Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas, 2007.

Borg and Crossan’s book is a careful look at the birth and infancy narratives in Matthew’s gospel and in Luke’s gospel. They do an exemplary job of looking at the particular concerns of the two communities—comparing and contrasting the differences between the two stories. The close reading is not particularly remarkable—it is eminently “doable” by people who have experience, but it’s done remarkably well. What is innovative is the argument the authors advance that the birth and infancy narratives offer the “gospel in miniature”: that these sections present the overall themes and concerns of Matthew and Luke, and that the content of the remainder of the gospels is contained in the almost-prologue-esque nature of the Christmas stories.

In some ways, it’s the last chapter which is most effective. Borg and Crossan tie together three themes that they look at throughout the book—joy, Advent, and “the meaning of Christmas past for Christmas present and Christmas future” (227). It’s an effective piece, and one I may well find myself rereading at the beginning of November next year as I get ready to preach in Advent and Christmas.

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, 2008.

I loved The Tipping Point. I think it’s a brilliant book, and I learned a lot from it. I’m a little astonished I didn’t blog about it at the time! It was likely because I was in the middle of thesis-ing.

Outliers is told in a very similar way: anecdotes and carefully presented data make sense of truths that are hard to see through the clouds. Gladwell’s lucid prose and brilliant storytelling make it an enjoyable read. My only problem with the book is that there’s nothing to it. Oh, sure, Gladwell convincingly proves his thesis that the success of people are not due to sheer dint of hard work (the old self-made man story crap), but rather that that they’re products of environment, milieu, history, genetics, and deep cultural traditions. He convinced me that it's better to see these successes more as outliers from the statistical mass, than it is is to see them within the usual narratives.

But… so? Yes, it’s a myth that needed to be punctured, but it’s hardly a shock. Gladwell offers no tools to assess situations and histories to determine patterns to make one’s self a success, nor does he offer tools to create effective communities like that of Roseto, PA (a very healthy town that he uses to begin his book). To return to the language of the book's title, there's no attempt to ask major questions about how we can shift the mean toward significant measures of wellness. The trends he thinks about are visible in his rear-view mirror, but never through the windscreen.

Ultimately, I was left disappointed. Gladwell’s book is brilliant at giving the answers to the “what” questions, but never gets to the “so what” questions in any adequate ways.

David Gilmour, The Film Club, 2007.

Gilmour’s memoir spans just a short period of time, from when he realises that school is killing his son until the end of their unusual experiment. His son Jesse—a bright, capable, and quite pleasant teenager when the story begins—is unmotivated and uninterested in school. David can sense that forcing Jesse to stay in school will lead only to badness. So father makes son a deal: Jesse can drop out, if we watches three movies a week with his dad.

It’s a fascinating premise. It just failed to hold my interest for the duration of the book. I enjoyed Gilmour recounting how he introduced each movie, how he designed groups of movies, what to watch for in each flick. The story of Jesse’s growth and development is more interesting and enjoyable still. Yet as I read it, I never felt the book come together: it lacked sufficient coherence, and felt as if it was held together only by straight chronology. I enjoyed reading it, and had no problem moving through it… but I just never found myself engrossed.

Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue, 1994.

I found myself needing something that was simultaneously funny, light and profound. This desire, odd and paradoxical, is a hard one to fulfil--except, of course, until you start reading Christopher Moore’s books. (If you’ve never read Lamb, you should go find a copy now: it is beyond incredibly brilliant.)

Coyote Blue is a romp through native American mythology, a playing-story with Coyote that’s delightful and very funny. It’s not as nuanced, as slyly playful as are Tom King’s novels (especially Green Grass, Running Water) but its sheer exuberance is undeniable. (For a brilliant academic treatment of the Trickster, read one of my favourite books: Trickster Makes the World by Lewis Hyde.)

The story revolves around Samson Hunts Alone, who is forced to leave his reservation when still a young man. After a series of jobs, he’s secured for himself a seemingly great existence as an insurance salesman. Yet the intervention of Coyote brings both love and chaos into his orderly, predictable existence… and things go crazy from there.

It was exactly the sort of book I was looking for: it is the right mix of crazy, zany, and at the same time deeply thoughtful about what it means to live well.

Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark, 2001.

A pleasant, ephemeral, un-mysterious mystery that was oh so much better than the two Twilight novels I read (and about which, because of their sheer disturbing trashiness, misogyny, and general annoying-ness, I refuse to blog). Dead Until Dark is the first story about Sookie Stackhouse--and the basis for a new HBO series, called True Blood. It`s light and fluffy, and replete with vampires and other otherwordly creatures. Don`t expect much, but enjoy the pleasant pulp that relaxes your brain, right after a Christmas that was very, very full of services.

