sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: religion

A children's book that was given to my mom when she was young. In some ways it's a nice enough story about a preteen girl's life on a rural Canadian farm. But it's also very frustrating. A big deal is made of whatever it was that interrupted the friendship between Sarah's mother and Mrs Bolton, but then although the rift is repaired it's never made clear to the reader what actually happened and it's deeply frustrating. And it's rather ableist about a phsyically disabled secondary character, Linda. Also, the story is very evangelically christian with a lot of focus on characters Being Saved in a way that's clearly intended to send a message to its readers and it's a) uncomfortable and b) not very interesting. Overall, it could have been a sweet little kid's book but instead I end the book completely dissatisfied.

(also, when I read this book as a kid I was disappointed because the cover art seemed to promise it would be a horse book, but although there was horse content it wasn’t a Horse Book. Misleading marketing!!)

Frances Hardinge is VERY GOOD at simultaneously making me very invested in her books and also very worried about what the heck's going to happen next. I love her writing so much but it's hard work to get through every book of hers I read, but I WANT to read them because they're so brilliant! It is a struggle being a wuss like me.

The other problem with Hardinge is that it's hard to just quickly and succinctly summarize her books because there's a lot going on. And like, it all goes together beautifully and makes perfect sense in the reading of it, but how do I give you a couple-sentence introduction?

Deeplight is about an orphan kid named Hark who's kind of a small time criminal, and whose best friend Jelt keeps egging him on to do more dangerous things. When Hark's captured by the authorities, he's indentured to a scientist experimenting with what you can do with the remains of all the dead gods who died several decades earlier. Now he's acting as a spy in a household of aging priests from the days when priests were still relevant, so the scientist can learn secrets about the gods! And Jelt won't leave him alone either!

Some of the other things Deeplight is about:

what does it mean to be a friend to someone when they're not a good friend to you?

a culture with a large contingent of deaf people, where knowing sign is normalized

what makes a god a god, and do they deserve adulation just for being one?

an all-glass submarine called the Screaming Sea Butterfly which does, in fact, travel by screaming very loudly, it's horrible and I love it

the trolley problem, on a very large scale

what is the core of a person's identity, and can it change? (and should it change?)

lovecraftian monsters of the deep

the importance of providing chances for young people on the wrong side of the law to get an education and better opportunities in life

I'm also fascinated by how the impending threat of colonialism is something that Deeplight ISN'T really about; the Myriad (the archipelago of islands where all this is taking place) is definitely under threat by the Continents, but the Myriddens mostly have other things on their minds and our main characters DEFINITELY have other things on their minds so that's just....left. As a throwaway detail, of a thing to worry about happening after the end of the book. THANKS HARDINGE.

I also love the way, like usual, none of Hardinge's characters are what you could call unambiguously good people (or, for that matter, unambiguously bad people). And yet they're so believable and understandable and compellingly morally-complicated!

I found Hark and Jelt's friendship really hard to read about. Very believable, in an agonizing kind of way. Jelt has certain ideas of what loyalty means, and he's become used to manipulating Hark into doing whatever Jelt wants. And Hark can recognize that the dynamics aren't great and he keeps on WANTING to tell Jelt no, but keeps getting sucked back in by the way Jelt's so good at controlling the narrative in their conversations. One of the things that becomes clear in the book is that Hark having power through the telling of stories is something that's important to his identity, so it's really interesting how with Jelt he never can.

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Time for the Hugo nominated novelettes! As a whole, I ended up liking the options in this category much more than what was in the short stories this year.

Here's my thoughts on each of the 6 novelettes. I'm listing them in the order for which I will vote for them, top to bottom choices.

Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin

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Omphalos, by Ted Chiang

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The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim

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Away With the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey

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The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker

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For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll

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This is one of those Major Works Of Classic Scifi that I've always vaguely thought I should get around to reading without a lot of excitement at the thought. My experience reading white male scifi authors from the 1960's has not been such that I feel a lot of confidence trying another one out. And okay, yes, this book is very clearly by a white male author from the 1960's, but I ended up....mostly enjoying it.

I don't have a lot of things to say about it. But I liked how the characters were allowed to have human foibles instead of just all being serious people doing serious things, which I didn't expect in quite that way. Overall I think I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't say anyone else has to rush off to read this themself.

