Books Read in 2021

Douglas Olds

December 30, 2021

 

NON-FICTION:

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) by Kristin Kobes du Mez. 

Well-researched history of White American Conservative Evangelicalism’s obsession with non-Christian gender tropes and martial stereotypes. Convincingly demonstrates that these tropes are cultural and not theological.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich. 2020.

Deeply empirical presentation of how the Protestant Reformation's changes in literacy and marriage patterns restructured both culture and cognition in  positive feedback loops. Family householding, faith, and prosperity evolved.

How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss, Peter Kreeft. 2021.

Assigns invidiously simplistic contradictions to the liberal world view. It does contain an interesting and important discussion of how metaphoric and narrative human cognitive and moral structures are being superannuated by the computer age’s institutions of symbolic logic.

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux. 2018. 

Intellectual and personal biography of everybody’s favorite atheist.  Accentuates the man’s predelictions and literary strangeness and the role of his sister in mismanaging his legacy.

Collateral Damage, by Mark Shaw. 2021.

 Mark Shaw is an experienced legal practitioner, communicator, and tireless researcher whose body of work and journalistic papers have been solicited by and archived at his alma mater, Purdue University. His latest book on the deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Dorothy Kilgallen is, as always, a very well-written presentation of a large amount of primary source synthesis and new information offered in a coherent and compelling report. I am convinced by the author that Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide and that there were several motives and opportunities for the murder of Dorothy Kilgallen. Tying RFK to L.A. and the company of her doctor when Marilyn died is both new reporting and strong support for the author’s theory and narrative of RFK being the motive focus of these events. Shaw explicitly recognizes that the narrative is circumstantial so that I am quite intrigued, but I understand there could be another circumstantial structure to these events. Yet Shaw has articulated his most compelling of narrative theories regarding mob involvement to date, beginning with the author’s work in “The Poison Patriarch” that introduced so much new and essential reporting on Jack Ruby and his lawyer Melvin Belli.

Based on the author’s work, I am increasingly aware how J. Edgar Hoover originated and publicized the lone gunman theory of JFK’s assassination to evade responsibility for failing both to stop a prior conspiracy and investigate it ex post facto. He is also implicated in a coverup of Kilgallen’s death and the disappearance of her files researching the Ruby/JFK shootings. Shaw presents a convincing logic to events that Kilgallen was preparing to expose the Warren Commission Report as fallacy with her own in-depth reporting on Ruby. Shaw does, at times, introduce questions and speculation for context, but he is diligent and responsible in flagging them as unresolved. These speculations do not serve as the foundation for his historical conclusions but are offered as avenues for further research and his openness to potential contradiction.

Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, Makoto Fujimura. 2021. 

Lucidly written theology of artistic making. Sparkling illustrations of author’s artistic philosophy illustrated by numerous Biblical citations and discursions into traditional Japanese techniques. Well done.

A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose. 2021.

How underappreciated mid-20th Century polemical writers led the way toward current right-wing populisms.

Orthodox yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Brock, Corey C. 2020

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland, Tom. 2019.

The balance of Non-fiction titles read as part of a ministry project I am undertaking:

God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation. Köstenberger, Andreas J., and David W. Jones. 2010. Lightweight and predictable.

Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Piper, John, and Wayne A Grudem, eds. 1991. 

Group of essays purporting to ground gender tropes in the Bible. Some of the essays border on the preposterous, such as Ortland’s (pp. 95-97) eisegetical importation that finds a “devil’s plan” in the Garden to prey upon the woman’s purportedly essential susceptibility to temptation and self-promotion.

Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Aimee Byrd, 2020. Addresses the shoddiness of the previous two items.

A Theology of Christian Counseling, Jay Adams. 1986.

A Theology of Biblical Counseling, Heath Lambert. 2016.

Spiritual Depression by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. 1998.

Overcoming Fear, Worry, and Anxiety, Elyse Fitzpatrick. 2001.

Will Medicine Stop the Pain? Finding God’s Healing for Depression, Anxiety & Other Troubling Emotions. Fitzpatrick, Elyse, and Laura Hendrickson. 2006

Counseling by the Book by John Babler and Nicholas Ellen. 2014.

