Category Archives: Reviews

Saint Siluoan the Athonite

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Saint Silouan the AthoniteSaint Silouan the Athonite by Sophrony Sakharov

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What does it mean to be holy? I’ve asked this before, in a previous review of the theology of Archimandrite Sophrony. Sophrony was a monk who lived for a time in the monastic community of Mount Athos and served as an assistant of sorts to an older monk, St. Silouan. Sophrony saw Silouan as a great spiritual leader, and this volume is an account of Silouan’s life by Sophrony (which takes up the first half of the large book), followed by the collected writings of Silouan himself.

Silouan was a Russian peasant who came to Mount Athos as a monk in the early twentieth century and who lived there in poverty, prayer, and ascetic practice for decades. In the minds of many, this is a waste: a life of chastity, cut off from the rest of the world, without practicing good deeds or serving others, simply a life of “navel-gazing”—fretting about one’s own spiritual life and a constant, morbid attention to death, to unworthiness, to begging for repentance and the love of God. As some of my students would point out, this seems very much like a “works-based” salvation.

But I’ve already argued for the merits of something like this, so I won’t go down that road again. Let’s just make the assumption that the ascetic life is a recognized and integral part of the Christian tradition, and once that assumption is made let’s see what we might learn from it. Because I doubt many who read this book will actually be called to that life (and Silouan is careful to point out that no one should embark on such a life unless they are called by God). Rather, there’s the idea that maybe folks who go up the mountain have some wisdom for those who remain below. And if nothing else, anyone who’s interested in diversity of views and perspectives (and what could be stranger than someone who self-consciously rejects what most of the rest of us spend our lives pursuing?) should occasionally peruse the writings of the Christian mystics.

For Siluoan, prayer and repentance are central to the life of the Christian. For those who claim that the life of a monk is one of inactivity, Siluoan (and tradition) would argue that prayer is the most essential, ontological reality of the world, and that this is thus the action of all true monks, the center of their existence. Indeed, there is the idea that if prayer ceases, the world itself ends. Prayer is the proper orientation of reality to God, the source of all reality, and for women and men like Siluoan, learning to pray—disciplining the mind and the will so that ceaseless prayer becomes a reality—is the primary task of the monk (or nun).

But the prayer Siluoan speaks about might be a bit foreign to those of us who are used to saying a few prayers on behalf of our own interests and the interests of our friends and family each day. True prayer, for an Orthodox monk like Siluoan, springs from repentance, which is not a “once and done” kind of thing. Rather, repentance is a constant posture before God: a sort of humility that borders on self-hate, a realization that the monk is the least in the kingdom of God, that others are sure to be saved but that there is no hope for the penitent, no excuse. It is for the monk an echo of the humility of Christ, that one must consider himself the least of all, must descend in humility and brokenness as Christ did, must shed bitter tears.

Like so many things in Orthodox Christianity, this is balanced in paradox: this deep repentance cannot give way to despair, because in the midst of all there is the hope of the mercy of God. This is the source of Siluoan’s famous statement, which he said he was given by the Lord Himself: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” That is, keep your mind on your own wretchedness and brokenness, keep a posture of ultimate humility and depth of need in prayer, but trust in the mercy of God.

There is a purpose to this disposition. It is not self-flagellation or psychological masochism in order to earn some kind of salvation; rather, it is the path to true prayer, because only from such a posture of humility can one begin to bear the burden of the world, can one begin to shed tears of compassion not simply on behalf of one’s own sins but for the sins of the world. And this, Siluoan argues, is the ultimate purpose of the monk’s life in prayer: to offer up the world itself to God, to ceaselessly intercede with tears and compassion for everyone.

It is in this context that Siluoan makes what I think is perhaps his most powerful (and helpful) claim regarding prayer and the presence of God. In today’s climate of religious fervor and fundamentalism, of preaching and emotivist appeals, Siluoan claims there is one true way to know whether the Spirit of God is actually present. In Siluoan’s world, this sort of discernment was necessary for monks who claimed to have received a word or a vision from God. I think it holds equally true for us outside of the monastery, surrounded by people who claim to speak for God.

Siluoan’s statement is this: where the Spirit of God is, there is true humility, true love for enemies, and tears for the whole world. That is, if you claim to have any sort of deep experience with God, and the results are pride, derision, or division, this is a false claim. The true marks of the presence of the Spirit of God, according to Siluoan, are recognition of one’s own unworthiness (humility) and a compassion that extends to even those you thought you hated. Siluoan emphasizes this multiple places in his work, arguing that Christianity is never violent, never cajoling, but always something built on humility and compassion.

This struck me as incredibly profound: that an encounter with God brings about, not confident fiery preaching or denunciations or clearly-defined lines between us and the other, but rather tears, compassion, and a reticence to speak because we’ve finally realized how broken we actually are. Replace our confidence to denounce others we believe are wrong with a heartfelt compassion for our enemies and a humility that says they are more deserving of God’s grace than we ourselves, and Siluoan says you have a much more genuine Christianity and the true marks of encountering God.

For those who might immediately protest that God hates sin and that we have a responsibility to speak about the righteous judgement of God, I’d offer the saying of another monk, St. Isaac the Syrian, who, hundreds of years ago, offered this advice: “Do not speak of the judgement of God. His judgement is not evident in His dealings with you.”

