One of my 2019 goals is to read 50 books. I did that quite easily last year--I think I read, like, 80. But probably most of those were audiobooks, and another part of my goal for this year is to read more books in print instead of audiobook form. I love audiobooks, but I find that I tend to rush through them, listening to them in every spare moment, and at the end feel like I thoroughly enjoyed the book but didn't absorb much of it and couldn't really come up with anything new to say about it if pressed. I feel this 50 book goal (most of them in print) will provide me with a healthy challenge, especially considering that I'll have a baby to care for.
Another of my goals for this year is to teach myself some marketable skills that I think will help me get a job I (might) want. Some of these skills include things like: content marketing, blogging, InDesign, SEO, technical writing, etc.--skills that most job postings that show up when I search "writer" or "editor" require, but which I feel I have not learned. Today I began an online video course on the exciting topic of blogging! Therefore, I would like to use this blog post as a place to bring together my two New Years' resolutions by 1) practicing blogging, and 2) writing a review of the 2 books I've read so far this year.
(In a more general sense, I would also just like to be better at writing book reviews, since it seems like this is also a skill required of people who want to be writers and good literary citizens, so we can say I'm practicing 3 of my goals right now! I would love your feedback on how good you think my actual reviews are.)
(And I've already broken one of the rules of blogging by writing a very lengthy preamble to the actual content of my post. I suppose this is inevitable because the venue I've chosen to write this post is perhaps at odds with my goal of practicing blogging, since you, as a friend who knows me and is obligated to read my words, are quite different from a general internet meanderer who will want me to deliver engaging content that tempts them to continue reading. Or are you???)
Without further ado, my books:
Gone Girl
In a revolt against my nature (or my conditioning), I've made a conscious effort recently to seek out and read more "plot-heavy" books. There is a certain distrust in the literary world to stories that rely too heavily on plot. There seems to be a dichotomy that assumes a book that serves its plot cannot serve its characters; because tidy plots are rarely found in real life, a plot-reliant book cannot be a good reflection of reality. Nevertheless, I feel that in my own quest to write a novel, I need to have a good feel for plot, because the fact is that this is what the majority of people read for. I need all the help I can get making my current project into a series of events linked by cause and effect (i.e., plot). I have this idea that I'll write a novel with a super-tight plot, and then as I revise I can go through and muddy it up a little to make it more literary. LOL.
Anyway, Gone Girl, as a bestselling crime-thriller, certainly falls into that category of books defined by their plots. Reading it, I find that I somehow distrust its quality because of this even as I thoroughly enjoyed and tore through it. The question I now have to ask myself in order to determine whether this book was "good" is this: Do the characters remain with me even after the book has ended, or do they feel like slaves to a plot that, once I've reached the end, leaves me with little to think about?
I feel that Gone Girl, for the most part, passes this test. There are a few aspects of the story that feel a little too tidily calculated to make the ending "sting," but for the most part, I felt as interested in the people telling this story as I did in the story itself. This is a book that's very propelled by voice; it's perspective switches between the two main characters, a married couple named Nick and Amy Dunne. For the first 1/3 of the book (approximately), we find out almost immediately that Amy has disappeared and Nick falls under suspicion for her murder. The perspectives alternate between Nick narrating the events of the investigation and Amy's diary entries in the years leading up to her disappearance (which certainly do give reason for Nick to be suspected). While I have an inherent distrust of books that incorporate perspective shifts like this--there's something about it that feels inorganic and contrived to me--I admit it worked masterfully here. As Nick comes to look more and more guilty, there's a part of me as a reader that feels like "But I've spent so much time listening to him talk--surely he would have told me if he'd killed his wife?" This is utilized to great effect.
There are some major twists in the plot that surprise and push you through the book, but the challenge for the writer is that up until we reach the twists this is in many ways--speaking strictly of its plot--a very straightforward murder mystery story. How to ensure that we continue? It is the voice and perspectives of the characters that pull us through and make the reading experience a delightful one.
