November Reading Log

A really nice reading month, including the rare experience of a long, epic novel that swept me off my feet. Take a look below, and happy reading!

SHEPHERDING LIKE JESUS by Andrew Hébert

When people think about what it means to be a pastor, they often use secular comparisons: pastor as CEO, pastor as brand manager, pastor as inspirational speaker. But in Scripture, pastors (bishops/elders, if you want to be technical about the translation) are compared to shepherds, operating under the authority of the Good Shepherd, Christ himself. So if a pastor is going to learn how to lead well, he or she ought to follow the example of the Lord.

That's the premise of Shepherding Like Jesus, a book that is part leadership text, part expositional commentary by Amarillo pastor Andrew Hébert. Using the Beatitudes as his outline, Hébert explains the different traits a pastor must have to be successful. By his own admission, this is not a book about the practicalities of ministry, but about the spiritual requirements for the role, all of which essentially boil down to humility and obedience.

While the book was fine, I was frustrated by what I saw as Hébert's fundamental misunderstanding, albeit a common one, of the Beatitudes. In his telling, Jesus is giving a list of characteristics every disciple should have, a resume for the Christian. But long ago, Dallas Willard convinced me that what Jesus is actually doing is giving a list of the kinds of people whom the world has let down—the poor in spirit, those who hunger for justice, those who mourn, etc.—and telling them that, because Jesus has come, they can now be called blessed. According to Willard’s interpretation, the Beatitudes are not about telling you how to behave, but are an announcement that grace has arrived in Christ, that there is good news for people used to nothing but bad news.

Because Hébert reads the text more like commandments, it makes him stretch and over-spiritualize in certain chapters—for example, when he gets to "blessed are those who mourn," his chapter is about how pastors ought to grieve the sinfulness of the world. Not a bad principle, but one that, in my opinion, is built on a faulty exegetical foundation. The misunderstanding of the book's central text made for a constant distraction in my reading of Shepherding Like Jesus—the chapters' content is fine, but it's built on sand. I appreciate what Hébert was getting at with his core message that pastors ought to look to Jesus as their example, but I couldn't get past the questionable exegesis.

RENEGADES: BORN IN THE U.S.A. by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen

Following the November presidential election, I was looking for a different take on America than the one we'd been living for the last few weeks/months/years. So I turned to this coffee table book by two of liberal America's favorite men, one a former president and the other a rock star.

In 2021, Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen recorded a series of conversations about their biographies and what it means to be American, conversations that became a hit podcast. Renegades: Born in the U.S.A. is essentially the transcript of those podcast episodes alongside a bunch of cool photos, ticket stubs, speeches, and more.

The conversations are warm, intimate, and wide-ranging, the kind of chats you'd expect from two thoughtful friends. They talk about fatherhood, race, masculinity, money, fame, marriage...just a sample of the things that have made them such fascinating figures in their careers. Drawing on their own experiences as well as their observations, the chats call to mind the kinds of talks you might have on a back porch or around a campfire.

This is a hopeful book for those who share the two men's convictions about the country, and might even be interesting for those who don't (for what it's worth, policy proposals aren't this book's project.) For me, at least, it was good medicine after a campaign season that left me feeling sick.

THE PRINCE OF TIDES by Pat Conroy

As a reader, there is nothing I love more than getting sucked into a novel. It doesn't happen often—I'm a fairly critical reader, so I unintentionally find myself reading from a remove, safely keeping my distance. But every now and then, I stumble upon a book like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or The Goldfinch, sweeping sagas that awaken my imagination and make me like a kid again saying, "maybe just 10 more pages before bed."

The Prince of Tides was one of those books.

The novel tells the story of Tom Wingo and his dysfunctional South Carolina family. When Tom, a football coach, learns that his mentally disturbed sister Savannah has attempted suicide in New York City, he goes there to be with her and see how he can help. Before long, he meets her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein, and begins a series of long conversations with her about their family history, seeking to uncover the trauma that is tormenting Savannah.

Through these conversations, we learn all about the abuse suffered at the hands of their father, the strength of their late brother Luke, the fierceness and fragility of their mother, and all the beauties and horrors they experienced growing up. The book ranges from the gritty—the descriptions of abuse are riveting and stomach churning, as is one horrific scene I won't describe here— to the fantastical (for example, the family owned a pet Bengal tiger.) Its plot is all over the place—some chapters are romance stories, some are adventure tales, still others are pure family drama.