What this thread of Christian thought is speaking to is this: Christianity is praxis, and the center and the goal of the Christian life is to know the love of Christ. Learn the love of Christ, these fathers would say. This knowledge is not book-knowledge. This is not a system of thought to be absorbed and repeated. This is an experiential knowledge, one arrived at through action, discipline, and the grace of God. Focus on that, bend your energies to that, to learning the love of God in Christ. Then and only then, these writers would say, worry about the implications of your theology for the life and practice of others. And then what you will find, according to their testimonies, is that you’re more interested in serving them, in serving even your enemies, in humility and love and compassion, then you are in condemning them.

Siluoan’s work is a hard read. The book is long and repetitive, and for a Western reader the nuggets of profundity seem buried in a lot of chest-beating and woe-is-me rhetoric. But for Siluoan, that’s the point. You have to do the hard work of self-abnegation to arrive at true knowledge of the love of God. The first portion of the book is a difficult go because it’s written by Siluoan’s protege and the tone is very hagiographic; it’s hard to see where the actual person was in the midst of all this. And then the second portion is Siluoan’s own writings, which, as the editor explains, are the occasional, unorganized scraps of a barely-literate peasant. So this portion is very repetitive and lacks a certain polish, but if anything it provides a more genuine glimpse into the mind and heart of someone who would forsake the world and spend a lifetime in the desert for love of God. Along the way, you also get some anecdotes about life on Mount Athos, which at times seems like another planet or at least another time period. And in the midst of this all, you get a sense of the things outlined above, of the goal of prayer and the life of repentance for the monk.

The Distracted Mind

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The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech WorldThe Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World by Adam Gazzaley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Distracted Mind (always capitalized in this study of the same name) refers to our current state of affairs due to both our neurological makeup and our current use of technology. The authors—a psychologist and a neuroscientist—address the problem of our distractions from three angles. First, they want to explain our chronic distraction neurologically (why we’re wired to be so easily distracted) and socially (how our technology is changing us and exacerbating the problem). Finally, they want to offer some practical solutions for things that we can do about it, short of a Luddite rejection of those technologies that have become a perceived necessary for professional life.

The first part of the work was the driest and most technical. Written primarily by Gazzaley, it is a detailed explanation of how and why of the human mind. Specifically, it discusses the structure of cognition and metacognition (our ability to think about how we think) as related to attention. Gazzaley provides an analysis of internal and external distractions and our proclivity to multi-task, which, as he explains, is not actually doing multiple things at once but rather rapidly switching between tasks. This portion of the study includes a bit of history about the development of our understanding of how the mind works here, including some really uncomfortable nuggets about lobotomies and how they revealed the aspects of neural structures related to keeping one’s attention on a goal and managing distractions. A primary analogy used in understanding why we’re wired toward distraction, why we’re so intent on flipping from source to source or device to device foraging for information, is a squirrel running from tree to tree looking for nuts, and a good portion of the work is Gazzaley providing an explanation for this “information foraging” nature of human thought.

The second portion of the work was more interesting to me. As a college professor, I feel like I’m on the front lines of the struggle against distractions brought about by technology. Because of research like that outlined in this book, I have a “no device policy” in my classes, and it’s amazing to see how difficult it is for college students to go for a single fifty-minute period without consulting their devices. In the second half of the work, Rosen (switching now from the neurologist to the psychologist) outlines the current state of our relationship with technology and examines how smartphones and the internet’s mobile accessibility represent a huge jump in technology and our distracted engagement with it. Quoting from a wide array of studies, Rosen gives data about average usage to show how ubiquitous this technology has become and how tied we are to it (how many minutes go between email or message checks, for instance, or studies about how stress increases when people are kept away from their phones). At the same time, Rosen outlines the social cost to all this, which includes stress, loss of life (texting while driving), detriments to feelings of well being and sleep patterns. In sum, the conclusion is that our technology drives us to distraction and contributes to feelings of anxiety and stress. No real surprises here, though they carefully document studies outlining what I’ve always offered simply as cranky-old-man anecdotes.

Rosen and Gazzaley are not simply cranky old men though. They’re much more reasonable than me, as I’ve sworn off a smartphone entirely because I fear what that amount of accessibility and distraction would do to me. [Swipes this screen while writing the review to check Facebook.] But the authors, recognizing that my amount of crankiness toward technology may not be practical for most, spend the third section of the book outlining ways to be smarter about our technology usage. If we have a good handle on our own metacognition (on our understanding about the way we think and the way we’re driven to distraction), they argue, we can take steps to use our technology more efficiently.

Being scientists though, they can’t simply offer what they think are good ideas. They have to analyze what’s actually been shown to work and give evidence for whether this will have any real impact. And being scientists they don’t want to take anything off the table, even approaches like drug therapies, brain stimulation treatments, and mental exercises that might be impractical for most readers (admitting that these are largely new and experimental and thus unconfirmed approaches). Indeed, the only real thing that holds up enough evidence for them to recommend without equivocation is physical activity, which has been shown in studies to contribute to focus and improve feelings of well-being and ability to concentrate. Other pieces of advice run the gamut to more technological fixes (recommended apps that can block or control the messages coming into your phone or the sites you’re allowed to visit during specific periods) and the blatantly obvious (such as carpooling to work to avoid the danger of texting or being on one’s phone while driving).

