Book Review: If It Bleeds by Stephen King

Here's another Stephen King tetralogy of short stories (OK, long stories), and as he continues to grow as a writer, these are becoming more and more my favorite way to read his work. The first one is creepy and technologically relevant, the second one is weird, messy, and exuberant; the third one is familiar and unsettlingly topical (with a monster who masquerades as a journalist that feeds on fear, which is not exactly what that profession needs right now); and the fourth one is about writing, which somehow is far better as a story than as a novel like King used to write. Each one actually says something. King still likes to gross you out and scare you, but that's never really the point. The point is about how to be human, even what it means to be alive and the mysteries at the edge of ordinary lives. Although there's not one that stands out (maybe the second just because it's so weirdly mixed up?), this might be the best four-story collection he's done.

Book Review: Conversations with Rene Girard: Prophet of Envy

Cynthia Haven has provided the world with the best, most accessible biography of Rene Girard and with this book, the most up-to-date collection of his interviews. Most of the interviews in this collection are more recent than the Girard books most Girardians have read, and so they touch on topics post-9/11 and show Girard applying his thoughts to the 21st century. He has no trouble doing so, and each interview is insightful and challenging. I'm surprised at how little repetition there is relative to most books like this, but I think that's because Girard did his best thinking in dialogue. It's probably best to be familiar with Girard's ideas before starting this, but that's what Haven's biography is for. I'm glad I bought this in physical form because I started scribbling notes and ended up in further conversation with Girard. Few books are provocative enough to require self-annotation but this one is.

Book Review: The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone

I don't actually enjoy much theology. Only about 10% of it has the "snap" that makes it worth it, but when it has that "snap" it's the most important reading in the world. Cone has that "snap." His writing is also elegant and trimmed to make its point and move on. This book shows a parallel that few white people see (although Girard saw it and he is duly cited here). Then it critiques a prominent theologian (Niebuhr), shows how this worked in the lived-out history of another prominent theologian (MLK), found it in the arts, and found it in the words of women. This is not just a crucial piece of theology that needs to be understood, it is an expansive example of how to include all voices and all fields in your argument. The most important book I've read this year.

Book Review: Miracles by Luke Timothy Johnson

This book takes you through the Bible looking at where and when miracles occur. Several points recommend it: It starts with the music (the Psalms) and focuses on the Gospel miracles in detail. I was good to read Johnson in his own words to justify his interpretative strategy of looking away from history and toward the present and future. In Johnson's definition, the miracle of persistence of life in the community is the primary miracle, which is a nice change of perspective. It correlates with Walker Percy's statement about the remarkable persistence of the Jews as one of the two primary miracles he sees today. I wish it came together a bit more at the end but just the action of walking through the texts from Johnson's perspective was very worthwhile and changed the way I look at miracles and prophecy. Miracles are about endurance, faithfulness, and music being embedded deep in creation. They can be quiet and hidden but they are fundamental to life.

Book Review: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

I recognize that this book is well-written and (generally) well-structured. (I would have liked a little more emphasis on the mystery, what we do not know.) It's one of the few books about artistic genius in which the genius itself is convincingly portrayed, well enough for suspension of disbelief. But I didn't enjoy it and was sort of relieved when it was over, so I have to give it two stars on the subjective, sentimental systems Goodreads has set up. Maybe I was jealous of the genius playwright Lotto, or thought that the character of his wife, Matilde, was too focused on hidden layers, the 90% of the iceberg, although that's part of the point of the book. It's nicely ambiguous and decadent and I think there's people into that sort of thing, but to me it felt like a highfalutin' soap opera in which I didn't identify with any of the characters. It's supposed to be about a fabulous-looking marriage but I didn't sense any true love anywhere. When I character says "I love you beyond love" I simply do not believe it. All the desires come from within and not from without, which I think is unrealistic. There's a few passages where the character complains that all this love stuff is in the air and force-fed through culture, and the closing passage about what really makes a marriage is touching, but it's like the end of American Beauty -- it doesn't redeem all the actions in the book in which, sure, people defend their own and stick up for their spouse in various ways, seen and unseen, but it doesn't seem to amount to anything. It's never boring and it's got nice turns of phrase and descriptions and surprises galore. It's just not enough to make me like it, much less love it.

Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard

This is late Girard, published around the turn of the millennium. It feels prescient to our current age of memes and social media mobs as ever. The guy was onto something. This is the book to read if you want to come at Girard from a foundation of theology. He starts with the Ten Commandments and the Gospels rather than from indigenous myths, or literary analysis of Cervantes and Stendhal, or individual psychology as in other books. He ends up at the same challenging point of unveiling societal violence and underground (or above ground) idolatry throughout history. A section on prophecy and a section on self-righteousness and self-deception are particularly incisive, but that just means I copied down full pages rather than sentences. I'm not sure how it would feel to start on this book, but it challenged me as much as ever and I'm still digesting it now. Near the end when it feels like Girard can really draw parallels and drive the point home, he seems to hold back and go vague rather than specific, especially in his description of the prevalence of victimization as power play. Maybe that's left for us all to figure out. I wish he would have gone a little further but he went so far that such a wish seems unrealistic. Start with this book if you want to read Girard starting from the Bible. Read Violence and the Sacred if you want to start from comparative anthropology; Things Hidden From the Foundation of the World if you want to start with literature and human origins (my favorite); and if you don't want to read a book listen to the 5-part CBC interview (or read the transcript). Girard helps me understand Genesis especially as a scientist, but really everything up to and including Revelation. Wherever you're coming from, he'll challenge and perhaps annoy you, but I think he's far more right than wrong.

Book Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I'm not going to say much about this book because I want you to discover it like I did. It starts out like 40 Years a Slave but soon becomes a different movie that I like much more (South Carolina) ... then another kind of movie that I understand needs to be theme but that I like less (North Carolina) ... and then yet another kind of movie that returns to the surprising genre elements that I liked so much. Along the way, it becomes clear that this isn't just about America and race 200 years ago, but it's about America and race today. If I could divide it up into different sections, half of it would get five stars and half four stars, but since I promised myself five stars would be hard to earn I'll give it four. But it's a strong argument for four and a half stars, and I understand why the recommender I got this from ranked it as the best book of the past decade. I don't think it's quite that, but it's awfully close.

Book Review: Muse of Nightmares

Muse of Nightmares continues the story of Strange the Dreamer but it seems to miss a beat in doing so. I still think this is one of the best fantasy worlds, with its Gaiman-esque evocatively wonderful details and fascinating combination of alchemy and psychology. The conflicts all make sense, and there are no paper villains here. There are discoveries on hand, a solid unifying motivation and mechanism for the magical events, and a satisfying conclusion. But I was disappointed with the plotting. The first book was paced incredibly well, and held back on detail perfectly to maintain suspense and surprise. The second book spends the first half cleaning up the plot lines from the eventful end of the first book, with some implausible resolutions, and only seemed to pick up when a new "villain" appeared. There's none of the suspense and longing (even though the ending of the first book seemed to allow for it) and too much consummation before it's earned. It's too bad, because if it had been able to keep up I would have maintained my previous line that I like this world more than Harry Potter's. Now they're about equal in my estimation -- but that's still very, very good.

Book Review: Son of Laughter by Frederick Buechner

I read Godric and Brendan by Buechner long ago, but I think Son of Laughter is his most revelatory historical fiction. Told from the perspective of Jacob, son of Isaac (Laughter), son of Abraham, it surprises you as it tells the same story you've heard all your life (if you're like me). I especially like Buechner's character and cultural descriptions. The chapter "The Red Heifer" is the best explanation of why people sacrificed animals (goes along with Girard, by the way) and the chapter on Jacob wrestling with his Rival is a kaleidoscope shifting through all the interpretations of this enigmatic struggle, somehow cohering with the text in a way I can only describe as awesome. My quibbles are that the characters other than Jacob are a little too much the same: Abraham and Isaac, all the women, and Jacob's brothers seem too much alike. But this book is really more about the whole story and so it's fine if some characters dissolve into archetypes. The overall impact is that all the characters feel like real people and the story of Israel gains another dimension. It feels like Israel could have happened this way, and it's a down-to-earth miracle as much as the Christmas birth in a cramped stable thousands of years later.

