's idea of a good time. Ghost Rider would go on to be resurrected in the 1980s (with a new alter-ego, Danny Ketch) and then again in the 2010s. He would guest star in various cartoons and even get two Nicholas Cage movies. But he's never been more than a B-lister...and after 4 volumes of his original title, it's not hard to understand why.

FANTASTIC FOUR/IRON MAN: BIG TIME IN JAPAN by Zeb Wells and Seth Fisher

Well that was...weird.

Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big Time in Japan is a 2005 four-issue miniseries that sees Marvel's First Family teaming up with the armored avenger for an all-out romp against a host of kaiju. Facing off against a few familiar monsters (and, eventually, the Mole Man), the heroes must come together to stave off the threat of an ancient "Apocalypse Beast."

But mostly, this series is artist Seth Fisher's excuse to go nuts with his surrealist, cartoony art, rendering the various kaiju in all sorts of strange ways, exploring what different dimensions look like on the comic page, and generally filling every page with color and madness. By the end of the book, I wasn't really reading the story so much as looking at the pretty pictures.

I don't know if this book is canon or not, and I'm not sure it really matters; it's an ultimately inconsequential story. But if you're somebody who likes comic art that strays off the beaten path, this is worth the hour it will take to read it. Don't expect much from the story and writing, but you'll have a ball with the art.