There aren’t any big “ah-ha” take-aways from this book, as the writers themselves admit. We all know we’re distracted. We all know our technology is probably largely behind this. What Gazzaley and Rosen want to outline though are the mechanics of this distraction in the human mind itself, the psychological details of the impact of our technology, and some (pretty straightforward and obvious, for the most part) suggestions of how we can address this. For me, working to provide a space where students are free from the tyranny of their own devices and forced to think without using their hand-held brains—at least for short periods of time—it provided solid scientific grounding for some of the arguments I already use, but it didn’t provide any real guidance for how to help my students navigate or transcend their own distractions. Because the point, as the authors touch on, is that many of us want to be distracted. It feel good, in the short term. But for those of us who recognize it as ultimately frustrating and shallow, a drain on cognitive energy, a syphoning away into a hundred small distractions what could be channeled toward those things that take deep thought and concentration to actually carry to fruition, The Distracted Mind provides an affirming call to action.

Drone: Remote Control Warfare

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Drone: Remote Control WarfareDrone: Remote Control Warfare by Hugh Gusterson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How will the Obama presidency be remembered? However else our first African American president is valued or villainized, an important aspect of his presidency that must be recognized is the fundamental changes to how warfare is conducted, instigated by the usage of drones. This did not begin with the Obama administration, but as Hugh Gusterson recounts in the brief history of drones that begins his study, is was greatly expanded and continually transformed under the outgoing administration.

Drones—the unmanned aerial vehicles used in conjunction with ground forces and survalience but more and more commonly used for targeted strikes against assumed militants—have fundamentally changed the way warfare is conducted, even the nature of warfare itself. For most of us, these developments are on the edges of our media consciousness. Most of us probably have vague notions that technology is allowing new types of strikes in the borderlands of Pakistan and the airspace of Yemen, through planes piloted by personnel thousands of miles away and beyond any real danger of retaliation. Drones have been used for years, but today they are being utilized by our military in ways many of us don’t fully understand. Hugh Gusterson’s short, accessible study of drones aims to explain and analyze what’s happening: how this technology is causing slippage in how strikes are conducted and in the boundary between fundamental distinctions underlying our definitions of warfare, including concepts like civilian and combatant and the boundary between what is and what is not a war zone.

Gusterson’s book is a quick study, and the author avoids polemic, not coming down hard for or against the technology. Rather, Gusterson wants to outline the transformative nature of this technology to conflict itself. Proponents of drone usage, including President Obama, cite the benefits of long-term observation and reconnaissance this technology affords, of the ability for surgical targets against known militants that spare collateral damage or non-combatant life (and have zero risk for American servicemen). In a war against a state-less enemy, the argument goes, drones provide important tactical advantages.

On the other hand, drones—when used in places that are not formally war zones—strain our current categories of warfare and blur the line between military and police intervention. And, as the author takes time to examine, the limits of the technology itself impose certain costs: surveillance is not perfect, and a “god’s-eye-view” allows dangerous reductions, especially when (as is often the case in drone strikes) this view is divorced from actual intelligence from the ground or cultural understanding. Our military, Gusterson points out, has confused killing with winning, and various third party groups have cited the high civilian casualty counts of drone strikes. In addition, Gusterson highlights what the threat of drone attacks does to societies to under constant danger of unseen, striking power and the antithesis this poses to winning hearts and minds.

Again, Gusterson’s treatise is not an impassioned argument for or against drones, which adds to its value. Rather, the book is a nuanced analysis of the implications of drones for conflict. Though he makes a compelling case for the ways in which use of drones causes ethical and procedural slippages in warfare, Drone: Remote Control Warfare is a scholarly work aimed at examining how drones are deployed in combat (including a brief but illuminating history of drone warfare) and what the implications and possible future ramifications are. Whether you’re a technology buff interested in learning more about what and how these machines are actually used, or someone more interested in the philosophy of technology or foreign policy, this is a quick, accessible, and piercing analysis of something that has framed Obama’s presidency and current US foreign interventions, for better or worse.

Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

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Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval EmpireByzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been fascinated with Byzantium for years, ever since I found a copy of Colin Wells’ Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World on the shelf at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, years ago. Wells’ book was in the tone of most popular work on Byzantium, balancing the empire’s relative obscurity in history with its neglected importance. Since then I’ve read 1453, Roger Crowley’s account of the final siege of Constantinople that reads like the story of the Alamo times a thousand, as well as several other recent popular works on the city itself or the empire or their role in the Crusades. After that it was time to dive into the older, classic works by Steven Runciman and John Julian Norwich. Eventually all this reading inspired some fiction, a historical fantasy called “The Gunsmith of Byzantium,” which I’ve been shopping around for years, so far to no avail.