What is consistent is the writing of Pat Conroy, an acquired taste but one I've come to love. It is not without its flaws, I'll give you that. His dialogue is undeniably corny, always too clever by half. His prose borders on purple (and sometimes more than crosses that threshold.) Especially in the early pages, when I was getting used to it, the writing bordered on distracting. But the deeper in I got, the more I came to love Conroy's use of language, the unabashed romance of his writing.

The Prince of Tides is not a cool book; it's way too overwrought for that. But I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, it's a good book. And by the time I got to the end of its 679 pages, I was sad to see it go.

THE GIRAFFE AND THE PELLY AND ME by Roald Dahl

THE TWITS by Roald Dahl
THE MAGIC FINGER by Roald Dahl

Me and the kids' bedtime journey through the works of Roald Dahl continued this month with some of his shorter, lesser-known books. First up, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me told the off-the-wall story of a window cleaning service staffed by a giraffe, a pelican, and a monkey, who wind up doing a duke a favor and thereby earning the protagonist, a young boy, his own sweet shop. Next was The Twits, the tale of a truly horrid married couple who, after years of making each other miserable with mean-spirited pranks, meet their demise thanks to the birds and monkeys living in their backyard. Finally, The Magic Finger is a preachy but delightful story about a girl who magically turns her neighbors, rabid hunters, into ducks in order to teach them a lesson about animal rights.

None of these slim books (each was closer to 50 pages than 100) are in the league of James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but they're serviceable, imaginative little tales, enhanced by Quentin Blake's artwork. The Magic Finger in particular was a favorite for my kids, who laughed uproariously when the hunters-turned-ducks had to build a nest to sleep in overnight. None of these books are going to change your life, but they'll make you smile!

ESSENTIAL X-MEN VOL. 6 by Chris Claremont, John Romita, Jr., Louise Simonson, et al.

Ok, at this point we're in deep. By 1986, the Uncanny X-Men had been around for ten years, ever since Len Wein and Dave Cockrum introduced the "all-new, all-different" team of Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Banshee, Sunfire, and Thunderbird to rescue the original team of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman, and Angel. The relaunched book had reached its critical zenith with the Chris Claremont-John Byrne run, which included the epic "The Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past" stories. And now the book was a runaway freight train of commercial success, Marvel's top book by a mile.

This led to spinoff books like New Mutants and X-Factor. It led to miniseries like Wolverine, Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, Beauty and the Beast, and Longshot. And it led to what would become a recurring problem for the X-Men—crossover events that demanded you buy other books to know what was going on in yours.

In this volume, that trend begins with X-Men #200, "The Trial of Magneto," where the once-villainous master of magnetism, now reformed, is tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity, somehow found innocent, and at the end takes over as headmaster of Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. That feels like the kind of thing that should be a seismic event for the X-Men, but it seems to have little effect on the main team (where Magneto almost never appears); only in the New Mutants is it really an issue. Weird.

What does matter to every team is the Mutant Massacre, a crossover storyline in which the Morlocks, a group of outcast mutants living in the sewers of New York, are brutally murdered by a group of mutant hunters called the Marauders. The story is shocking for its savagery; up to this point we were still in the more naïve, kid-friendly, "Wolverine never stabs people on camera" era. While never graphic, the story isn't ambiguous either; this is the beginning of a darker time in X-Men lore, when mutant persecution is not only hateful, but violent.

As for the creative team, this remains largely a Chris Claremont-John Romita Jr. joint. Claremont is as wordy and soap operatic as ever, and Romita is really coming into his own by this time, starting to develop a style different from his famous father's (Romita Sr. was the artist on Amazing Spider-Man in the late 1960s.) Those big names, as much as anything, kept Uncanny X-Men in the spotlight during this period.

As you may have gathered, Essential X-Men Vol. 6 is pretty much more of the same readers had come to expect from the previous 50 or so issues: lots of character, lots of plot, lots of words. I'm not sure I fully understand why it tapped into the zeitgeist the way it undeniably did, but it's fun comics.