Middlemarch wasn't the only book I read in the first half of this year, but it did take me about five months to read! It is an absolute tome. It's Liz's favorite book, and I know there are others (I think Jonathan Franzen) who have listed it among their faves. I've been meaning to read it to see what the fuss was about, and then Liz and I saw an incredibly beautiful edition at The Book Loft in Columbus, OH, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. So we got it and eventually I read it.

This book was written in the 1870s, set in the 1830s, and covers almost nothing of consequence. It chronicles the daily lives of middle and upper-class Brits... their loves, their losses, their conversations, their miscommunications, and mostly their thoughts. So, so much of this book is dedicated to the interior strands of thought passing through the minds of characters.

When I say "nothing of consequence", though, I mean only on the grandest scale. For the characters involved, the issues of the position they hold and relationships they maintain are of the utmost importance. Of course they are; that's how it is for you and me, as well. This is where Middlemarch shows its wisdom. "Non-fiction" means history, or philosophy, books about business, or whatever. And "fiction" means made up stories about the lives of characters. But between non-fiction and fiction... which form of writing is more "real"?

All of the constructs of non-fiction are, after all, basically made up: historical currents are identified in retrospect, to make sense of chaotic sets of events. Philosophical frameworks are spun from the matter of their social context to help pull together meaning for a society. Business books teach you how to cope and make sense of completely arbitrary economic dynamics. Fiction, on the other hand, is about human experience: the only topic on which you can be sure you have knowledge, beyond all ontological threat. Your self-esteem, your anxieties, your relationships, your money, your work. These things are not "made up" - they're the realest it can get. This is what Middlemarch knows, and taught me, and why it is now one of my favorite books.

George Eliot sets out so knit a deeply human and empathetic layer around the hard and essentially Stoic realization that our bodies, our feelings, and our relationships are most of all that we have. And she affirms this by demonstrating that the way we feel about these day-to-day vicissitudes is a) important, by their impact on how we experience life and b) essentially universal. Reading this book, I was impressed over and over again with how Eliot found things to write about that are still relevant 150 years ago: the emotional bottleneck of being engaged and the emotional flood that follows a wedding, or the lengths boys will go to avoid asking their fathers for money, or the ridiculous amount of relational injury people will assume rather than ask a vulnerable question. It was personally validating, but also a celebration: "Oh look," I thought, "We're all the same."

This book is like the anti-Dostoyevsky. Instead of following characters around who are thinking massively large thoughts about war and God and Man, we observe characters sitting at their dressing table, thinking about love and boys and money. But this is so much better, and so much more important. There's one character, who loves to think about large and lofty things of consequence; and she's the most tortured of the bunch.

And, of course, it's wonderfully written. It's massively long, and it was written a long time ago, so starting out can feel like breaking in a pair of soon-to-be comfortable shoes. And the length, I think, is part of the message. It's about mundanity's importance, but about mundanity nonetheless, so being a bit slower than it needs to be is part of the study. In that way, it reminded me of The Pale King. But it's a beautiful book, and absolutely worth taking slowly. A friend of mind referred to it as "gentle and invigorating" - and now I can't think of a better way to put it, except to add -- because no one told me this going in -- it's also very funny!

If you read it, let me know - I'd love to talk about it.

The Quiet Zone by Stephen Kurczy 📚

Liz and I are starting to host occasional white elephant-style book swaps, where we get a group of friends together, each share about why we like the book we brought, and then trade. Our most recent book swap, a few weeks ago, yielded me this book! Which I immediately devoured over the course of several days. Thanks to my friend Oliver for the recommendation! And for your copy of the book 😉.

This book is about the National Radio Quiet Zone in west Virginia. The author is careful to disclaim that much has already been written about the NRQZ, but I for one had never heard of it. It makes for a fun read because the NRQZ is populated by -- and attracts -- several different kinds of people: local west Virginians, obviously, as well as scientists who work at the fancy government radio telescope, hippies who want to unplug & reconnect with nature, and a group of literal neo-Nazis in search large tracts of unsurvielled, cheap land, on which to build their compound.