Byzantium represents both continuity and transition, something at once central to the heritage and transmission of classical learning but also largely peripheral to Western histories. It is the enduring Eastern half of the Roman Empire, lasting for well over a thousand years, from Emperor Constantine’s transferal of the imperial capital to the city on the banks of the Bosphorus to its ultimate conquest by Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Judith Herrin’s Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire is not a straightforward history or a narrative on this huge topic. You won’t find the same dramatic scope as you would, for instance, in Crowley’s book or in Norwich’s sweeping chronological treatments. Rather, Herrin offers a synthetic survey, roughly chronological, distilling the various threads of Byzantine history and culture and drawing them into the light for a wide audience. Throughout the work, the author’s obvious enthusiasm and expertise in the subject vies with a small amount of tediousness as Herrin works to balance being thorough and comprehensive with being straightforward and engaging.

You’ll find out, for instance, both about the practices of taxation in Asia Minor as well as the epic poetry composed along this frontier, the splendor of the imperial court and the role and history of eunuchs within it. Herrin offers surveys of theological disputations that divided the empire, the role of women in propping up emperors and supporting the arts, the role of language and literature, the changing political fortunes of the empire, and the impact of the Crusades. The vast scope of issues she needs to discuss and angles to explore to be comprehensive is necessary for a complete treatment of an empire that endured for over a thousand years, but it makes the overall narrative structure slim. Throughout though, Herrin does a good job drawing connections with contemporary issues and the enduring legacy of Byzantium.

For the casual student of Byzantium, Herrin’s treatment doesn’t hold many surprises. It’s a good overview of Byzantine life and culture by a recognized scholar in the field. For someone who has heard of Byzantium though and is looking for a good place to start (and wants something a bit more synthetic and less sensational then Crowley’s 1453), Herrin provides an ideal entrance to this largely neglected world.

When the Watcher Shakes

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When the Watcher ShakesWhen the Watcher Shakes by Timothy G. Huguenin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Timothy Huguenin’s book When the Watcher Shakes is a solid debut novel by a solid new writer. The story explores a cultic, isolated town hidden in an Appalachian valley and is told with an easy confidence. Huguenin has a good handle on the tools of the craft: the writing is clear and precise, and the straightforward tone and pacing kept me reading even when the characters themselves felt at times a bit unrealistic. I was still turning pages up to the very conclusion of the novel, and apart from a few very minor typos, the work was artfully done. My main disappointments, outlined below, were in the depiction of the characters and in ultimately unsettled questions.

Abestown is a walled city in a forest, governed by a council of Historians and overseen by a sinister Head Historian who keep the inhabitants in line with threats of strange creatures beyond the walls (akin to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village). The town is governed in a stranger, more metaphysical way by the clocktower dominating its center. We see the town through the perspective of John, a hapless, easy-going wanderer who sights the town from a nearby highway and decides to investigate, despite having met Jerry, an old man who grew up in the town and departed but now lives on the mountain overlooking. Once inside the town, where the inhabitants are polite but suspicious, John’s inquisitive personality influence the thinking of Isaac, the town janitor and “watcher” of the title. Eventually and inevitably, John’s destabilizing influence transforms life within the town.

Huguenin puts all of the elements in place for a darkly unsettling mystery, and his writing style and skill is enough to clinch it, which make it disappointing when the hidden nature of the town is never truly revealed and the spectacular confrontations built toward (for example, between the Head Historian and Isaac) never are quite carried through. There are plenty of hints of darker things afoot—in the nature of the clocktower itself, for instance, which seems to predate the town itself in some ways, and in the supernatural strength of Rob Kai, the Head Historian— but these mysteries are never explored. Perhaps Huguenin is setting the stage for further work in which the history of Abestown, will be further developed. But if that’s the case, there are no obvious hooks that leave the reader on the line for another installment. Instead, we’re left to drift away from the walls and their mysteries like Lisa, the only character in the work who truly finds freedom.

These things were disappointing because of their potential. If the novel had been weaker, perhaps they wouldn’t have been so troubling, but When the Watcher Shakes was rife with interesting things popping up that were never followed out. One of the first things John notices in the town, for instance, is that he clearly hears the whistle of a passing train but none of the other townsfolk hear it. We come to realize that the council somehow has such a hold over the town that whatever the council declares to exist or not exist shapes the way the rest of the town experiences reality. (This gives rise to some clever wordplay, for example when Isaac realizes that when the train whistles he hears nothing, and that he has heard nothing several times before.) Again though, besides the power of suggestion, this is never fully explored—and the mysterious train that first gave John some understanding of how strange the town really was is never addressed either (though it is where John meets his ultimate, grizzly fate).

The town’s isolation is also never fully explored, and it gave rise to a few strange paradoxes in the novel. For instance, we learn that the newcomer’s name is one “Abe would approve of,” indicating Biblical names are probably preferred. There are other Biblical names as well (Isaac and Obadiah, for instance), but there are several more modern names: Lisa, Rob, and Jerry, for starters. The inhabitants of the town don’t know what trucks or cocoa are, but there is a restaurant in the town that serves “deer burgers,” and Rob, the primary villain, on several occasions refers to other characters as “punks.” Moreover, for a town that insists to live in such isolation and believes outsiders like John pose such a threat, the ease with which John first found the town and wandered into it seemed far too convenient.