Book Review: Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade

This was a deeply affecting book. Chris Arnade had a Ph.D. in physics and a Wall Street analyst job, but he left it and went on several road trips through America. At every town, he got out with his camera, walked around and talked to people. Often he ended up at two places he previously avoided: McDonald's and church. He talks about how important these places are to back row America and why so much of the country has been left behind. There's only six chapters (going from memory): 1. McDonald's; 2. Drugs; 3. Church; 4. Place; 5. Race; 6. Respect. Each person Arnade talks to, and Arnade himself, is a broken and biased reporter, but the sheer generosity of his ear and scope of his travels makes this book worth reading. Arnade challenges the status quo from beneath, and he changed the way I see my city. Of the chapters, the one on race may be the weakest, because Arnade has the least personal connection to that. But this isn't about Arnade, it's about the people whose voices he transcribes, and that is the reason to read this book.  One thing is clear: the average academic consensus is wrong in many ways. Why was it assumed throughout my life that place doesn't matter? I was supposed to move across the country for college, then for grad school, then post-doc, then job. Because of my sense of place I resisted that somewhat, only moving across the country for grad school, and then staying in place. I therefore understand the people who stay in their hometowns to take care of family even when neoliberalism and neoconservatism both assume they should just move to where the jobs are. And a quick glance at this blog shows I have always seen the point of church, while Arnade discovered it empirically, as the faith of the poor wore away at his academic atheism. There is a sense of futility upon finishing this book, but as someone who appreciates church (and McDonald's) I also find a distinct, strange hope, even an encouragement for the light shining through the cracks.

Book Review: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

My head was delighted by this collection, but my heart was slightly disappointed. All the big ideas are here, as they always are in Ted Chiang's work. You won't find a better treatment of the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics and parallel universes anywhere, this is how it would work. And there's a lot of heart, too. One story about raising digital creatures unexpectedly resonated with my own experiencing parenting teenagers. Every story is a notch above average -- it's like other authors have their ideas in standard definition but Chiang's grasp of the science and its implications is high-res. But there's no story that stands out as much as "Story of Your Life" in its sheer scope, originality, and depth. I didn't develop a deep emotional connection to any of the characters in this collection. I was most excited by "Omphalos," a story in which a 19th-century scientist follows a chain of discoveries and surprises in a world like ours that was created only a few tens of thousands of years ago. But for all the prayers we read from the central character, I don't feel like her faith is quite recognizable or tangible. It's not "high-resolution" like the science is. This is the same issue I had with Chiang's previous collection: he deals with science so well, and characters so well, that his slight shortcomings dealing with the deep nature of faith stand out all the more. The conclusion of "Omphalos" throws up unnecessary walls, describing certain aspects of science as problems to faith when a robust theology like JRR Tolkien's theory of subcreation would not only endure the problems but use them to strengthen the role of faith. It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, so I'll leave it at that. There is a five-star story here about parrots by the Arecibo observatory, but it's too short to lift the whole collection to the level of Chiang's previous collection. I am sure that I'd give this four stars if I hadn't read Stories of Your Life and Others, but since I gave that one four (while considering five), I'll have to give this one three (while considering four).

Book Review: Creation and Anarchy by Giorgio Agamben

This is a book for people who want to dive into words, and the first sign of that comes from how you read the title. "Creation" is indeed a theme of the book, more in the artistic sense than the natural, but the "anarchy" Agamben talks about is about things that have no beginning or "arche" (an-arche). The first essay is about the "archeology" of "works of art" but I associate it with etymology, rather: it's about how Aristotle and company most highly valued the artworks that changed the person, inside, rather than those that produced a physical object. Therefore, contemplation was a high good, much higher than it is today. I'd like to contemplate bringing that back.

Overall, this book is the second I've read by Agamben and both have been the very definition of pithy. These books are only 100 pages or so and 5-6 chapters, but open them up and they have as much depth as the Tardis. Occasional paragraphs get bogged down in philosophical complexities, but Agamben's ability to take words apart and reconstruct their meanings means that if you have a passing knowledge of Greek or Latin, then you're able to keep up with the fundamental ideas, which are what really matter.

The last two essays (of five) are the best, and overlap with David Bosworth's The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America, another little book with big implications. Agamben points out that the conflict between science and religion may reflect how the two disciplines use words: philosophy and science use words of description; law, religion, and magic use words of command. There's a great gulf between describing something passively, and speaking to make something true, respectively. That crystalline insight is an example of why, if you like words, you should read Agamben.

Book Review: The Language God Talks

Herman Wouk has always fascinated me as an author: someone who could write huge, ambitious, and (most uniquely of all) popular books about World War II with what can only be called heart. Like Stephen King, he's not a perfect writer but he's perfectly readable and has something to say beneath the flowing, even breezy, language. Sometimes breezy is a breath of fresh air.

This book is a short work about Richard Feynman and the space program (I happened to start it on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing), as well as Wouk's method for writing The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. I read those in high school but don't remember many details, I just remember how Wouk had a knack for complicated, epic plotting on the scale of the big Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies.

Here he talks about science, writing, and God. Wouk is an American Orthodox Jew and he uses Feynman as a foil for the big questions. In A World from Dust, I end with a plea for conversations exactly like this (though the final imaged conversation isn't as compelling as the actual ones!).

For Wouk, there's actually two "languages God talks" to refer to the title: calculus and the Torah/Talmud. Wouk only speaks the latter, but he speaks it fluently and persuasively. This quote is the center of the book, in which Wouk refers to the "Ghost Light" that stagehands would set on a stage after everyone else had gone home, always burning, to make sure no one would trip and to keep away the ghosts. I'll leave you with this gem:

“For Feynman, the Ghost Light was nothing but his own piercing mind, the spark of Adam in his genius brain, contemplating creation and finding it glorious but senseless. It is a popular view, also the considered view of some, not all, advanced thinkers. As for the author of this causerie, I see a different Ghost Light, distinctly there but very far off and hard to make out. It is not a single brilliant light like Feynman’s intellect. It is an odd irregular flickering flame, like a tumbleweed or low bush that has caught fire. Each time I look, there it is, burning.”

Book Review: Order Out of Chaos by Prigogine and Stengers

It's often said that an author really writes only one book, over and over again in different ways. This has never been more true than for Ilya Prigogine. I have read three of his books over the past few months, and each is making the same points in different ways. The most useful distinction is audience: From Being to Becoming (the earliest) is for chemists and physicists; The End of Certainty (the most recent) is for the sci-curious at a popular science level; and Order Out of Chaos is for the academics and philosophers. OOoC has the most material for my undergraduate classes. I appreciate especially the historical foundations provided by Boltzmann, Carnot, and others, because those were not detailed in my physical chemistry classes and knowing the history makes the physical chemistry a lot clearer. I took several historical notes about WHY we have different laws of thermodynamics with different emphases. This historical and philosophical richness must be attributed to Isabelle Stengers, and her contribution really makes this book work differently from the others.

For all that, I'm glad I read this book after the other two, mostly because there's not enough room to include the full arguments. As a result, many of the crucial arguments come down to important elements that must be tucked into a citation or waved away -- you can't fully derive the true mathematical germ that explains why it has to be this way, or at least you don't have the tools to fully challenge it when it's asserted. So I don't think OOoC would convince a skeptic in the same way From Being to Becoming did, at least in the areas of kinetics where I am equipped to be skeptical.

On the other hand, From Being to Becoming was a difficult read for me and I still don't have the tools to really use what Prigogine says about quantum mechanics. That's not really my area. But FBtB was like a scenic mountain hike, a lot of climbing and some fog but ultimately worth it, especially for the kinetics/non-linear dynamics part, which is Prigogine's specialty.

It's also possible that Prigogine downplayed his QM ideas in his later writings, after they were challenged (which I know they were and they don't seem to have taken hold at least for QM). Still, in my opinion, the heart of what he has to say is nonetheless intact. So I don't worry about the QM, I'm happy to take the kinetics and run with it.

Another issue is that I would have liked more philosophy at the end, thinking about what this all means. We have some of that but it's not as thorough as the historical review itself.

But this story is worth telling three different ways in the end analysis. So I recommend reading all three books, and not reading this one first, but reading it nonetheless.

Book Review: Disorder And Order: Proceedings Of The Stanford International Symposium (Sept. 14 16, 1981)

This was a hard book to track down, but it was worth it. Cynthia Haven's biography of Girard describes a conference he helped host in the 60s in great detail. In 1981, after moving to Stanford, Girard co-hosted another conference with a Nobel Prize winner ... in Chemistry. The Nobelist was Ilya Prigogine, who has some very interesting ideas about complex chemical systems that help reinterpret quantum mechanics and even challenge the common conception of time itself. What do Girard and Prigogine have in common? I wished I could attend that 1981 conference. And lo and behold, in a sense, I can. Every talk from the conference, with discussion, is recorded in this book. Some of the essays are five-star essays. There's enough essays not up there that my rating's brought down to four stars, but the essays worth reading are very much in the majority. Here's my favorites with a sentence about how I liked each one. (Full text is here: https://archive.org/stream/DisorderAndOrder/Disorder%20and%20Order_djvu.txt)

ILYA PRIGOGINE, "Order out of Chaos": One of the best summaries of Prigogine's ideas for a general audience ... well, a more general audience than Ph.D. chemists, at least. 

RENE GIRARD, "Disorder and Order in Mythology": A fine summary in itself, although I was mostly familiar with this from my recent reading already. The discussion afterwards may be more originally illuminating than the talk itself.

JEAN- PIERRE DUPUY, "Shaking the Invisible Hand": A nice take on how Adam Smith and Girard fit together. Also, might be a better summary of Girard's application than Girard's own talk!

JOHN FRECCERO, "Cosmology and Rhetoric": The hidden gem of the conference. I expected a wonderful reading of Dante from a Dante scholar, but this is a reading of my favorite image from The Divine Comedy that extends to show how Augustine of Hippo anticipated an answer to one of Einstein's big questions, and it all has to do with reading the universe like a poem, with attention.

FRANCISCO J. VARELA, "Living Ways of Sense-Making: A Middle Path for Neuroscience": Another hidden gem. Varela raises some very good questions about perception of color and puts things together in a way that's new for me, and bridges both Prigogine's ideas about the importance of the observer and Girard's ideas about order from chaos.

Workshop 1: Girard's comments are of course good, but the best parts are when Isabelle Stenger (Prigogine's colleague and co-author) speaks. Pay attention -- I wish she had been given her own talk.

Book Review: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

This collection of stories has two big award-winners. I was floored by one (5 stars!) and only merely impressed by the other (3 stars). The other stories fall in between those extremes -- which means the collection as a whole is impressive. Chiang has a gift for taking an original, plausible, intriguing idea to its logical conclusion -- then blowing past mere logic to fully realize the implications, both scientific and personal. His science is prescient and creative, but it's in combination with its effects on people that it really shines. Each story is at least as good as a good sci-fi novel. And "Story of Your Life," the basis of Arrival, is one of the best stories I've ever read. This is my fifth time experiencing it (third time reading and have watched the movie twice), and it opens up new depths of meaning each time. This time the theological implications fell out, and the deep connection between mother and daughter. The other award-winning story, "Hell is the Absence of God," on the other hand, took an excellent idea but showed how science takes religious concepts and ossifies them into idols, and I think it showed a lack of theological sophistication, which would have been fine if that had been the point. I still think it's far better than most sci-fi depictions of faith, but it felt as wrong and dystopic as The Hunger Games. God is not like that, and this story contains really good reasons why God is not like that. Even that of course has distinct value. Each story is intellectually provocative and this book by itself makes me want to read more short stories. Chiang's newly released book is going in my queue now.

Book Review: The End of Certainty

This is the book by Ilya Prigogine that I will send people to. It's genuinely for a general audience and seems to have been influenced by the success of A Brief History of Time. I actually think this book is more interesting than Hawking's, but I'm a chemist, so of course I would. Even here, fascinating connections are made and not fleshed out: I'm particularly intrigued by connections to music, and his frequent insistence that non-equilibrium dissipative systems allow matter to "see." Most of his argument from On Being and Becoming is recapitulated here, and its later publication date allows for more interaction with the scientific community (although he doesn't really engage with critics significantly, I guess when you've got a Nobel prize you don't worry about that so much?). This is a book with an argument that catches fire and makes connections you never saw coming. Time itself is reformulated. I haven't had time yet to be completely convinced, but I do want to think more about how the cosmos is musical from the description Prigogine gives.

Book Review: From Being to Becoming

This seems like Ilya Prigogine's post-Nobel victory lap book. It claims to be written for a general audience, but, no, it's not. Prigogine is challenging the very way physicists and physical chemists do calculations, and that's not going to be accessible to a general audience. This book lays out his case in one place for chemists and physicists, and it's probably not enough to convince skeptics, but it worked for me to see a bird's eye view of his argument from outside the field. I'd say it requires at least a BS in Chemistry or Physics to read this book and recommend his other books for people who actually want to read an argument rather than deduce it from equations and figures.

Book Review: Circe by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller is in the same league as Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) and Kate Tempest (Brand New Ancients). Circe's perspective as a mother is the most compelling part of this book. The parts about her relationship with her parents and siblings, and about her sorcery, all feel like something I've heard before, but her relationship with her son feels urgent and vital. Maybe I've just had too many isolated underdog stories lately, but I'd prefer to know more about her positive relationships than her negative ones. Of the other characters, Odysseus is particularly well drawn: it's a long time before he's named, but it's clear he's a magnetic and brilliant (and cunning) personality. Telemachus is fascinating, too, and is very different from his father. Come to think of it, the brief role Icarus plays in the story is another standout moment, so parents and children are a strong theme here. The story itself avoids the problems of pacing that go with a story of exile, although the conclusion feels faded, just like the myths do at that point. I prefer Tempest's mix of today and yesterday, and I think myth isn't quite represented by Miller the way it really works, but as a novel set in a mythical context, this worked.

Book Review: One Day in December by Josie Silver

In my quest to read interesting books off other people's best-of lists regardless of genre, I recently listened to One Day in December. I don't know what section it would be in at Barnes and Noble, and that's probably for the best. It's a story about a woman who sees a man at a bus stop, falls in love, then a few months later her best friend brings him home as her new boyfriend. This could definitely go either way, and it definitely does. Some scenes verge on plot contrivance and romance-novel purple prose. However, those scenes are few and far between, and there's more originality and strong writing here than I expected. One of the strengths of the book is Silver writes (mostly) convincingly from the man's perspective too, and flips between the two perspectives expertly to hide things and create tension as well as to reveal. Most of the central plot points are driven by character and logical progressions rather than coincidence. I especially like how the conflicts between characters are set up with that inevitability that you see coming but hope won't happen nonetheless. It's hard to write a story in which a relationship is developed for more than a decade, revealing, advancing, putting up barriers, people changing, etc. That's something only a book can do convincingly, and I think this book does that. Silver is also aware of ALL the movies and tropes (Love Actually is referenced in the first few pages), and while I would prefer it challenges more of them, I think it at least captures the zeitgeist so that someone could analyze and challenge the tropes from the outside (don't get me started on the Girardian rivalry of the best friend duo). So, yes, I can see why this was on someone's best-of list. Though it's not in the center of my own Venn diagram, it had its moments and told its story well.