This year, perhaps I did not read as much as I should have, but I have settled for reading as much as I could. Certainly in a year such as this, there was no shortage of down time. But is there any good in being hard on oneself in this manner? One of the great things about reading is going at your own pace. In film, the director and the editor decide how fast you shall proceed. In a book you have however long you want. If you are reading for yourself, no one will be disappointed in you if you put a book down, pick it up months later, and skip a chapter here and there. There’s no reason not to be adventurous in your choice of literature.
The books I read this year brought great value to me, so I thought I’d start a personal tradition in the form of a brief end of the year book review. Maybe it will help me stay accountable, and maybe you’ll find something to add to your own reading list.
The First Circle
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Most who know Alexander Solzhenitsyn know him for his massive history of the Soviet prison system, The Gulag Archipelago. The First Circle can be considered a more personal companion piece, which involves a novelized version of his own experiences in prison, particularly in what is called a Sharaska, which was a special type of prison for engineers and scientists to conduct highly skilled research and development for the Soviet Regime. Whether or not one is familiar with Gulag Archipelago, one shall find Solzhenitsyn’s incisiveness fresh and deeply affecting. The insight borne from Solzhenitsyn’s reflections formed in a decade of servitude do not come cheaply. Few who have lived through such terrors retain the mind and courage to also write about it. The heights that he reaches in this book are rarely encountered in literature. Compared with Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn is not difficult to read. He writes simply, directly, often with barely contained indignation. If I could add one book to the standard high school reading list, it would be this one. Its personal perspective makes it a faster read than The Gulag Archipelago and less traumatizing. Yet it does not fail to make its point and would be of great benefit to the young mind, or any other.
One section details the succession of lies from the lowest prisoner, to middle management, to regional leadership, all the way up to Stalin himself. Nothing I have encountered better encompasses the great warning of the Soviet experiment. It captures the immeasurable cost of allowing lies to pervade the public life, creating a smothering atmosphere of fear, suspicion and vicious self preservation at all cost.
As a side note, I acquired my own copy of the book in a small town book store last year, picking up the original 1968 release. However, if you seek out the book yourself, it would be best to get the 2009 version. Solzhenitsyn vainly attempted to censor himself in an effort to get his book past Soviet censors, and this was the version that originally reached the West. As I understand it, a chapter is omitted, and a few details were changed around; not a noticeable problem while reading, but a shame nonetheless that was fortunately corrected in the new edition.
Great God A’Mighty!
By Jerry Zolten
One would be surprised to learn of the far reaching musical influence of Ira Tucker, and the Dixie Hummingbirds. In fact many of the motifs of the musical revolution of the 50s and 60s first appeared in Gospel music, in groups like the Dixie Hummingbirds. While reading this book, I was reminded of O’Brother Where Art Thou? The Coen Brothers’ evergreen, zany masterpiece of Southern life. One finds in this book, many historical analogues to what the Coens portrayed. One discovers that lone radio operators out in the boonies who “pay good money if you sing into his can,” (meaning record music in his studio) were no fantastic invention of the brothers, but a real state of affairs across the south, when, at the dawn of radio, demand for folksy music was high, and the infrastructure to deliver it was in its nascence. The personal reflections of Ira Tucker and the Dixie Hummingbirds are wonderfully evocative, full of life, hardship, and good character.
Mayor: Notes on the Sixties
By Ivan Allen, Jr. with Paul Hemphill
I picked up this memoir by Ivan Allan Jr, the Mayor of Atlanta over the tumultuous decade of the 60s, as part of my continued effort to better understand the cultural transition which took place in America throughout the middle of the last century. As an Atlantan, this book is also of interest as it gives context for our prosaic town and the roads and skyline, which we are so familiar with but often have little pride for compared to the natives of other major cities. While I found his writing a little self serving, it is nonetheless a remarkable perspective on an important era that only grows more distant in our cultural memory.
The Open Mind
By J. Robert Oppenheimer
I was hoping to find here some insight into the elusive character of the so-called “Father of the Atomic bomb,” Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous, or infamous, physicist who oversaw the construction of the first nuclear weapon. He is an often evoked, yet poorly understood figure in the public consciousness.