The primary weakness of When the Watcher Shakes though was the characters’ impotence in enacting any real change in their circumstances. John seemed laughably naive and oblivious to his own danger in his insistence that an easy-going nature would get everything weird about the town sorted out. Isaac was a bit more developed, and it seemed he would become the hero to actually stand up to Rob, the Head Historian. He eventually did, but this confrontation was ultimately futile, and Rob was only destroyed by an accidental fluke. There was no final confrontation in which the masks came off and truths about the town were revealed. The only real crisis overcome by a character changing and overcoming odds was when Lisa, the abused wife of the Head Historian stood up to him to defend Isaac at his trial, but even that lacked an ultimate resolution between Rob and Lisa. (As an aside: the attitude of the town/cult leader to the women in his community was an obvious generalization hit upon heavily in the work.)

For all that though, Huguenin’s writing was strong enough to make Abestown feel like a real place and the characters come to life. Though portions of the narrative seemed a bit contrived, the terseness of the prose itself kept the overall story gripping. When the Watcher Shakes is an example of a writer setting out to create, testing his narrative grasp, and finding it true. I look forward to his next offering, and I hope it rises to the challenges his own stories set forth.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

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Jonathan Strange & Mr NorrellJonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you followed Potter through all the years of his Hogswarts residency and found the idea of a secret magical history of England compelling but were not quite carried away by the novels themselves because they were books for kids featuring a tedious, angsty protagonist, then Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell might be the actual history of magic in England for grown-ups that you’ve been looking for. It also helps if you have some experience reading period pieces like Austin’s novels, but none of that is to say you should consider this something like Jane Austin meets Harry Potter.

What Susanna Clarke has done instead in this massive and layered tome is two independent things, both which would have been impressive on their own. Firstly, she creates a believable history of magic in England, stretching from the Middle Ages and complete with footnotes to imaginary (but believable) sources, historical figures, and anecdotes. Secondly, she uses this history as a backdrop for the novel’s actual narrative, the story of the rebirth of magic in England in the early 1800s. But even more impressively, she does these two things simultaneously. The history is woven into the story, and the story is intimately related to the history.

Clarke gives the old England you believed in as a kid (and probably the England many Americans still believe in): fairy princes, sorcerer-kings, and enchantments. But we only get glimpses of this landscape through snatches of histories or accounts of old books given in passing. When the novel opens, all of this has faded away. England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars is a place where gentlemanly societies of magicians practice “theoretical magic” (discussing the history and nature of magic but not working any actual magic). This begins to change when the two magicians of the book’s title arise independently and set about to restore “practical magic” to England, primarily by putting it to service defending the nation against Napoleon.

The characters and setting are expertly constructed, and much of the novel’s effectiveness comes through the rivalry and friendship of the two primary magicians. Strange is young, ambitious, impulsive, and comes to the practice of magic almost by accident. Norrell is overly cautious, introverted, plodding, and arrived at his power by years of careful reading and study. The central conflict of the novel arises over their different approaches to magic: Norrell wants to reinvent or formalize magic as a scientific discipline and rid it of any traces of wild, fairy magic. Strange, on the other hand, is comfortable dabbling in the less controllable aspects of magic. He uses dark magic when necessary on the battlefield beside Lord Wellington, for instance, and he eventually pursues the essence of madness itself in an effort to summon a fairy servant.

These aspects of magic horrify and disgust Norrell. The irony though is that in order to begin his own path to power, Norrell entered into a bargain with a fairy to raise a young woman from the dead. This single lapse comes to haunt Norrell’s entire career. Eventually Norrell’s attempts to deny or cover this up and to keep Strange from embarking along a similar path lead to his ultimate rift with Strange. At the same time, the door this act opened for a malicious fairy to begin working mischief in England must ultimately be closed, at great cost to both magicians. (As an aside, the way Clarke handles the absolutely alien, whimsical, and chilling nature of fairies in this book is another one of its strengths.)

It would be difficult to summarize the entire, immense work, which begins with Norrell’s attempts to make magic respectable and useful to the government and then the actions of Norrell and Strange and their magic in the Napoleonic Wars. In the background of everything though is the looming question of the history of the Raven King, a boy-king who walked out of the lands of Fairie in the Middle Ages, established a kingdom in northern England, and ruled it for three hundred years before departing and taking a good portion of English magic with him. As the results of their own actions, inactions, and misunderstandings grow, Strange and Norrell come to realize they will need to summon help from this wellspring of English magic itself.

Clarke’s book is intimidating in its size. The particular copy I was reading was a paperback advance reading copy that weighed in at exactly 777 pages. This wasn’t the first time I had attempted to get through it. On this attempt though I had a crutch of sorts (in addition to some time in bed with an illness): the recent BBC miniseries. Watching the six-episode miniseries as I read through the book spurred me along and added a layer of engagement and I tried to figure out what had been done differently in the television adaptation and picked out specific speeches or passages pulled out of the book verbatim.

The main problem of the book is its sheer volume. The plot meanders, and though many of these meanders are pleasant and interesting (even the pages-long footnotes from the history of English magic) about midway through the novel things start to get a bit old. There are dozens of characters, and Clarke can’t introduce one without giving several pages of background history of who they are and where they come from. This lends a thickness and verisimilitude to the work, which again is one of its strengths, but it also becomes at points a bit of a slog. That said, all the various plots are tied together nicely in the novel’s climax, but getting there was helped along by being able to stop every couple hundred pages and sit down and watch the next installment of the television version.