There is much more to say on this book's representation of "women," though I can't do that without spoiling it.
Have you read this book/watched the movie? I watched the movie last weekend, which I found astoundingly similar to the book, especially given that I couldn't guess how they would depict the alternating perspectives on screen. I was interested to learn that the author, Gillian Flynn, also wrote the screenplay for the movie. I would recommend both.
How Jesus Became God
My choice of this book was motivated by the fact that I've recently realized for someone who has spent my entire life as a Christian, I really don't know much about Christianity--particularly its first 1000 years. The thesis of this book by scholar Bart Ehrman is that Jesus during his lifetime was an apocalyptic preacher who believed in the impending end of the world and never claimed to be the Savior or the Son of God--these were perspectives that evolved after his death and sort of wormed their way into the Bible's narratives of his life. A lot of the evidence is very compelling, though some is difficult for me to understand, even though this book is written in a really accessible way even for laypersons like myself.
This is a book that would have frightened me to read a few years ago, for fear that it would convince me of something I didn't want to be convinced of. The one thing I found kind of annoying about this book is that Ehrman seems to anticipate an audience who doesn't want to be convinced of his arguments and in fact is hostile toward them. Because I am now in a less scared space, I found some of his defensiveness to be excessive--I wanted to say You're the scholar here--I trust you, okay! He actually does this less when presenting specific arguments and evidences than when trying to explain the nature of historical scholarship itself. There are just a few too many times when he seems too keen to explain things like, "I'm not saying here that Jesus definitely wasn't resurrected, or that he couldn't have been resurrected, or that I don't believe he was resurrected--only that we cannot know, as historians, from reading the surviving historical sources, whether he really was resurrected or not." I feel that I fully understand that principle, and I imagine most of his readers will too. Maybe I'm just imagining that most readers are like me--if they don't want to agree, they're going to be reluctant to read the book in the first place.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the book for me was the portion where Ehrman talks about debates that raged within Christianity about the nature of Christ himself (and everything else) in the two or three centuries immediately following his death. The things that the majority of the Christian world now believes were decided simply by which sects won out in these debates.
Now I feel reasonably well-acquainted with the questions that inspired more recent religious thinkers to break off and establish their own faiths (Martin Luther, Joseph Smith). But reading about these very early debates caused me to realize that there are some answers established so early in Christian history that neither Luther nor Joseph nor I have never even had occasion to think about them. Ehrman summarizes some of these early debates this way:
"Some Christians maintained that there was only one God. Others argued that there were two Gods--that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as the God of Jesus. Yet others argued that there were twelve gods, or thirty-six gods, or even 365 gods. . . . Was the Hebrew Bible--the Jewish scriptures--part of the revelation of the true God? or was it simply a sacred book of the Jews, of no relevance for Christians? Or even more extreme, was it authored by a lower, malevolent deity? . . . What about the world we live in? Was it the creation of the one true God? Or was it the inferior creation of the God of the Jews (who was not the God of the Christians)? Or was it a cosmic disaster and inherently evil?" (p. 286-87)
Reading through this section caused me to realize that there are some theological/existential questions that my religious upbringing and culture have taught me to ask (or have encouraged me not to ask, but by that very misdirection have inadvertently motivated me to ask). And then there are some that I have literally never ever wondered about. The Nicene Creed, as much flack as it may get among Mormons, actually played a big role in teaching me what is worth pondering and what isn't. I have literally never wondered whether the Old Testament was written by a malevolent deity. There are plenty things I've believed and do believe are true, but not by explicitly thinking through and dismissing every other possibility. Some other people hundreds of years ago that I've come to think were misguided apostates actually did a lot of that thinking for me. Their conclusions not only established what was true and what was false, but also what was even worth asking. Which feels kind of weird to realize.
And that's what I've read this year! I guess that's what happens when you're sitting around just waiting to go into labor.
What are your New Years' resolutions? Do you believe in them? What have you read lately? (This is my call to action, which I've just learned blog posts should always end with.)