John Green, An Abundance of Katherines, 2006.

My second John Green read, An Abundance of Katherines is a delightful romp. Immediately post break-up, Colin Singleton heads out on a road trip with his best friend, the very funny Hassan. Stopping in the amusingly named Gutshot, TN, the two luck into jobs and housing. Hassan immediately begins to make friends and fit in, while Colin mopes about his most recent girlfriend. Colin--a child prodigy who deeply wants to do something that matters--sets out to develop a formula which will predict which of two people in a relationship will be the dumper, and which the dumpee. He has a fair bit of data to make sense of, having had nineteen relationships with women all named Katherine.

Colin also has a lot of useless information at his fingertips, which may perhaps be why I identified with the lad. I experienced as much joy reading the footnotes--which play with or explain some of the details Colin shares--as I did reading the story! He's also a brilliant at anagrams, a skill in which I am profoundly lacking--to my detriment whenever I'm bored and there are only cryptics lying about.

At any rate, it's a funny, funny book and is touchingly sweet. My impression of Green as a solid and impressive YA author is soaring, and I should really introduce my mother to Green's work. I also need to get my hands on a copy of Paper Towns, to give it a read.

John Green, Looking for Alaska, 2005.

So. Because I like Jonathan Coulton, I discovered Molly’s ukulele playing on YouTube (her screen name is sweetafton23). So I subscribed to Molly, and a little while ago, watched her video of playing a nerdfighter’s show at the Seattle Public Library. This video, in turn, allowed me to discover the charming John & Hank Green and their Brotherhood 2.0 project. (It also helped me to discover the marvellous song stylings of Ms. Julia Nunes, whose music is stuck in my head of late.) Having discovered John & Hank, I thought I’d give John’s writing a try.

I read Looking for Alaska first, which is a well wrought novel. It’s the story of a young man named Miles Halter, who goes off to boarding school seeking the “Great Perhaps” and who makes friends with other amiable eccentricities (Miles' own eccentricity is a remarkable knowledge of people’s last words). It’s very clearly a bildungsroman, with some of the shortcomings of that particular literary genre—specifically, a fair bit of exposition by a religious knowledge teacher at the school which introduces some concepts of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam (perhaps hardly surprising given Green’s double major in English and Religion). While these expository bits drag a bit, it’s less notable than similar chunks in most bildungsromans that I’ve read. They’re well integrated with the plot, and do add to it, but they’re a big part of why I see this novel as more of a YA title than something more literary. The plot itself revolves around a tragedy at the school: the book’s two sections are entitled “Before” and “After.”

I’m glad I picked it up and read it. It’s clever, funny, and eminently enjoyable—and I can see why it appeals strongly, both to the nerdfighter community and beyond.

A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, 2004.

The Know-It All is not as good as The Year of Living Biblically. There’s no bias in my reasoning, that I can identify: they’re both eminently enjoyable books, filled with musings about what it is to live. Jacobs’ more recent book, though, has a stronger narrative, a clearer through-line that gives shape to his experience in a way that the A-Z nature of this earlier book lacks.

I bought The Know-It All after L. gave me—and I so enjoyed--The Year of Living Biblically as a present. Jacobs spends a year reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica. More than anything -else, I was struck by how much I am occasionally like Jacobs: enjoying the sharing of obscure, only vaguely relevant bits of trivia and arcana. It can be compulsive.

While it was a meaningful experience for Jacobs, his summary of what he learned takes only a couple of paragraphs. Throughout, he shares interesting experiencing, tidbits of knowledge, and how he makes sense of the experience. Yet while having knowledge helps one in many ways (I’ve always wanted to know everything), I was bemused by the framing of the book, that of a quest to become smarter. It seems too trite, too simplistic a frame: this problem may well explain why I found The Year of Living Biblically to be that much more powerful a quest for meaning than The Know It-All.

It’s an enjoyable book, and worth a read. You’ll pick up all sorts of interesting and completely useless bits of knowledge: Nathaniel Hawthorne was obsessed with the number 64; women in Peru wear yellow underwear on New Year’s; that the name of eggplant “comes from the white egg-shaped variety” (which may explain to my sister why the Brits insist on calling the eggplant that we know an “aubergine”); that “Etruscans sometimes wrote boustrophedon style, in which the direction of writing alternates with each line—right-to-left, then left-to-right”; that Mormons were the first settlers in Las Vegas... I expect you’ll get a bit better at Trivial Pursuit, reading it—though better still if you repeat Jacobs’ experiment!

Shalom Auslander, Foreskin’s Lament, 2007.