The book comprises a series of speeches he gave over his post-Manhattan Project career as a public intellectual. Unfortunately, his speeches here are dryly academic and reserved. Anyone versed in history of the Atomic era shall find the warnings and elucidations well-trodden by modern perspective. It is hard to encounter his words here, in his only published book, with the perspective of how they would have been received in his own time; and harder still to perceive the man behind the words. What does come through is a man of great subtlety, with great depth of knowledge and thought outside of his own field of physics. Even after reading his biography, American Prometheus by Kai Bird, and now this, his character remains a mystery to me, and a subject of further study.
The Confessions of St. Augustine
By Augustine of Hippo
Despite its moderate page count, it took me several months to read this top shelf tome of Christian thought. I chose this work of Augustine over City of God, because I reasoned it would be a far more personal account of his faith. Despite the high language, one finds that even this lofty church father struggled with the same human foibles with which we all are so familiar. It is always a joy to find similarities in the human experience across vastly different eras and cultures. It is a common error of modern evangelicals to suppose that they are the first Christians who have ever figured out what it means to follow God truthfully and honestly. Here, such an error is corrected in Augustine’s timeless exploration of the Christian journey.
Out of this list, it is a more difficult read, but it shall reward the patient reader.
Simulacra & Simulation
by Jean Baudrillard
At the other end of the spectrum is this influential work of French Postmodernism. Like many people my age, I first learned of this book in The Matrix, where it appears early in the film, as a cut-out book that Neo uses to hide some of his hacker hardware. While the reference is apt, it mostly sounded like a dense and impenetrable work primarily to be avoided. However this year I wanted to better understand Postmodernism from its own perspective, not simply as it is characterized by those who malign it. Thus I felt it would be worth investigating for myself. I must confess to skimming through it, but I have lived to tell the tail. This book and others like it (translated from French) form the basis for the impenetrable modern style of academic writing in the humanities. The style of prose feels designed to make you feel inferior and stupid. I can think of no good reason to value this sort of obscurity over brevity and clarity of thought. Perhaps this work and others like it are more clear in their original French, but that their language and style is so influential in English is unfortunate.
Nonetheless, patient reading reveals some great insight into our modern malaise. Baudrillard, writing in the early 80s, has many warnings to offer about the dangers of our modern media, and how our views of reality are shaped through our vessels of consumption. Much of his thought predicts our woes of social media decades in advance of it’s arrival. His predictions feel utterly prescient today. But while the Postmodern critique of civilization is not lacking in incisiveness, what it does lack is a direction worth traveling toward.
By way of example, I experienced some cognitive dissonance after watching the trailer for the Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit, only to read that the story is a work of fiction. Obviously, there’s no reason that every period drama needs to be a true story, but something about the presentation gave me a false impression of historicity. I feel some concern when I imagine fans of the show who might have watched the series thinking it was a true story only to learn otherwise. The dreadful insight that Baudrillard has to offer is that for most viewers whether or not a story is fact or fiction matters little so long as it appears true. Thus a work of fiction can have a greater impact on our sense of the past than what actually transpired. The Queen’s Gambit is a great example of his eponymous concept — a simulacra — a copy without an original.
Ultimately it is not that the postmodernist critique of our society is totally invalid — it is at times quite incisive. It is that for all it’s critique, Postmodernism often ends up as nothing more than a vast and elaborate permission structure for self-seeking nihilism, which can not possibly raise our society from its present state to something better.
The quote which opens the book, ostensibly from the Book of Ecclesiastes, is an intentional misattribution. That a good number of readers might fail to notice this probably would not bother Baudrillard at all. Indeed, it is central to his thesis.
One need only look at our modern media culture, and our taste for sensationalism over statistical analysis and factual reporting to see the analogues. “Welcome to the desert of the real.”
