Between preparing for Holy Week, an upcoming renovation of the church sanctuary, and a 2 week Italian vacation, my daily reading schedule looked a lot different the last couple of months than normal. In fact, I did something unthinkable while we were in Italy...I didn't bring a single book (instead I caught up on my daunting stack of unread New Yorker and Texas Monthly back issues).
Nevertheless, I made time for some books the past 2 months. Here's how I spent my reading time!
2 Articles I Like This Month
"Did We Forget What School Is For?" by George Packer, The Atlantic. 11 minutes.
Amidst school board battles over critical race theory and banned books, writer George Packer issues this impassioned reminder that education is not about indoctrination to one way of thinking, but about teaching children how to think by exposing them to different ideas.
"After 30 Years, There's Still Nothing Like Spring Training" by Jamey Newberg, D Magazine. 9 minutes.
One of my happy places is metropolitan Phoenix in March, where 15 MLB teams convene each year for spring training. In this article, longtime Texas Rangers blogger Jamey Newberg writes about what his annual treks to spring training have meant to him and his family.
Reading Through the Fantastic Four- #271-300, Annual #18-19
This stretch of issues marks the final third of John Byrne's legendary run on the FF, a sequence that sees the series leaning into its place in the wider Marvel Universe to varying degrees of success. On the one hand, it's fun seeing guest star after guest star—Spider-Man! Daredevil! Phoenix! Nick Fury!—but on the other hand, after a while it starts feeling like the FF are no longer interesting enough to carry their own book. In retrospect, it seems clear that Byrne, who was already engaged in other projects at Marvel, had mentally moved on.
Nevertheless, his run's decline from the high point of issues #257-265 or so is almost imperceptible while you're reading it. The art is still clean, dynamic, and detailed, a look that would define Marvel in the 1980s. The plotting and dialogue are still miles ahead of anything the book had seen since the day of Lee and Kirby. And Byrne's reverence for those Silver Age stories continues to be the book's guiding star.
Which is not to say the book is just a nostalgia trip—in fact, Byrne makes several substantive changes in his last twenty issues. One that endures to this day is his elevation of Susan Storm Richards. In the early days of the FF, Sue was little more than a damsel in distress, whose passive powers did little to help the team. In Byrne's hands, she gradually grows into a more modern woman, renaming herself the Invisible Woman and proving herself to be arguably the most powerful member of the team. The other big change, which proves to be more of a misfire, is a whirlwind romance between the Human Torch and the longtime girlfriend of the Thing, Alicia Masters. While handled pretty well by Byrne, the idea is too cute by half, and while issue #300 sees the two get married, this marriage would eventually be retconned.
Though Byrne's six-year run on Fantastic Four ends with #293, that 300th issue marks a sort of unofficial page turn for the title, with temporary member She-Hulk shuttled back off the Avengers to make room for the Thing and with Johnny and Alicia wed. The next few years of the FF would be a mixed bag...check back in next month to see what awaits!
THE HOPE OF GLORY: REFLECTIONS ON THE LAST WORDS OF JESUS FROM THE CROSS by Jon Meacham
In preparation for a Lenten sermon series on the famous "Seven Last Word of Jesus," I picked up this slim book of devotional thoughts from historian and public intellectual Jon Meacham, a figure whose political takes I've long appreciated. As expected, what I got was a series of well-written but surface-level expository thoughts, the kind of thing you might get from a talented but inexperienced Sunday School teacher—some good quotes, but not necessarily any new insights.
As you may have figured, each of Jesus's statements from the cross get a chapter, most clocking in at a mere 5-10 pages. Meacham's reflections cover everything from the concept of salvation to the humanity of Jesus to the nature of truth—weighty subjects to be sure, perhaps a bit too heavy for that kind of brevity to suffice. While I was grateful for a theology book that was so easy to swallow, I can't help but wonder whether we'd have been better off with a book twice as long. After all, Meacham's writing is excellent; a little more detail would have been nice.
One word of warning for anyone wanting to pick this up: in the book's introduction, Meacham makes clear that he is a mainline Christian, not an evangelical one—he doesn't believe faith in Jesus is the only way to eternal salvation, nor does he believe the Bible is inerrant or infallible. For some, that may render the entire book meritless. For my part, I like to read people on different spiritual wavelengths from me, and I found his perspective—that of a curious, searching, but ultimately faithful believer in Christ—worth overlooking our significant theological differences.
For those looking for bite-sized insights into the cross, this is a quick, easy-to-read offering from an intelligent, eloquent author. For those looking to jump into the theological deep end, you'll have to look elsewhere. The Hope of Glory is a spiritual snack—it may not stick with you long, but it tastes good going down.