A nonfiction book by a woman who went to Costa Rica as a missionary for 5 years with her family and ended up realising that the way Christian missions works is super fucked up. She has since become an advocate for mission reform, which is good, though I personally am of the opinion that the correct way to reform the industry is to just remove it altogether.

Wright's a very engaging writer, and I enjoyed reading her book in which she says a lot of true things about the stuff wrong with missions and missionaries in a funny, irreverent, and heartfelt way. And she even jokes at the end that most of her ideas on how to improve Christian missions involve gasoline and a match! But she still seems to remain more of an Evangelical than I'm really comfortable with. IDK.

At any rate I hope her book and her work are successful at least at helping convince well-meaning christians who haven't ever thoughtfully considered the issue that there are problems with missions, since I think that's the audience she's aiming at, not an audience like me.

Of course after I finished watching the show I had to reread the book for the first time in over a decade. But I possibly made an error in judgement with timing, because I read it in bits and pieces while extremely sleepy and jetlagged and busy. So I kind of...forgot to think about what I was reading. I was mostly just spending time in a pleasantly familiar narrative without anything particularly sinking in. So I'm afraid I don't have anything at all insightful to say about how it compares to the tv show, or for that matter anything else insightful to say. Whoops!

This is a book that I have seen recommended so many times in terms that made it clear it would be extremely my jam. I kept on not reading it because my library doesn't have it, but eventually I gave in and put in the effort to ILL it.

DEAR INTERNET: You were right. This book is incredible. Lesbians, swordfighting, theological magic, and political intrigue in the 19th century: what's not to love???

A Ruritanian romance, this book is set in the nonexistent continental european country of Alpennia. Barbara is the duellist of the old Baron Saveze, which means she is his property. Her past has been kept a secret from her, but he's promised her her freedom and the truth about her family when he dies. SURPRISE, when he dies she's instead passed on to his goddaughter, Margerit, whom nobody expected to be the heir to his fortune. (The expected heir is, of course Extremely Put Out that he's inherited the title of baron but not the money.)

Now Margerit needs to learn how much life changes when you have mondo money (with both the privileges that entails, and the danger that comes with it when you are an unmarried young lady), and Barbara needs to make peace with the fact that she must continue to be a possession (since Margerit is not allowed to free her until Margerit comes of age).

Meanwhile Margerit and Barbara are both scholars interested in studying the divine Mysteries in a systematic fashion rather than just trusting to tradition. And there's a difficult political situation involving unclear lines of succession to the rulership, that the whole country is obsessed with. And the disappointed heir to Baron Saveze is hanging about causing trouble for Margerit.

There's a lot going on!

I love the slowly developing relationship between Margerit and Barbara as they learn to trust each other and love each other, amongst the complexities of the inequal social standing between them and the issues that causes.

The worldbuilding was strong too, and intriguing, and I absolutely believed in the world that was created in this book.

And I love that this is a book that's unapologetically about two women who are really competent at the things they do (SWORDFIGHTING and STUDYING and MAGIC), while also being imperfect at them. And even though neither of the main characters is the sort of person who is into society and clothes, the book also makes it clear that social competence is also a valuable skill and not one to be looked down on.

And I love all the interesting and well-developed secondary and minor characters. Each one clearly has their own personality and history and things going on. I particularly loved the practical-minded servant girl gunning for the role of Margerit's personal maid, as well as Antuniet, the aloof scholar-sister of the disappointed heir. Apparently the second book in the series focuses on Antuniet, which I'm delighted by, because when I finished this book the number one character I wanted to know more about was her! I suppose it's time for more ILLing.

All in all: highly recommended.

Wow, this is a powerful book. It's a memoir by a woman only a few years older than myself, which is weird, that I'm approaching an age that's old enough that people can already be writing memoirs by this point.

But that's not what I really care about with this book.

The author grew up in rural seclusion, raised by parents who were the sort of radical separatists who thought the Feds are out to get everyone, and that doctors and hospitals are evil, and the end times are coming, and by no means is a child to set foot in an actual school. Her family was loving, but challenging, in some extremely real and awful ways.

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All in all: a very worthwhile read, which isn't something I often say about massively popular bestsellers getting recommended by famous people.

It's Ann Leckie's newest book! And it's SO GOOOOOOOOD!

It's. Uh. Why am I so bad at writing reviews of the books I love the most? Okay. Okay! I can do this! This is a fantasy novel, set in the same general world as many of her short stories, which I had already read and loved.

