Hi friends!
Happy May — spring is all green grass and rhododendrons and cool breezes here in my neck of the woods, and it is bringing me a lot of joy.
I don’t know if you can tell, but I abide eternally by the manta of “vibes reading.” My process to pick my next book is simple and intuitive, which is a nice way of saying chaotic. This month was no different: a mish mash of fantasy and lit-fic (classic). But I have been spending time with books that are a little toothier and take up more mental space and energy. I’m working my way slowly through some non-fiction; mostly theology and some political theory/philosophy. I’ve been feeling pressure to read fast to have things to write about here, but I’m trying to actively resist that and be gentle with myself in the process.
Anyways — I hope your spring is being as gentle to you as mine is being to me.
The Postcard by Anne Berest, Tina Kover (Translator)
Hear me out: when I picked this up, I knew that it was about the Holocaust, but I didn’t know it was About The Holocaust. I understand that that is an insane sentence, but I was completely emotionally unprepared for how equally moving and upsetting this book would be. I was horrified, and yet I couldn’t stop reading this gorgeous, awful, beautiful, spare, terrible1, unrelenting, magnificent book. Growing up (at least for me) the Holocaust is something you just kind of always know about, and you know it was sad, and you get the sense that you’re supposed to still recognize how sad it is, but it lives in the background of everything else, and you don’t really feel how immensely and profoundly devastating and evil it was/is. And I could not stop feeling as I read this. In some ways it was awful, as it always is to feel grieved by the immensity of death and how humans destroy one another. In some ways it felt right to read it during Lent, a season that I hold close to my heart for the ways it opens me to the reality and universality of suffering, and to let myself be held under the roiling surf of one family’s experience of unutterably loss. It’s not right to say that I loved it, for all the reasons outlined above, but I certainly loved how it moved me as the reader; I couldn’t put it down. I will certainly be on the hunt for a used copy so I can re-read it, or give it away at will.
5/5 ⭐
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue
You know how sometimes you read a book, and it’s clear that the author loves the characters they’re writing, even though they’re complex or unlikeable? That’s how this book was. It’s clear that even though the titular Rachel is a mess — petty, self-centered, juvenile, self-flagellating, and self-aggrandizing, but also wily, funny, and charming, you get the feeling that O’Donoghue loves her. And despite the fact that every character makes ethically questionable or downright contemptible decisions at several points throughout the book, O’Donoghue doesn’t condemn them to pithy moralization by categorizing them as good or bad. But crucially, she doesn’t let them off the hook, either. What emerges is a deeply funny and tender portrait of how the friendships we develop in early adulthood shape us, and how becoming an adult entails both owning the consequences of our actions, for good and bad, and letting ourselves be forgiven for them by the people that love us. This book is so tender and made me tear up at several moments as I thought of my own early 20s and my dear friends during that season of life. Read if you need a good dose of youthful yearning and/or to be reminded of what it’s like to lack a fully-developed prefrontal cortex.
4/5 ⭐
God Didn’t Make Us To Hate Us by Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail
I am so freaking glad I am on this Earth at the same time as Rev. Lizzie, my word. I have been following Fr. Lizzie on Instagram for several years, and am a devoted listener to the podcast she hosts with Rev. Laura Di Panfilo, And Also With You. I am not usually a devotional gal2, but when I saw Father Lizzie was publishing a book, I hit that preorder button so fast. Laura and Lizzie consistently preach a thoughtful, convicting, gorgeous, Jesus-centric Gospel on the podcast, and not only did I want to support Lizzie, I also knew I would learn something. And whew, girl, did I. This book is creative and warm and committed to clearly communicating the gospel truth that God is a liberating and loving God. This book is made up of 40 short chapters, each of which lovingly interrupt the toxic, shallow theology that has colonized so much of the discourse about and within Christianity in the United States. My intention was to read a chapter a day during Lent, but I ended up breezing through the whole thing far before Lent was over. I love that the theology was simple but not simplistic; accessible but not shallow. Even though I deconstructed long ago, and came out on the other side (mostly) intact, this book shook loose some things that I needed to let go of, and the Holy Spirit sure did Her darnedest. I cried multiple times. Fr. Lizzie is a gift. If you’re interested in reading more from Rev. Lizzie, she also has a lovely Substack. You can find her at: A Liberated Life: Musings from Rev. Lizzie.