Clarke’s tone in the novel is wry. There were parts where I laughed out loud because she captures so perfectly the stuffiness of Norrell and the British ministers and has them interact in ways that seem incredibly droll and believable. Stylistically, her strongest juxtapositions are between the philosophies of Norrell and Strange. Norrell represents a kind of “scientific magic,” perfectly sanitized and reasonable. Strange, on the other hand, discovers the pathways behind mirrors and tries to learn to read the Raven King’s language, which we learn is like barren trees written on a winter sky. He represents the poetry and wonder of magic. It is this tension—between reason and wonder—that is the central engine at the novel’s core, sputtering and coughing and rifted but ultimately renewed, like magic itself.

Tangents

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TangentsTangents by Greg Bear

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s one simple instruction for the person who imagines she might want to be a writer: read. Marilynn Robinson said it. Steven King said it. I’m saying it too. Are there other careers like that? Probably. Do you want to be a famous composer? Listen. Do you want to be a painter? Learn to see. Do you want to be a writer? Read.

This means it’s going to be important what books are on your shelves, particularly what books are on your “to read” shelf. I know some writers collect books impulsively, simply for the love of books, and they live in wonderful houses bricked up with shelves of books they have no intention of ever reading or that they imagine they one day might get around to reading. There is a certain freedom of genius there. I’m far too rigid for something like that though. The books on my diminutive “to read” shelf I have every intention of (some day) reading. Otherwise why would they be sitting there?

It’s not a very big shelf. (My house isn’t big enough—or at least lacks the shelving—for the other sort of approach.) Which means that when I wander into a huge annual used book sale in the basement of the public library of my home town and can come home with a large bag of books for something like three dollars total, I have to be very careful. I pick. I chose. I collect a large pile of titles that catch my eye, and then I whittle it down to half that.

What do I want to read that might conceivably help me improve my craft? Someone who had donated to this particular book sale had a collection of book club editions of important science fiction authors—most interestingly, anthologies of short stories, including several authors I’ve been meaning to explore: Phillip Jose Farmer, Samuel Delany, Fritz Leiber. And this one, a slim volume of eight or nine of Greg Bear’s short fiction.

I was ill when I was reading most of it, recovering from a stomach flu. I’m glad I had already gotten through the first part of the work when the bug hit, otherwise reading the first story in the volume, “Blood Music,” might have hit too close to home: a scientist engineers super-intelligent microbes based on his own cellular structure, and then introduces him into his bloodstream. What happens when a human becomes host to trillions of intelligent beings, when he becomes a galaxy unto himself? What if the galaxy were alive, and we were spreading to fill it, learning to communicate with it? What would it mean when it was time to start colonizing others? I saw glimmers of some of the darker bits of Leviathan’s Wake and its proto-molecule here.

But Bear can also do quite excellent literary fantasy, as the second work—a novella, really—in the volume shows. I had an interesting experience sitting in my yard (this was also before the stomach bug), distracted, trying to read, when one of my older sons stopped in his bike riding abruptly to ask me about the book. What’s it about? It’s a book of stories. About what? And I remember doing the exact same thing to my dad when I was a kid and he was reading some random scifi anthology and then being fascinated with the ideas that unfolded in each summary he gave. But I wonder now how distracted he was in the telling and how many details he had to gloss over, as I did explaining “Sleepside Story,” which is about a young man who has to go live in a witch’s house.

Bear here has created a gritty, magical precursor to Mieville’s New Crobuzon in which a boy is traded as a servant into a haunted, enchanted brothel. The details and dreamlike quality of the story are in wonderful contrast to the exacting concepts of Bear’s hard science fiction (though the language remains sharp in this piece as well—focusing on certain surreal details with almost scientific exactitude). Even more haunting than the setting though are the ideas of what it means to be a prostitute, even a very good one, and what kind of love might it take to free someone of the bonds of the past.

Each piece in this collection is excellent, with the most famous being Bear’s award-winning short story about an Alan Turing-like character who fled Britain secretly instead of undergoing hormone treatment for his homosexuality and his unlikely friendship with a young boy who can see in the fourth dimension. I had read this story before, but this time (and maybe because I was ill and running on very little sleep) I wept like a baby when I finished it.

If I was more thoughtful I’d end this review by tying it back to the beginning and noting some of the things that Bear teaches about the craft of writing through this collection. I’d talk maybe about the way he plays with hard science in his piece on a surprisingly inhabited Mars, “A Martian Ricorso,” or the terrifying implications of quantum mechanics in “Schrodinger’s Plague” or something about the way he creates characters who feel true to life even in Hell in “Dead Run” or in the near-future “Sisters.” But that would be too much work, and beside the point if the point is simply to be absorbing good fiction. Because in this respect, Bear’s short stories are an ideal place to begin.