The author is a good writer, writing on an interesting subject. It was an engaging read. The book's written in the first person, and I found the author's personality a bit annoying, but that I read the book so quickly in spite of that really does speak to the strength of the writing.

The thing that has stuck with me most since closing the book was a comment the author made about the RELATIVE nature of quiet. He writes that, several days after moving from noisy Brooklyn to the NRQZ, something as simple as a car driving by was enough to pull him out of his concentration. It reminds me of something Thomas Merton said - that he had for years dreamed of the solitude he would experience once he entered the monastery... but that as soon as he got to the monastery, he started daydreaming about a hermitage where he could truly he alone.

I guess that means we need to make our own quiet, from the inside out! 🙂

Untamed is the third book in my feminine spirituality series, the first being Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey and the second being Wild Mercy by Mirabai Starr.

It's basically criminal that I haven't read this book yet... Liz read it in 2020, loved it, and blogged about it here. I didn't read it then because I didn't think it was "for" me - I hadn't learned that (as I wrote in my Wild Mercy review) that masculine or feminine "wisdom is not exclusively applicable or appropriately mapped to any one sex or gender identity."

I thought this book was awesome, and full of wonderful spiritual and non-spiritual wisdom. As usual, I finished this book and waited a few months to write, just so I could have some time to process. The idea that has most deeply stuck with me is about creatively and boredom; Glennon says:

"I find myself worrying most that when we hand our children phones we steal their boredom from them. As a result, we are raising a generation of writers who will never start writing, artists who will never start doodling, chefs who will never make a mess of the kitchen, athletes who will never kick a ball against the wall, musicians who will never pick up their aunt's guitar and start strumming"

This idea has slowly been blooming within me, and has helped me reshape some of my phone use habits, yet again, around preserving boredom and decompression time.

This book is also amazing just because it does such a phenomenal job articulating the deep frustration and ambivalence that Glennon feels (and that I imagine many women feel) about being a member of a religion that is essentially "by men, for men": that religion being Christianity. Glennon really shows up in this book, expressing really raw and honest anger and confusion, and also earnestness and a desire for truth, goodness and beauty.

It's sort of a messy, scattered book - it takes a while to settle into her brainstorm-y style. But the book rocked.

This was a fun one! I read it for my wife's cousin's podcast's discord's book club earlier this year. A big part of the fun was that I got it in a vintage mass-market paperback with an absolutely stellar cover. It was tiny and I got to put it in the pocket of my cargo shorts to read on the go. Nerdy; but fun!

Story-wise, it is broken into three distinct acts. They were all good as separate small stories. Taken together, each added a sense of empathy to the other. Each act centered on a different set of characters, with overlap at the edges.

The first and third acts are on earth, featuring very hard sci-fi. Lots of science. I loved it; I don't always love it, but Asimov can write boring science in such a way that gets you excited about the eventual made up breakthrough.

The second act is not on Earth, and features a highly organic sci-fi... it reminded me of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. Actually I guess it's a ton like Xenogenesis... both center around a pretty in depth exploration of thruples in species that have three sexes. Certainly some influence going on, I'd imagine; although Butler takes the idea and runs and runs and runs.

Good, fun, quick read. It won't change your life, but it's not a waste of time 🙂

My practice of Catholicism has a singular purpose: praying, more and better. In my pursuit of that purpose, I have several values - one of those values is that my faith be collaborative, and not confrontational. God is in everyone, and is revealed to me uniquely in every person I meet. So I cannot pray more and better without continually learning how to better know and love those around me. If the people in my life ever feel rejected, or judged, or misunderstood because of my faith, I know I'm not on the path towards praying more and better.