Created in God’s Image. Hoekema, Anthony A. 1986

Marriage as a Covenant: Biblical Law and Ethics as Developed from Malachi. Hugenberger, G. P. (2014).

The Heart of Addiction: A Biblical Perspective. Shaw, Mark E. 2008.

Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues. Roberts, Robert Campbell. 2007.

The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict. Sande, Ken. 2004.

 

FICTION:

Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald.

Poldark, Winston Graham.

The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr.

Intricate plot across eras of two protagonists, an antagonist, and their family members set in WWII era France and Germany. Author delves deeply into the society and technologies of their times.

Seize the Day, More Die of Heartbreak, Ravelstein, The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow. 

I most enjoyed Ravelstein’s portrait of epic pedantry, recalling what Nabokov does better in “Pale Fire.”

Remembering Laughter, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Recapitulation, Angle of Repose, The Spectator Bird, All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner.

My favorite was “Mountain’s” psychologically rich portrayal of Great War-era family dysfunction and dispossession set in the western prairies and mountains, and then in 1979's "Recapitulation" Stegner revisits the tragic climax of the earlier novel in a dense, time-shifting recollection of jejune sexuality from the perspective of frozen and repudiating middle-age.  Stegner is a premier novelist of the sinuous and fragile male psyche in the 20th C Euro-settler American west.

Fatelessness, Imre Kertész.

An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Comedians and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Judas, Amos Oz

Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund, Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse

Rendering deep spiritual insights by characters pursuing early 20^th C sexual ephemera. Steppenwolf contains the best novelistic treatments of partner dancing I’ve encountered in literature.

The Aviator, Solovyov and Larionov, and Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin. 

While I found Laurus spiritually shallow, I am anticipating with excitement the April release of “Brisbane.”

Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Double, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Top-rate psychological characterization. My third time through Crime. Brothers has a deep sense of religiosity’s uses and abuses.

War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. 

My second reading of both. My favorite ancillary figure in War was "Uncle" in Part 7 and the hugely charming "old Russia" winter hearth scene in his rural lodge--where he played that artifact guitar for Natasha--which served as the anti-type of the urban society balls that prominently figure earlier in the book.

 I was a bit let down by War’s penultimate "First epilogue," which linked an unsatisfying disquisition on the philosophy of history with an unsatisfying resolution to the Sonia-Nikolay-Maria triangle. In both, the role of love seemed short-changed. However such a resolution may have been intended by Tolstoy to raise the question of love. His "Second Epilogue" contained a masterful metaphysics regarding causation and human necessity.  It was a most suitable conclusion.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

Inferno, Dante.

Vipers' Tangle, Francois Mauriac.

While I am no devotee, this is the finest example of Roman Catholic sensibility of its time I’ve read.

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell.

The Violent Bear It Away, Wise Blood, Flannery O’ Connor.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford.

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

Austen is a fine craftsman of language. The topic of arriviste women seeking rich husbands will get done to death by the end of the 19^th C but seems fresh enough in Austen.

Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov.

Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain.

Bleak House, Charles Dickens.

Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, George Eliot

Middlemarch has surprising and pleasing depth for a novel concerning the bourgeoisie.

 A Laodicean, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy.

Hardy has the keenest eye for environmental detail which he links with natural and theological applications.

Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham.

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy.

House of Meetings, Martin Amis.

Life and Fate and Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman.

Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  

 

ABANDONED:

Love's Executioner, Irvin D. Yalom. Suggests out of the box how psychotherapy can be applied to atheism’s despair at life’s meaninglessness. Better: great literature, to which I turned quickly.

New York Trilogy, Paul Auster. Multiple layers of protagonist alter egos engaging a wild child antagonist is a great setup for a novel but realized in excruciatingly tedious dialogue and hackneyed plot turns in the first 5 chapters, at which point I gave up.

Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow. I read 4 other Bellow novels, and this one assaults woke sensibilities about Africa through the eyes of a banal protagonist.

Siddartha, Herman Hesse. I love Hesse but couldn’t get into the flat spirituality of this portrayal.

Wuthering Heights. Psychological potboiler without philosophical interest.

Demelza. After reading the first, this second in the Poldark series by Graham Winston delivers plot developments but relatively fewer new insights as to its times or characters.