Miracles
by Craig Keener
This massive text shall prove highly challenging to naturalists and cessationists willing to confront the monstrous volume of testimonies of miraculous healings and supernatural occurrences, well documented, and multiply attested, in this book. But what makes this work, a scholarly effort — not a tract of sensationalism — so effective, is the restraint with which Keener proceeds. He does not blindly accept every testimony he reports as miraculous, rather he invites the reader to ask how it is possible that a witness would form the beliefs that they clearly hold with conviction in absence of what they report actually occurring. He asks that we do not rule out supernatural causation a priori when asking how it would be possible for example, for rural farmers in China, never prior exposed to Christianity, to spontaneously believe that Christ had instantly healed a member of their community of lifelong paralysis. These farmers went on to found a church, widely attended in their town, with little aid or support from missionary contact. This story has many analogues across every continent and drastically different cultures. It is a change in behavior that is difficult to account for without a drastic, and life altering event being genuinely witnessed. Keener draws attention to attitudes worldwide regarding the expectation of miracles, and how these feelings differ significantly from those in the West. He argues that influential philosophers like David Hume have little of substance to offer in their philosophical attacks on the possibility of miracles, and the evidence he presents makes a strong case to back him up. It is consequently a challenging and timely apologetic for anyone willing to make the dive and grapple with the big questions.
Wondrous Strange
by Kevin Bazzana
It is common for those who see a video of Glenn Gould playing the piano to suppose that he must have been some kind of a savant with undiagnosed autism of some sort. Further exploration reveals an even more singular figure, who defies almost any categorization at all beyond that of “troubled, solitary genius.” I for one knew almost nothing about Glenn Gould until a few years ago aside from seeing his name linked almost without exception to The Goldberg Variations. But when I chanced upon video of his impeccable performances, his bizarre style of playing — always sitting on the same low chair his father built for him, singing along to himself so loudly that the microphone picks him up, it was clear I had been missing out on an absolutely singular figure in music.
I recently noticed that I have a long standing interest in isolated persons of immense talent across regardless of their discipline, and Gould is one of the most extreme examples of this type. In this biography, Bazzana here does a good job of personalizing Glenn and finding the truth that undergirds the myth. I also appreciated the number of pages he dedicated to Gould’s pursuits outside of piano, especially in the realm of radio documentary, something easy for a biographer to overlook when doing the obvious and focusing exclusively on his musical output and immense talent. At times, I found the style of this book a tad too general. On occasion one gets a sense that the author has in mind a specific event, but for brevity’s sake, reverts instead to the generality. I cannot necessarily fault him, this approach is understandable when summarizing a person’s life in a book that is already nearly five hundred pages, but at least my for my own interests, this approach proves less insightful into the minute details of a person’s character, which are better explored, not in summary but in example. Nonetheless, I found it a compelling read.
Audio books (they count, right?)
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
by Thomas Sowell
Aside from it’s provocative title, Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a sober minded look at many of the pressing issues of our times. In this collection of essays, Thomas Sowell provides great insight on a number of topics which we would all do well to be more informed about. The history of global slavery, Black education in the 20th Century, universal characteristics of minority cultures and discriminatory tendencies that arise within these contexts, and how these attitudes change over time. It should be required reading for anyone wishing to have a more historically informed perspective from a thoughtful voice on our present racial issues.
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K Le Guin
Ursula K Le Guin has quickly become one of my favorite writers of science fiction. Her writing is not focused on speculative technologies, but rather speculative societies. Her multi-book spanning Hainish Universe envisions a pantheon of human worlds across the galaxy, each with its own unique culture and dreadful foibles. Each world, and each story, is something of a mirror into failures in our own cultures, only made more extreme, inverted, imagined in new contexts, played out to their furthest possibility, but in a manner that never ceases to feel painfully insightful into our own. Her egalitarianism, and willingness to explore both the ugliness and beauty of our human relations with one another should find her more champions within my own generation.
The Dispossessed displayed all of these qualities, but I still find myself preferring some of her novellas like Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea, A Woman’s Liberation, Paradises Lost, which have a focus, and moral complexity that I have rarely encountered in the genre.
Next year, I should like to read more fiction.