There are LOTS of people, both religious and non-religious, who just don't operate this way. The very fact of having a faith can be interpreted by others as confrontational. Justifiably, many people assume that anyone self-describing as religious is judging them in some way. Why is that a justifiable assumption? Because many people who self-describe as religious are incredibly judgy. Making my faith and unifying (and not an othering) force is something that takes work, and gets tiring. And it's discouraging, because often you try your best and it still doesn't work.

This encyclical felt like a cool glass of refreshing water, to rejuvenate that work. It felt like a de-emphasizing of the divisive cultural particulars that surround a given day, story, or situation, and reminder to focus on the basics: God loves us, and we are meant to contemplate that love and share it.

I wouldn't necessarily describe it as accessible; it felt extremely Catholic, and a little slow at times. But the focus was clear: love one another. And sometimes that's all you need to hear. I'll end with a quote, which could have been written either by Pope Francis or by Thomas Merton:

"We see, then, that in the heart of each person there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one's personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others. We become ourselves only to the extent that we acquire the ability to acknowledge others, while only those who can acknowledge and accept themselves are then able to encounter others."

These High Republic Star Wars books are... not good.

In a comic book shop in 2022, I overhead a conversation between the clerk and a customer. The clerk had shared they liked Star Wars, and the customer launched into a long, impassioned, and relatively well-informed speech about all the reasons Star Wars wasn't good: the stories were derivative, the science made no sense, the characters were slapdash, whatever. The clerk listened while scanning books and futzing with the cash register. When the customer was done, the clerk responded "yeah, it sucks. I like it though."

I heard that exchange from across the store and felt like I was listening to the Buddha. That "it sucks, I like it though" counts as a valid perspective had never occurred to me. It's also really the only way to find peace in fandom; you'll rarely find yourself satisfied with everything, and once you do, you can be sure it won't last.

This book was a prime example of "it sucks, I like it though." The nonsense science in this book was an active distraction - the plot didn't hold together worth a darn at any single point. At one point a character is repairing something with a tool called a "turbohammer," which immediately invokes the classic sci-fi epithet: "I got on my cyber bike to go to the cyber bar where I ordered a cyber beer." This book was absolute trash.

I liked it, though.

I fell a touch short of my regular book count last year… part of the reason for that is that I’ve never included comic books in my list, even though I’ve increasingly been reading more and more comic books, including big collections of comics like this one. Writing reviews for individual comic books doesn’t really seem like a fruitful use of time, but maybe I’ll start including these. 

There are a few main types of Captain America stories:

1. Group conspiracy against Captain America
2. Two Captain Americas fight
3. Captain America quits

This volume doesn’t have #2 (that’s in the previous volume), but it has good content for #1 and #3. Without giving any solid details, Cap quits because “the country he’s fighting for is no longer the place he knows from 1941,” and it is softly implied that when he Scooby-Doo style unmasked a bad guy, it was the president. So sort of topical, I guess, although I didn’t really love that it drove him to un-claim his title as Captain America.

That reaction feels in deep contrast to what Sheriff Billings said in the recent season of Silo: “I didn’t cross the line; the line moved.”  “Captain America quits” is definitely the hardest plot to execute well… but it’s sort of a necessary precursor to another classic Captain America story, “Captain America Comes Back”

I like Steve Englehart for a few reasons:

1. He’s from Indiana, like me
2. He’s an involved narrator
3. He’s super campy

Im currently collecting Englehart’s Fantastic Four and West Coast Avengers runs as individual issues, and I love the relationship-driven, soap-opera drama they have. These Captain America stories don’t have that same drama, but they’re fun all the same. I love all the wacky villains. 

I read these collections on glossy print with remastered colors, which people often complain about for being garish and over-the-top. I also felt this way when I started reading them, but now, at least for campy Marvel-style writers like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the over-the-top colors help capture an psychedelic, sort of punk attitude. I have a few other of these old Cap “Epic Collection” volumes; and am excited to read them soon