Threads: A Neoverse Anthology

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Threads: A NeoVerse Anthology, Volume 1Threads: A NeoVerse Anthology, Volume 1 by Aaron Safronoff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Neoglyphic is in the business of creating new ways to tell stories. It’s a transformation a long time in coming, the creation of media that unites story-telling, music, graphics and interactivity. Perhaps it’s been underway for years in the video-game industry, but it hasn’t yet carried over into electronic reading platforms. What I mean is this: prose itself is reaching the place where it can be transformed, for better or for worse. Publications are looking for submissions that blur the line between creator and audience, that find creative ways to use the now-fluid electronic medium to make stories more interactive. Again, some video games have been doing this very well for years, but they remain a specific platform and niche. Neoglyphic, it seems, is working to bring this transformation to story-telling itself, to transform how readers (not just players) engage with text.

To do that though, they have to position themselves as purveyors of story. They have to assemble writers and narratives, and they have to show that quality story-telling—with all the editing, advocating, and disseminating it entails—is part of what they do and what they do well. To this end, Threads: A Neoverse Anthology was born. Neoglyphic cast the net out for stories, and the anthology was their wide and varied catch.

What they caught was a school of strange fish, some frightening, some lovely, all of sleek and flickering hues, all from different depths and of different shapes and sizes. The stories in this volume, in other words, are of a huge variety. They range widely in polish and style and run the gamut from literary realism to psychological horror, from golden age scifi to technological thriller and on to lighthearted fantasy. (Full disclosure, this anthology includes my contribution, “Gold, Vine, and a Name,” which I will not be discussing below.)

Many of the stories feel like pieces of larger works (and the editor explains that this is indeed the case for some of the stories—that they are stand-alone chapters from novels, for example). This increases the feel (whether intended or not) that the work is meant to function as a patchwork showcase of sorts, of a collection of resources Neoglyphic can draw on in their quest to take storytelling in new and different directions. Whether this turns out to be the case remains to be seen, but there’s the sense here of launching, of piloting some new projects to see where they might go or how they might develop.

The anthology was organized around a contest, and the first three stories appearing in the collection are ranked in prize order. After that, the stories are alphabetical. This may have been to ensure the rest of them were treated equally, but it meant there wasn’t editorial freedom for structuring the flow of the anthology by giving the order of stories some organizational structure. What the book lacks in unified flow though, it more than makes up for in the artwork Neoglyphic created to accompany each story and tie them together. Each story has an introductory illustration by the same artist, and the cover (recreated as a full two-page spread at the conclusion of the volume) brings elements of each tale together in a dynamic mishmash that makes the collection of narratives leap off the page.

Some of the stories in this collection were especially striking on a first read. For example, Chuck Regan’s “Dysphoria” (the third-place winner) presented a grippingly horrific vision of a near-future alternate reality awash in chemicals. When most of the world has forgone a physical existence for a virtual one, a market has arisen to create and produce new psycho-chemical experiences. But who’s actually in control: the emotive artists creating them or the corporations selling them? “Say When” by Pamela Bobowicz and “Hotel Marietta” by Sabrina Clare were other stand-outs, literary pieces that look at issues of loss and how families (biological or adoptive) come together to cope. There’s a certain level of the saccharine in some of the works of the anthology, but these two do an excellent job of treating issue of the heart with earnestness and skill.

There’s great fantasy here as well: “Vanni’s Choice” by David A. Elsensohn and “Stormsong” by Tessa Hatheway, for instance, are solid and satisfying. In the first, we follow a thief breaking into the magical fortress of an enemy sorcerer and the choice she must make once she realizes the nature of what she’s been hired to steal. Elsensohn did such a great job building a world and a character in a manner of pages I wanted to follow Vanni directly to her next heist. Likewise, Hatheway’s “Stormsong” is a straightforwardly haunting tale of hubris and deep water.

“A Knight, A Wizard, and Bee— Plus Some Pigs,” by K. G. McAbee, is another fantasy piece in this volume that stuck out. The plot is straightforward—a knight arrives to slay a powerful wizard—but the tone and style is in the tradition of Terry Pratchett, and the humor makes it come to life. Like Vanni, I want to follow Bee and her new master across a few more pages. If a goal of the anthology was to generate readers for new adventures, McAbee and Elsensohn succeeded.

There were several good pieces in the anthology, but there was one that stood out above the rest. (No, I’m not talking about my contribution.) This was Katie Lattari’s “No Protections, Only Powers,” which the author admits in the introduction was written as an attempt to channel Stephen King. A young girl dabbles in some harmless witchcraft and makes a new friend along the way. In the background though, there are much darker things afoot. What makes this story so devastating is the way Lattari balances the details of suburban life and the shadowed view of a surly teenager but then makes those shadows hide genuinely frightening details that only become clear later on. Things are left unsaid or only alluded to, and the story becomes exponentially more chilling by its conclusion. Lattari has stepped into something deep in this one.

Where some anthologies have an overriding theme that ties the contributions together, this one has rather an overriding purpose: to tell and celebrate stories. It gives the work something of a patchwork feel, but it also means that whatever your tastes, if you have an appetite for short stories you’ll certainly find something in here to satisfy.