CROSS-SHATTERED CHRIST: MEDITATIONS ON THE SEVEN LAST WORDS by Stanley Hauerwas
Same song, second verse: this is another brief set of devotional thoughts about the Seven Last Words, this one courtesy of theologian Stanley Hauerwas. And in a sense, this one commits the opposite sin of Meacham's book, going so theologically deep in its brief reflections that you're sometimes left wondering if he missed the forest for the trees.
In his introduction, Hauerwas explains that his goal is to exposit the last words of Christ from a strictly theological view, not an anthropological view. In other words, he doesn't want to explain what they teach us about ourselves, but what they teach us about God—"how does this apply to my life?" is not a question he's interested in for this book. On its face, this premise creates some interesting questions about Trinitarian dynamics, how the Father relates to the Son in the person of the Godhead.
But in practice, the essays are uneven, as some of the statements from the cross lend themselves more naturally to this limitation than others. When Jesus cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" or says, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit," the premise is a good one, and yields some interesting thoughts. But when Jesus begs forgiveness for his oppressors, you can feel Hauerwas straining to turn the attention away from humanity—who is, after all, the object of Jesus' plea.
There are good insights and some memorable quotes in this brief little volume, and I found it helpful in my sermon preparation. Nevertheless, I felt that Hauerwas' premise unnecessarily hamstrung him from some opportunities for application. After all, isn't that part of the point of a devotional book?
THE BASEBALL 100 by Joe Posnanski
In the spring and early summer of 2020, with the professional baseball season delayed by a pandemic that had shut down the whole world, award-winning sportswriter Joe Posnanski challenged himself: every day he would write an essay, published by The Athletic, about one of the baseball players he deemed to be in the top 100 of all time. The project swallowed every available minute of his time; he would later confess to researching and writing for 12+ hours per day at various points But when the countdown drew to its conclusion (and the COVID-shortened baseball season finally began), Posnanski had far more than just a a fun series of articles—he had an 800+ page book.
The Baseball 100 is, at least to this point, the pinnacle of my favorite sportswriter's career; it's an instant classic full of wonderful anecdotes, mini biographies, statistical anomalies, and more. Whether writing about Deadball players like Eddie Collins and Nap Lajoie, golden era titans like Ted Williams and Willie Mays, or modern phenoms like Barry Bonds and Mike Trout, Posanski infuses every essay with the information to justify the player's inclusion and the heart to make their stories sing.
Certain themes run throughout the essays, themes familiar to fans of America's pastime. Expect lots of stories about fathers and sons, the lifeblood of the game. Expect plenty of discussion about how racism kept the greatest players out of the game for decades, how those players persevered with their own Negro Leagues, and how the heroic Jackie Robinson finally burst the dam of segregation and opened the game to everyone. Expect controversies from labor wars to steroid use to be addressed, and to read about how those controversies affected players' legacies.
But most of all, prepared to be moved by Posnanski's beautiful, makes-it-look-easy prose, the kind of superb writing you don't get often in sports books. I challenge any baseball fan to make it through the whole book without getting teary-eyed at least once. It's a challenge I lost several times.
Oh, and the rankings? They're just a construct; don't take them too seriously. After all, as Posnanski reminds the reader in the book's final words, baseball is ultimately not life or death, it's a game. It should be fun. And this book, rest assured, is fun.
ALL OF THE MARVELS by Douglas Wolk
If you read this book log every month, then you know I like to take up ambitious reading projects: collecting and reading all 172 Essential Marvel volumes, reading all the presidential memoirs, reading through every issue of the Fantastic Four, etc. Douglas Wolk put those projects to shame: over a 3 year period, he read every Marvel comic published between 1961, when Fantastic Four #1 hit the stands, through the completion of the 2015 Secret Wars crossover.
All of the Marvels is his account of that experience and his synthesis of the Marvel Universe as a whole. The nature of serialized storytelling is that creators come and go, but the characters remain relatively stable; Wolk seeks to identify what Marvel's most significant characters are all about. These analyses are remarkably insightful, with Wolk serving as a sort of tour guide through the universe, showing which comics are true "must reads" and which runs are inessential.
While I appreciated his character summaries, my favorite part of the book was probably the first three chapters, where he talked about the actual experience of deciding what he would and wouldn't read (basic rule: if it was part of the "Marvel Universe," he had to read it; Marvel titles outside the universe, like Conan the Barbarian, could be waived) and how he acquired those issues (mostly through the Marvel Unlimited digital app, though with plenty of help from back issue boxes and collected editions.) Wolk's experience reading literally everything Marvel had to offer—the good, the bad, and the ugly—appealed to my completionist tendencies, and even had me tempted for a moment to replicate his feat. I'm not going to, but I thought about it!
For comics fans, especially of Marvel, this is a blast to read, and I highly recommend it. And for fans of the Marvel movies, this is well worth your time to get a feel for the source material for the universe that has taken over Hollywood. As Stan Lee used to say, Make Mine Marvel!
RELENTLESS: FROM GOOD TO GREAT TO UNSTOPPABLE by Tim S. Grover with Shari Lesser Wenk
W1NNING: THE UNFORGIVING RACE TO GREATNESS by Tim S. Grover with Shari Lesser Wenk
This pair of books was an admitted departure from my usual reading. I'm not a big fan of the self-help genre, which often relies on generalities, clichés, and folk wisdom more than true insight. But an Internet rabbit hole led me to this pair of books by Tim Grover, personal trainer to Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and a series of other NBA athletes, and his win-at-all-costs approach to work, what Kobe called the "Mamba Mentality."
Let's start with the good: Grover is a professional motivational speaker, and these books will indeed motivate you to work harder, to focus in on what really matters to you and pursue it with single-minded intensity. Focus is really the key word here; Grover persuasively argues that in a world rife with distractions, what sets winners apart is their ability to set everything else aside and give their all to what matters most. He tells story after story about Michael Jordan's ferocious competitive spirit and about Kobe's inexhaustible work ethic, and challenges the reader that, while you can't match their talent, you can imitate their approach.
Now the bad: these books are essentially advocating workaholism, and unapologetically so. To Grover, work begins when you wake up in the morning—the earlier the better; Kobe starting taking shots in the gym at 4 AM—and doesn't end until you go to bed. He talks again and again about the need to sacrifice time with friends, family, and other "distractions" in pursuit of your work. He's not only a skeptic, but an outright opponent of the idea of "work-life balance," saying that winners must be imbalanced in order to set themselves apart. To him, life is work and work is life.
Since at least the days of Michael Jordan, sports fans have long been fascinated by the ruthless singlemindedness of athletes like MJ, Kobe, Tiger Woods, and Tom Brady, men whose entire lives were built around their goals. Their obsessiveness is fascinating—heck, curiosity about it is why I picked up these books—but it's far from healthy. Michael Jordan is a winner, yes. But if you watched The Last Dance, then you tell me: is he happy?
ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN MARVEL VOL. 1-2 by Roy Thomas, Arnold Drake, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, Gil Kane, et al.
If you know Captain Marvel as Brie Larson's Carol Danvers, this character may be new to you. Indeed when the Kree soldier Mar-Vell was introduced in the Captain Marvel movie, they changed the comic character's gender and virtually everything else about him. Unfortunately, that gives you an idea how memorable the original character was.
This title really goes through three different phases in the 46 issues these volumes cover. The first introduces Mar-Vell as a Kree soldier acting as a double agent on Earth. Sent by his superior officer and archrival Yon-Rogg to scout out Earth as a potential Kree target, he instead sabotages the Kree's attempts at conquest time and again, serving simultaneously as a conflicted Kree soldier and a protector of humans.
While an intriguing premise, it's hard to keep a monthly serialized comic going with that structure, so after about a dozen issues, the character is radically reimagined. In a shameless ripoff of DC's Captain Marvel (now known, after a series of complicated lawsuits, as Shazam) Mar-Vell comes to share a body with perennial Marvel sidekick Rick Jones. When Jones slams his two metal Nega-Bands together, he is shuttled off to the Negative Zone and replaced by Mar-Vell. This change grounds the character more, but something still feels off about it all.
So, when artist Jim Starlin also takes over the writing duties, Marvel allows him to get weird. In his hands, Mar-Vell goes from a superhero to a more intergalactic "Protector of the Universe," equipped with the strange-as-it-sounds power of "cosmic awareness." More importantly, Mar-Vell is brought into the world of Starlin's favorite characters: Adam Warlock, Drax the Destroyer, and, most importantly, Thanos. With Starlin at the wheel, the book goes from a traditional superhero book to a space opera.
Unfortunately, while the book gets better with each of these three phases, it never quite clicks, owing largely to Mar-Vell's lack of a dynamic personality. There's just not a lot there; he's a blank slate without any real charisma. In a team book, that's forgivable, but it gets to be a drag when the star of the show isn't shining.
It's been said that Mar-Vell's greatest story was his last, the Starlin-penned Death of Captain Marvel. After 40+ issues of the character's original series, I'm inclined to agree. These Essentials may be important reading for Starlin fans or Marvel completionists, but they can mostly be skipped by casual readers.
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