5/5 ⭐
The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson
This had all the trappings of what I love about historical fantasy/fiction: a time period I know very little about (Moorish Iberia/Al-Andalus during the fall of Granada), a fantastical hook (one of the characters can draw magical maps to places that don’t exist), and friendship at the center of the story. And the first half really hooked me! But unfortunately, the second half was undercut by a flat and reductionist philosophy of human nature3, and a strangely breathless pace. The book essentially amounted to one giant chase scene, with a trite moral at the end that I won’t spoil, but which made me roll my eyes pretty hard. There were some bright spots: Fatima and Hassan’s friendship, as well as the relationship between Fatima and Gwennec4. Additionally, Fatima makes a remarkable and powerful moral center for the novel, which I enjoyed. I loved that she was entirely herself throughout the whole novel, and never made a decision that felt outside of her characterization. But at times, the prose felt didactic and heavy-handed, which I am always against in a piece of art.5 And yet, it wasn’t exactly clear what I was supposed to be taking away from the novel. To me, this is what separates an okay or good book from a great one: in a great story the author never tells me explicitly what I am supposed to be thinking about or taking away from the text as the reader, and yet I am irrevocably shaped by the experience of reading it. The Bird King was just an okay read, for this reason. Overall it was decently enjoyable, despite some of the major hang-ups I had.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
A beautiful, spare, atmospheric book. Less like a novel and more like a series of vignettes, this book follows the life of Father Jean Marie Latour, as he serves as the Apostolic Vicar of the New Mexico Territories under its transition from Mexican to American rule. It follows Father Latour’s quiet faithfulness with lucid, unhurried prose. It feels rare to encounter the kinds of stories about faith and community that reflect my own experiences: one that takes seriously both the joys and the sorrows of modeling one’s life after Christ’s. For this reason alone, I found it profoundly moving. However, there is much to be enjoyed about it even if you’re not a person of faith, particularly Cather’s descriptions of the American Southwest, and her keen, empathetic descriptions of the peoples that lived there. I don’t think it’s the kind of book that would get published today; it’s too slow, too restrained, too hushed. Which, to me, is all the more reason for it to be cherished.
4/5 ⭐
Things I read and loved that Aren’t Books
“The Good Life Cannot Be Optimized” by Mark Casper for Ekstasis
Refuse to optimize and read a novel.
…several years ago I started noticing an interesting trend. In conversation after conversation with friends and coworkers, I heard the same line: “I can’t remember the last time I read any fiction.”
This statement bewildered me to no end. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Eventually, it dawned on me: In a self-improvement culture, there is no room for art. There is only room for things which have an explicit, utilitarian purpose. Literature, art, poetry, films—these have no practical value in and of themselves. So why read a novel when you can learn ten principles from a self-help book?
“My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’” by Molly Young for The New York Times Magazine
I love everything Molly writes, and this is no exception.
If Americans are exceptional in our approach to happiness, it may have to do with an insistence on treating the matter as a glittering mystery, a thing requiring pilgrimage or a course at Harvard or Yale (both schools have offered happiness classes) to understand. It’s a quandary we’re tasked with solving — as with many quandaries in this country, like taxes and health insurance and self-defense — on our own. In a land of maximal freedom, where the coffee cups are huge, we can just as easily imagine ourselves becoming billionaires or dying on a street corner. The span of the ladder is as wide as our imaginations allow.
“who gets to do the right thing” by Clara from Hmm That’s Interesting
An excellent analysis of an excellent novella. If there is any time to learn about how to have a moral backbone in the face of state and/or religious secrets and the institutional pressure to keep them, that time is now.
We are so often presented with a rosy view of morality—the idea that doing the right thing may be hard, yes, but in a sort of intangible way. Something vague about bravery and swimming against the current. There’s less said about the specifics, the ones that are felt, sharply: the jobs lost, the relationships sacrificed, the marginalization, the resentment from loved ones. That’s why, of course, the collective is necessary—hard things are less so when they’re done together.
This month’s Just Trust Me.
And Just Trust Me Again.
Love you, mean it!
I mean this not in the “this is a bad book” way, and more in the sense that is conveyed by the Latin terribilis, which connotes the feeling of being “fill[ed] with awe or dread” or something that is “unendurable.”
This was thoroughly worked out of me in my time in the evangelical church
I read this on Kindle so I didn’t see the cover as I was reading it. This frustration made sense once I realized that Lev Grossman wrote the cover blurb, because this is the same frustration I had with his book The Bright Sword! *sigh*
Although, I don’t know why we can’t just let monks/priests be celibate in popular culture?? When someone who has taken a vow of celibacy breaks that vow in a movie or novel, it always feels like a ‘gotcha’ moment that is more intent on showcasing some kind of religious hypocrisy than furthering any kind of character development. This is a pet annoyance of mine.
I don’t think this is a uniquely contemporary problem, but it does seem to me that it doesn’t bother contemporary readers as much as it might have bothered people from other time periods, which is worrisome. If the purpose of reading is to be shaped into more moral people (which I argue is the telos of reading as a practice), didacticism in art only has two outcomes: it alienates the reader who disagrees with you, or it affirms the previously held beliefs of the reader who agrees with you. Which only serves to re-entrench the beliefs the reader held before they picked up the book, in which case, why write it at all?? There is a whole glut of contemporary authors (including several wildly popular ones) that fall into this camp, and I have a bone to pick with all of them.
Thank you so much for this really heartfelt and kind review!! Your words mean a lot to me and I am so glad to know this book was a blessing :)
I ALWAYS LOOK FORWARD TO THESE.