Reading this blog, you’d be forgiven this week if you think I pick what book to read next based on my compulsive listening to NPR’s This American Life. I first heard Auslander on an episode about the ten commandments. He described a period of his life when the rabbinical instructors at his Hebrew school yelled at him if he dared write his name on anything—from an atlas to a lunch bag: “Name of the Creator!” It’s a story both moving and sad; his voice, which sounds vaguely reminiscent of Eeyore, makes it impossible not to feel deep empathy for the mistreatment Shalom endured—and yet he tells the stories in a way that is funny, and wry. He happened to be on an episode of Tapestry the other weekend, so I placed a hold on his new book. I raced through it.

Foreskin’s Lament is a memoir about his relationship with God. He writes that his relationship with God “has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated ‘faith followed by doubt,’ but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please, followed by fuck it, fuck You, fuck off” (71). It was hearing that idea on Tapestry that made me want to read the book. Let me quote Auslander again, and try to explain what it is that I mean:

I do not keep Sabbath or pray three times a day or wait six hours between eating meat and milk. The people who raised me will say that I am not religious. They are mistaken. What I am not is observant. But I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumb-founded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each one more hateful and bloodthirsty than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose him. I’m failing miserably.
I believe in God.
It’s been a real problem for me. (71-72)

There are two things here which intrigue me. The first is that Auslander is not of the Sam Harris / Richard Dawkins school, suggesting that what’s wrong with the world is religion. He’s not convinced that religion won’t lead to the sort of abuse that he experienced, that Harris and Dawkins claim is normative and rail against. Rather, Auslander is quite clear: what’s wrong is how faith has been lived out. Maybe there’s a better way to live it, though likely not. So how do you survive with it? Secondly, there’s an intriguing notion, better described elsewhere when his wife Orli offers a felicitous description of an infelicitous upbringing: Auslander was theologically abused, by parents, teachers, and his societal group as a whole. Without suggesting any sort of equivalence, this latter idea made me wonder about people who have been brought up within a faith tradition and have fled it. Do they do so only because they perceive no relevancy, no connection? Or is there something else, some trauma or injustice, something which has driven them away? And in this latter case, what is the appropriate response of the faith community? Saying “It wasn’t us” or “That’s not who we are now” isn’t any more satisfying than saying “We’re sorry you went through that” to the injured. What is the justice making response, if any?

Reading Auslander, I’m left with more questions than answers. I don’t have a response to his writing that feels in any way adequate. I am genuinely sorry that he has such a tortured relationship with God, and that he had such an upbringing that has left him in this state. He’s very clear in his writing that what he experienced is not Judaism; and yet he’s far from sure that any faith--even one that turns again and again to the Shema--can escape such perversions. I was amused and engaged as I read his book; I felt drawn in, and present to his stories.

Ultimately, I’m left with something he said in the Tapestry interview. Tragedy, he argued, is the human response to the events of our lives: abject dejection, a sense that no good is entirely possible, that we’re too trapped by fate. Humour, in contrast, is God’s perspective: the way of looking back over events and seeing that there’s more than pain and suffering. It’s an interesting way of thinking about the two modes, and as Auslander plays with this idea, he privileges comedy in a way I’ve not encountered before.

It’s a book well worth a read; I hope it will leave you with more questions than answers, just as it left me.

Dan Savage, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, 2005.

I first encountered Savage when I read, at the urging of a former co-worker, a couple of Savage’s advice columns: Savage Love. While far more entertaining than most such columns, I wasn’t hugely excited. Then I heard him on one of my addictions: the NPR show This American Life. Surely, if Ira Glass likes the guy’s writing... I was hooked. Even Savage’s voice works well, drawing you into his stories.

It was one of those stories which inspired me to get this book out from HPL. Savage was talking about his son’s opposition to Savage marrying his boyfriend Terry, and I found myself in tears by the end of that act of TAL (which you can listen to here). When I learnt that there was an entire book devoted to the musings, I placed a hold.

It is a book that is by turns touching, vitriolic, foul-mouthed, pensive, inquisitive; it is an incisive commentary on the state of the United States, with some travelogue-esque sections that made me remember de Tocqueville. At its heart, though, it’s a book about what family is and means. Savage’s own large family, whose various members have adopted diverse varieties of familial models, provides much fodder for Savage attempting to make sense of one question: should he and Terry get married? I didn’t cry again, reading it, but I found myself feeling a number of moments quite intensely. One such moment, well worth years of future consideration, is about our relationships in neighbourhoods: how they’re constructed, how we attempt to escape them, how we re-create them in later life. One large Catholic family, rooted in one area of a city for a number of generations offers a treasure trove for thinking about individuals, families, and communities.

So, it's a book I'm glad that TAL pointed me toward. I promise to let it pick my books for me even more frequently.