This book is written in first person, but that person is talking to someone, so it's also written in second person. Which is kind of amazing and I love how this conceit plays into how the story is told.

The "I" of the story is a rock. More specifically, Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god who is in the form of a rock. The "you" of the story is Eolo, a soldier from a rural background who is aide to Mawat, the heir of the local, uh, rulership sort of position. It's complicated. He's definitely not a prince.

Because gods have to be careful about what they say - everything they say must be true, or they will drain their power in the effort to make it true - it makes for an interesting perspective on Eolo, because Strength and Patience of the Hill can never just forthrightly assume Eolo's internal processes, so there's something of a distancing from Eolo even as he's one of the main two viewpoint characters. Which creates an interesting effect, where Eolo honestly seems more of a cipher than any of the other characters in the story, despite his actions and reactions and other people's reactions to him being firmly foregrounded, which is weird and kind of cool how it ends up working. Eolo's clearly a guy with a lot going on beneath the surface and I want to know more! (meanwhile I very early on gained an extremely good sense of the kind of person Mawat is, possibly because he's really not that complicated. Oh Mawat.)

The story goes back and forth between two narratives, which are slowly brought closer and closer together until the one leads into the other. One is Strength and Patience of the Hill's history, starting loooooooooooooong ago in ancient prehistory, through the introduction of humans, and language, and the development of religion, and what it means to care about other beings. The other is the story of what happens in the immediate aftermath of Mawat arriving back in town expecting his father to be dead very soon and himself to take up the mantle of the Raven's Lease, but instead his father has disappeared and his uncle has usurped the role. (Yes, this is something of a Hamlet retelling, and with some really fun reversals and recontextualizations!)

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Another nonfiction book consisting of the letters home of a 19th century white century woman who travels to a different country, listened to as a Librivox audiobook! This one is by accredited doctor Clara Swain, who travelled to India in the 1860’s as a missionary and stayed for 27 years.

This book is definitely even more colonialist than the one about New Zealand I listened to last year. The New Zealand one just has a few offhand mentions of the native population which means at least the reader doesn’t get descriptions of active terribleness on the part of the white people, just the knowledge that the writer is there as part of a Very Colonial Endeavour. But this one is all about the writer’s regular interactions with the local people as she tries to convert them to Christianity.

I mean, it was obvious going in that it was going to be terribly colonialist and probably pretty racist, the question was merely about degrees. It’s.....not as bad as it could be, which I know is still not saying a lot. Clara is definitely of the benevolent-paternalism school of racism, which is at least not as directly violent as some brands of racism. But it's still unfortunate, and gets rather bad sometimes. An example:

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Overall, despite Clara’s issues, the book was an interesting one, though kind of tedious and repetitive at points since it covers 27 years' worth of relatively similar work and the letters are excerpted to exclude anything personal. It was neat to learn about the types of missionary work done in India at that time, especially since at a later era my great-grandparents were also missionaries in India, though in a different region.

And I was also made to think once again about the gendered social roles available to someone like Clara in her era. At one point in the book, Clara makes an offhand comment where she's clear that if she'd been born a boy she would have been an engineer. But in her gender and culture, one of the few ways a woman can have a respectable independent, ambitious, career-focused life is as a missionary. Engineer is right out. It's one of the things that's so interesting in reading about 19th century Western missionary women: wondering what else they might have done with their lives instead, if they'd had more options open to them. Clara seems to genuinely feel called to her mission work, and get real satisfaction out of it (....for better or worse), but she also knows that if she'd been a man she would not have been a missionary. But of course we only get one sentence on the topic because obviously we can't learn too much about Clara's personal feelings about things!

I rather wished in general to know more about what was going on in Clara’s personal life throughout the book, in fact. The extracts from the letters that comprise this book are all about Clara’s missionary work, and there’s just hints here and there of what else might be going on. For example: after 5 years in India Clara goes back to the USA for a home leave, stays for several years, then returns to India looking much more haggard and having clearly uncertain health. What happened during her time at home??

Well, I understand Clara's desire to make sure her published letters didn't include too many personal details since I would probably feel similarly if I were to publish something like that. But it still makes for a less engaging reading experience than Lady Barker's chatty letters from New Zealand.

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Karen Armstrong wrote of her years as a nun in another memoir, Through the Narrow Gate. She joined the convent at age 17 and left after 7 difficult years, realizing that the best thing for her would be to leave, hard as that choice also was. This book then details the years after she leaves, as she tries to find her place in the world.

It's a wonderful book, Armstrong is a very strong writer and has clearly done a bunch of work figuring out her internal journey. I don't know that I have a lot to say about this book, but: it's definitely worth the read. (And I don't think you need to have read Through The Narrow Gate first, this one stands on its own, but both are equally worth reading.)

I had FIVE MILLION FEELINGS about this book. I laughed, I cried, I spent much of the book internally screaming with delight, I want to shove this book into everyone's hands.

(okay, not everyone's, I recognize that different people have different tastes in entertainment and this wouldn't be up everyone's alley but uh HELLO YES IT IS UP MINE)

This is a marriage-of-convenience romance novel about a low-class Jewish con-man and a properly-brought-up rich young lady who is a leader of her small town's political and social scene, and how much they have in common with each other! Because turns out both of their careers involve basically the same skills, just to different ends. Also they both have younger brothers who they've raised to various degrees on their own and feel extremely protective of.

I just. I just! I am overcome. Where to start??

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Not quite sure what to say about this one. I did enjoy reading it, but its genre combination of being partly memoir and partly analysis of biblical translation choices meant that it felt weak on both counts instead of the two parts strengthening each other or balancing each other out. I can see what the author was going for with this and I understand, since the two things are intrinsically connected for her, but.... I dunno, it made it feel like a relatively shallow read for me, which was disappointing, especially since it's clear that this project meant a lot to the author and I really wanted to appreciate it more than I did.

I read this book as a kid, and evidently read it multiple times, given how familiar it feels to me on reread. But I don't remember ever loving it as a kid. I hoped it would click with me more on reread, given how much so many people love this book. But I still don't love it.

It's a bit too...mystical/spiritual for me, honestly. And weirdly Christian about it in a way that felt very out of place for the otherworldly Mrs W's; why would they be quoting the Bible?

Also I never felt able to connect with any of the characters in it - they feel more like set pieces than real people to me.

Camazotz's particular type of evil is compellingly awful, but that alone is not enough to make the book work for me.

Oh well. I'm glad other people get joy out of it at least.

This is a fairy tale retelling! Based on a lesser-known fairy tale, but one I'm still familiar with (obvs.). And it is a REALLY GOOD fairy tale retelling.

And....I had other thoughts after I finished reading this, but I dove right into reading my next book instead of writing my thoughts down and then I couldn't remember what I'd thought about. Whoops, sorry!

I read this book once before, back in 2009, the very first year I started writing down a list of all the books I read. It was one of my favourite books that year! And I've thought of it fondly on and off since then, and then suddenly this year I was like....was that book really as good as I remember? So I decided to get my hands on a copy and reread it.

Friends, I am happy to tell you that this book is EVERY BIT as good as I remembered.

It's historical fiction, set in the 4th century in the Roman Empire, and features a young woman named Charis who really really really wants to be a doctor. So she runs away to Alexandria and pretends to be a eunuch so that she can study medicine.

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Series consists of: Pagan's Crusade, Pagan's Exile, Pagan's Vows, Pagan's Scribe, and Babylonne aka Pagan's Daughter

This is a series of children's books about a Templar knight (Roland) and his Palestinian-born squire (Pagan) and, eventually, Pagan's scribe and Pagan's daughter. The books are written in an extremely distinctive style - it's like, the most immediate possible version of first-person, the first three books especially - and it's very effective at making things feel in the moment, but I do not actually like it. BUT I care about the characters enough that I don't care. And the period feel and the earthy historic details are wonderfully well done too. The author is apparently a medieval scholar and it shows in the best possible ways.

The degree to which Roland and Pagan care deeply about each other, and work to take care of each other, despite the two of them being very different people who often do not understand each other, is wonderful. And it's a main focus of the series, their relationship with each other.

( spoilers for the fourth and fifth books )

Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

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content note: discussion of nazis and antisemitism

This is a book about the history of nationalism (and attending fascism/racism/nazism) within the Mennonite confession. A good book, but a hard read - both because of the academic writing style and because of the uncomfortable contents.

Too much of Mennonite history is presented kind of as a hagiography: look at all the ways our ancestors have nobly suffered over the years for their morals and their faith! I think this is an important reminder that we are not exempt from sometimes being really terrible too, just because we also have a history of having been persecuted.

Mennonites like to think we have always been separate from the world, but during the general rise in nationalist sentiments in the 19th and 20th centuries, many Mennonites went right along with it. Of course, what nation we were being nationalist for varied: are we German, or are we Dutch, or are we Russian, or are we our own Mennonite nation? The answer to this question swung in various directions depending on political expedience.

And along with the rise in nationalism came a decreased commitment to pacifism within the Mennonite community (at least in Europe), which was really surprising to me, but perhaps shouldn't have been. I've always been taught that pacifism is one of the doctrines that sets the Mennonite denomination apart from other denominations. We're one of the Historic Peace Churches and all! But among some groups there was all sorts of frantic back-pedalling from the historic association of Mennonites with nonresistance, arguing that if one is really committed to being part of your country then of course you must be willing to defend it (which means fight in your country's army, whatever that army happens to be doing, even if it isn't technically defense). Including one suggestion that doing so doesn't break with what the original Anabaptists meant by their pacifism, because defending your country isn't the same thing as spreading your faith by the sword. Wow.

And then we get to the Nazi era and the political expedient of what to be nationalist for swung more firmly towards being German. After all, we were held up as the Aryan ideal! More pure than most Germans, maintaining this purity even when living in diaspora! There's even this whole alarming discussion about how we were seen as the anti-Jew: a wandering people, but the good ones.

I've noticed some parallels between Jewish identity and Mennonite identity before, and it was kind of awful to see that the parallels were brought up historically by Nazis to support antisemitism, when that is the opposite of how I would personally use the parallels.

Of course not all Mennonites - not even all Mennonites who lived in Germany - repudiated pacifism or supported Nazism, but a really disheartening number did. I have a Nazi relative namechecked in this book, even. And Mennonites personally materially benefited from the genocide of the Jews, with land and other possessions. We were complicit in the atrocities perpetrated, and in some cases actively participated in the atrocities.

And then of course in the post-war period there was a whole bunch of denial of germanness (we're not German, because that would mean being stuck in post-war Germany and being held accountable, and we're not Russian, because that would mean repatriation to the Soviet Union and that doesn't sound like a good idea, so let's try out claiming being Dutch! And if that doesn't work then obviously we are our own Mennonite nationality!) as well as denial of any culpability. And Mennonites did a pretty good job of distancing our reputation from both of these things - I mean, the popular conception of Mennonites these days is of technology-avoidant North American farmers. And we did a great job of denying it internally too. Even now if you check out GAMEO (the online Mennonite encyclopedia), the article about one strongly pro-Nazi Mennonite I looked up says nothing about all his Nazi-supporting activities and instead talks about the many ways in which he was a wonderful person who did wonderful things. Gross.

It's interesting to me, the way that this book demonstrates a link between nationalism and the sense of being part of a global Mennonite church body. I've always seen the latter as a positive thing: instead of being insularly focused on other Mennonites who are Like Us, we are reminded of our connection with many different kinds of Mennonites all around the world. And I think it is a positive thing these days when we're actually willing to admit people of colour as being equal coreligionists instead of only counting the white people, but it definitely did not start with a goal I would personally find laudable.

Anyway, the book does manage to end on a positive note, which is impressive given the general tenor of most of the content of the book. It ends by reminding us that, as Mennonitism has had a multiplicity of shifting identities and priorities in the past, so it continues to change now and can continue to do so into the future, and we are not bound by the awful things Mennonites have been and done in the past - we can be better.

Which is a timely reminder, given that we are living in an era when Nazism is rising again. It's time to be better than our past!

This is not the kind of book I ordinarily would have chosen to read, but my mom gave it to me years ago and so I kind of felt obligated to get around to it eventually.

It's a very odd sort of book and I'm not quite sure how to categorize it. Somewhere between memoir, writing advice, ode to the power of stories, and Christian witness, I guess? The genre that it seems most similar to me personally is the sermon, actually: using both personal experiences and biblical stories to illustrate a point about Christianity.

L'Engle wrote this book in her old age, after a very serious car accident where she was significantly injured. So she talks a lot about that, of course, but also uses illustrations from throughout her life.

I found it largely a pleasant sort of book to read; not particularly mindblowing or anything, and there were some parts that were tedious, but mostly it feels like just hanging out with the best kind of elderly church lady. Her overall theme - of story (and particularly the Christian story) as truth rather than fact - is good, as is her general loving approach to religion and life.