After Virtue

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After Virtue: A Study in Moral TheoryAfter Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

MacIntyre wants to understand virtue. In particular, he wants to know not so much why virtue seems to be lacking in society today (this isn’t book moralizing on the problems of a post-modern society); rather, he wants to know why social discourse about virtue seems so incommensurate, so broken, so pointless. My first thought on reading the initial portions of this book was that he was simply critiquing the advent of post-modernity, but what he’s actually doing is something more sophisticated and systematic. Yes, he’s acknowledging that our dialogue on any sort of moral issues or claims seems to be absolutely stymied today, but he wants to rigorously explain why and analyze how it came to be this way. And the answer, according to his historical and philosophical treatment, is the loss of Aristotelian virtue ethics.

After Virtue is largely a historical analysis of virtue. MacIntyre’s central claim is that moral discourse is broken because there are no central agreed-upon premises to begin with and that historically Aristotelian virtue ethics has proven one of the most fertile starting grounds for questions of morality and ways of living. (I admit the philosophical sophistication of this work was such that my review may simplify to the point of obscuring.) He’s careful not to idealize Aristotle’s system of virtue, and he points out the failings and shortcomings of the Philosopher’s model, but historically he looks at the primary aspects of Aristotelian ethics, how they were abandoned in the Enlightenment, and the failure of the Enlightenment project to construct alternative groundings for morality.

There are two central aspects to MacIntyre’s reading of Aristotle’s concept of the virtues, two primary characteristics the abandonment of which have bankrupted societal dialogue and endeavors on morality today. For MacIntyre (as for Aristotle) an understand of virtue was tied to an understanding of the good of man—the intended end or telos of humanity—not as individuals (the individual rights and internal morality that have dictated how we talk about these things since the Enlightenment is a central problem for MacIntyre) but as the good of communities. A community exists and evaluates virtue in terms of those things that are useful between individuals in relationship with one another for the good of the community.

But this isn’t a utilitarian good; MacIntyre’s resurrection of Aristotelian telos is something more philosophically nuanced. It is related to the internal goods of practices, for instance, and here’s where his argument seemed most profound (and most apt to slip away from me). Internal goods are those goods that are intrinsic to the practice itself (excellence in the practice of chess-playing or baseball, for instance), as opposed to external goods (money, fame) that might be found through those practices but aren’t the intrinsic telos of the practice itself. If we lose a sense of humans in community working toward common, intrinsically-valuable ends, sharing practices that have internal goods—if we give this up for an Enlightenment sense of atomistic individuals pursuing their own self-interest—then MacIntyre says we don’t have a grounds to understand virtue.

The second aspect was that virtue can only exist in the context of narrative, also tied to Aristotelian views of telos. If we don’t have a clear understanding of our own story, of our own participation in narrative, and of our communities and institutions as also having narratives, then we won’t have a grounding for understanding virtue that is defined in terms of ends and intrinsic goods. Aristotle writes that it’s impossible to say someone has been happy until their death, until their story has played out. MacIntyre says profound things in this work (quotes I wish I would have saved, as they speak directly to the power of narrative) about the necessity of narrative and the view of humanity in a narrative structure to our understanding (or lack thereof) regarding virtue.

The problem with this book is illustrated by the fumbling manner in which I’m generalizing and vaguely pointing to the different aspects of the work. In reading it, one can follow MacIntyre’s thick analysis more or less. He’s building an argument for something that seems quite counter to modern analytical philosophy, but because he wants to engage philosophers he has to do it in a very careful and analytical manner. But because his ideas are radically different—a view that ethics and morality as a logical, analytical exercise is vacuous and things like history and narrative and practice have to come into play—he’s constantly reaching beyond analytical philosophy to make a bigger argument. It’s an argument that has a direct bearing on how we live (something that also makes it perhaps unique among analytical philosophies), yet it’s a book that’s out of reach of most, I fear. It would be ideal if there were a quality popularization of this work, something that pulled out MacIntyre’s central themes and set them out for the interested undergraduate or popular reader.

MacIntyre’s work has been influential (there’s a paper, for instance, in the latest issue of ISIS, applying MacIntyre’s concept of goods internal to a practice to the practice of science), but I’m not sure whether such an explanatory derivative work based on After Virtue exists. The posts of Father Stephen, an orthodox priest who maintains a popular blog, often draw on his arguments and in fact were where I realized I should probably read this book. (I don’t have an excuse for waiting so long, as an undergraduate roommate did his thesis on virtue ethics, and I ran into MacIntyre at least once during my time at Notre Dame.) Father Stephen goes so far as to say that he finds it useless to have discussions about modern morality (or lack thereof) unless his interlocutors have first read McIntyre’s work. I find that frustrating, as I imagine most people would find this book difficult going indeed. But the central concepts here are indeed crucial and deserve a far wider hearing. Indeed, the energy that most of us use arguing about morality, I would venture, would be far better applied to attempting to work through MacIntyre’s analysis.

A Brief History of Nearly Everything

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A Short History of Nearly EverythingA Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bill Bryson tries to do everything, and it totally pisses me off. It wouldn’t bother me so much if I could dismiss him, if what he did didn’t really matter very much or if he did it badly. But he does it with a certain curmudgeonly panache that makes it all the more irritating when he succeeds. He gets to travel to interesting places and write about how they make him cranky, which is pretty much the height of achievement for a writer. But when he takes on something like the entirety of the physical world itself in A Brief History of Nearly Everything and comes across even more genuine and reflective, I want to either give him a huge high-five or push him off a cliff.

The thing about this book, