Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

by

Wise Blood by Flannery O'ConnorSummary: A 22 year old veteran,comes to the city since his only remaining relative (his mother) died and the country home is falling apart.

One of my reading projects for the year is to read all of O’Connor’s fiction. I have read A Good Man is Hard to Find several years ago. But I knew I wasn’t really getting all of the meaning of the short stories. One of the reasons I want to read O’Connor is because I am looking for books that require a bit of struggle. Not because difficult books are ‘better’ because they are difficult. But because books that require something of the reader use different intellectual muscles than those that are laid out more clearly. I tend to read a lot of non-fiction. Books that while they may be academically difficult, are not intended to have layered shades of meaning. Fiction and poetry does often have layers and I am trying to work on some of those intellectual muscles.

Last year I picked up the short biography, The Terrible Speed of Mercy and I am currently reading A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Previously I also read O’Connor’s graduate school Prayer Journal.

A Subversive Gospel is one of those books that I want to read more of, an interpretive guide. It is not a biography, although it has biographical details, it is about O’Connor’s writing, theology and philosophy. (It is also a reworked dissertation.) A Subversive Gospel has been very helpful at understanding O’Connor and their vision of writing so that I can understand the books later. But I was nearly 75% of the way through A Subversive Gospel and I have not read one of the novels, so I quickly listened to Wise Blood, not so much for the story, but to get a sense of what her novels felt like before I finished A Subversive Gospel.

One of O’Connor’s most quoted phrases about her writing is, “œ”¦to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” This is very similar to what James KA Smith says he is doing in his attempts at being an alien anthropologist that is exploring the mall and the ball park to understand what cultural liturgies are driving those spaces.

“œ”¦my goal is to try to make strange what is so familiar to us precisely in order to help us see what is at stake in formative practices that are part of the mall experience.(p23 of Desiring the Kingdom)

Wise Blood is not a standard country boy comes to the big city story with standard middle of the 20th century characters. First of all, I listened to the audiobook, but it was one I did not leave running when litter ears were around like I often do. This is full of crude ugly language, swearing and derogatory comments. But lots of books that are not classics have bad language. (And there is a real beauty to the language even when it is crude.)

Read more

The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor (Binti #3)

by

Summary: Binti returned home to try to find stability; she found more confusion, realizing that the home she thought she understood was not what she understood. And now she also brought war to her home.

Part of what is important about alien stories is that they are alien. Part of what is important about reading an African author writing alien stories is that she points out that sometimes those of different human cultures are actually just as alien as the actual aliens. And sometimes those from our own culture or family are less close than those aliens that are adopted into our family.

The Night Masquerade is the third part of what is really a single-long novel. I assume that these will be packaged together in a single volume at some point. Together, they are less than 500 pages. There are three distinct parts here, but the story is a single story.

In part one, Binti secretly leaves her traditional African village home to enter an alien university against her family’s wishes. During the space travel, everyone on board except for her is massacred as part of a long feud. As a harmonizer, Binti helps solve the immediate problem and bring about a peace, but at great personal cost to herself.

Read more

Boy of Dreams by Nathan Van Hoff (Kingdoms of Broken Stone #1)

by

Boy of Dreams by Nathan Van Hoff (Kingdoms of Broken Stone #1)Summary: Boy of Dreams is start of an epic fantasy series.

I grew up reading fantasy. Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin, Anne McCaffey, Piers Anthony, Raymond Feist, Tolkien and CS Lewis were part of my continual diet of reading. I re-read a number of books of my childhood about six or seven years ago, but I have not read a lot of fantasy lately.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Fantasy as a genre is a bit of a muddle. On the one hand there are those that want to turn the genre on its head, but mostly end up relying on earlier authors for jumping off points. Philip Pullman and Lev Grossman are examples of this style. Both are talented authors, but they are more about deconstruction than construction and there is a limit to my interested in deconstructed fantasy. Others like George RR Martin stay fairly close to the common ideas but push the lines on violence or sex or other cultural mores.

Traditionally, part of what I think attracts young readers to fantasy is the clear lines of good versus evil and the common theme of the young unknown having a secret power or being of noble lineage. Both I think are good themes to encourage teens to read. The pushing of boundaries is in part tearing down that traditional good vs. evil line and making everything be much more focused on the shades of gray. (V.E Schwab plays with this in each of the titles of his fantasy trilogy.)

Boy of Dreams is a first novel and a traditional epic fantasy. Whether intentional or not, there are hints of ideas from older epic fantasy. Being a first novel, and self published, there are some points where I think some editing or more experience writing would have told the story a bit differently. But I was engaged through most of the book. (I was less engaged at the start as the story was set up. After the main plot started to unfold, I read the rest of the book straight through.)

Warrenfin is a young teen, a new apprentice mage, and the main character. He is taught by the youngest full wizard, Tryphena. Magic has begun to be forgotten after many wizards turned evil and many on both sides died in the ensuing civil war. Tryphena has spent a long time (years, maybe decades) looking for a boy of prophesy that see the future in his dreams. She believes Warrenfin to be that boy, the wizard council does not. So she proceeds to start his instruction on her own, against the wishes of the council. At the same time, she has instructions from the council to investigate a war that seems to be breaking out, and which may be influenced by dark magic.

Read more

Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey

by

Raising White Kids: Brining Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer HarveySummary: A practical, example filled discussion of how to parent White children in a racially unjust America.

My children are young, 2 and 4. I am not particularly young (middle 40s). Both my wife and I have spent most of our careers working in or around education with predominately minority students. We want our own White children to both have the advantages of relating well to many different types of children and to appropriately be advocates for racial justice issues. So I eagerly accepted a review copy of Raising White kids.

In a mid point of Raising White Kids I think the author hits dead-on the real fear a lot of parents have.

“Nerves are normal. So many examples I have shared in Raising White Kids Include Moments of profound discomfort. Urging parents to face head on and precisely create more opportunities to teach our kids about racism means inviting them to accept the inevitability of discomfort. Discomfort may come from worrying about what other adults think, as we swim against a color-blind tide. It may come from worrying out attempts risk getting it so wrong we may screw up our kids in the process! It may come when our children ask questions we can’t quite answer or say things that push us out of our comfort zone. But a bird’s-eye, big-picture view of the positive effects and powerfully healthy outcomes of supporting our kids and being truthful can help us persist.” (page 130)

Much of the advice of Raising White Kids is very practical based on lots of examples good discussion. But at root, this is a book that says that unless adults directly confront their own racial issues and attempt to overcome them, then we cannot expect our children to come to a different place in life. Simple exposure to diversity, which is hard enough, isn’t enough to insure that White kids will not absorb the cultural beliefs that White is either better or normal. (At one point she describes common racial beliefs life smog that you just can’t completely get away from.)

I think the most important chapter for me, one that I have not seen much about in other places (or just hasn’t really sunk in if I have read about it previously) was her chapter Diversity is Confusing. The basic theme of the chapter is that White kids in diverse setting, with at least some racial intelligence, know there is something problematic about being White. Harvey cites a study about a diverse high school where there were thousands of hours of interviews with students. Non-White student would clearly identify how they understood themselves racially. But White students would joke about it, or refuse to answer, or equivocate in some way. It is this point that I think is most important about the book. It is not just that we need to give our kids racial intelligence so that they do not offend or oppresses other children, although that is important. We also need to help them create a self understanding as what it means to be White.

Read more

Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York by Francis Spufford

by

Summary: When New York City was young, a mysterious stranger comes to town with money.

Francis Spufford is an author that authors that I love, love. Alan Jacobs yet again yesterday expressed his admiration for Spufford. And this novel in particular has been talked about for a couple of years. (It was published in the UK in 2016 and Jacobs had an advanced copy of it.) Wesley Hill, John Wilson and others I follow on twitter have also lavished praise on it. It was also on a number of best of 2017 lists (NPR, WSJ, Washington Post, Kurkus, Library Journal, etc).

Golden Hill is set in 1746 New York City. A mysterious young man comes to New York with a letter of credit (as would be common at the time so that a traveler would not have to carry a lot of cash) for an extraordinarily large amount of money but a resistance to telling anyone what he was interested in doing with the money. The book follows his story for several months. I won’t really give much more detail about the plot other than that.

It has been several days since I finished Golden Hill because I was not sure how to write a review. The longer I wait the more I like it. Spufford has a way with words. One of the things that is most impressive is that the book, especially the letters within the book, are written to mimic the 18th century, but it is still quite readable for a modern reader.

Read more

Birmingham Revolution: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Epic Challenge to the Church by Edward Gilbreath

by

Summary: King’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail as well as the whole Birmingham campaign still have something to say to the modern church.

I have known about this book since it came out. The author is the brother in law of a friend of mine and we have several other mutual friends, although I have never met him. But like many books on difficult subjects, I found one reason or another to not pick it up.

But after re-reading King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail this past MLK day, I decided it was time to stop delaying. And I am glad that I did.

Edward Gilbreath is a journalist, editor at Christianity Today, founding editor of Urban Faith magazine and has worked with Promise Keepers and other Evangelical organizations or magazines. So it is helpful that this is not an abstract history of the Birmingham campaign and exploration of the content of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, but also a personal reflection both as an African American and an Evangelical.

I have found that reading the history of Civil Rights in the US is more effective when told in the first person. Carolyn Maull McKinstry’s memoir of her life during and after the Birmingham campaign would not have had nearly the power if it was just talking about the 16th Street church bombing. It had power because it talked about the bombing of a church and the death of her four friends in a bathroom that she had just walked out of right before the bomb went off and her life as a survivor after that point.

Gilbreath does not insert himself into the narrative, like me he was too young to have lived through it. But he does interview a number of people that did live through it and he reflects not only on how he is inspired or how things have changed (or not changed) since then, but also how he is challenged.

Birmingham Revolution revolves around the Letter From a Birmingham Jail, but it is also a larger history to give context to the letter. King was the author and face of the Birmingham campaign, but he was not the leader. King was reluctant and against the children’s marches. But those children’s marches, along with the publicity that came from news coverage and King’s own national appeal to the church in the Letter From a Birmingham Jail were a real turning point in Civil Rights.

Read more

Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon

by

Summary: Approximately 70 years of slavery from the 1870s to the 1940s have largely been unknown or ignored.

Part of what has been vital for me to recognize as I read history is earlier examples of current problems. There may not be a direct connection with those similar issues, but we need to acknowledge that there may be a connection. For example, one of the issues brought up in this book is local control of school funding. Many small government advocates today advocate local school control, which is not bad. However, local control was used to get around rules for disproportionate funding of White and Black schools during the Jim Crow era and beyond. And today, local control is the root of school funding and quality disparities.

Another example is the different sentencing levels of Whites and Blacks (including a higher likelihood of being arrested and charged, more severe charges when charged, and more severe sentences for the exact charges when sentenced). Then, there is the example of Ferguson, Missouri, using fees, primarily enforced against Black residents, to fund city services to lower tax rates.

It is not that there are direct connections between today and earlier in the three examples above, but when there are similar examples, we should investigate whether the issues that gave rise to those similar examples are really similar.

Slavery By Another Name is primarily about the system of convict leasing. Convict leasing was the practice of leasing convicts to private businesses or individuals as laborers. The local or state government then was relieved of the requirements for housing and feeding convicts, made money from those convicts, and could privately fund much of the salaries of law enforcement and the courts through fees instead of taxes.

Much of the work done by convict leasing was dangerous or excessive work. Records were often poor, but in some cases, there was as much as a 30% annual death rate among convicts. Convicts were purchased for $30 to $75, roughly $1000 today, compared to the approximately $1000 purchase cost of slaves a generation earlier (what would be roughly $30,000 today). There was little interest in moderating the effects of work or punishment because of the low investment cost. Working convicts for 20 hours a day, seven days a week, with low rations and high rates of punishment with lash, waterboarding, or hanging by thumbs was common.

The crimes were often minor: swearing in front of a woman, disrespecting someone, leaving an employer without permission, selling goods at night, etc. It was commonly thought at the time that African Americans would only work with the threat and reality of lash and other beating. (The idea of the lazy Black worker continues today but is a derivative of this earlier era.) The descriptions of beatings throughout the book are one of the most complex parts of reading/listening to the book.

Read more

Kindred the Graphic Novel by Octavia Butler adapted by John Jennings

by

Kindred the Graphic Novel by Octavia Bulter adapted by John JenningsSummary: Graphic adaptation of the best of Octavia Butler’s books.

Over the past couple years I have begun to appreciate the art and promise of the graphic novel. Not as a “˜children’s version’ but as something that can be a true art form to itself. I do not think that John Lewis’ memoir in the March Trilogy would be as good in narrative text. The graphics of the March trilogy were essential to making it so good. But I am not sure that the graphic novel of Kindred is up to that standard.

It is not that Kindred is a bad adaptation or a bad graphic novel. It stayed pretty close to the original in story and I liked the art. But the novel was, in my opinion, the best novel of a very good novelist. Octavia Butler captured not just the horror of slavery for the slave, but the horror of slavery for everyone involved. I think some of the nuance of the novel was (necessarily) lost in the graphic novel adaptation. A graphic novel, even one that is over 200 pages, can’t really tell the same story as a 300 page novel.

Read more

Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

by

Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le GuinSummary: Several long and short stories that serve as background and a bridge between books 4 and 6 of the Earthsea cycle.

I have not read the later books of Earthsea properly. The first three books I read as a teen multiple times. Then five years ago I picked up Wizard of Earthsea, the first in the series. Which lead me to read the sixth book (The Other Wind) of the series. I thought I had read the fourth book (Tehanu), but I have no record of reading it.

So I am all wrong about reading this series. I have picked up the threads of the story and I think I mostly know what is going on. But if I were recommending it, I would tell you to read the series in order and not spread out by 30 years. (Although it was over 30 year spread from the start to the completion of the series.)

There are six stories here and a description of Earthsea. The stories range from 130 to 25 pages. Not unusually, I liked the longer ones more than the shorter ones. The first two and last I think were the best. Throughout the book there was an exploration of why the wizards were only celibate men. A history that shows that the founding of the school at Roke was not by only celibate men. And the final story is about a woman that comes to the school to learn to be a wizard.

Read more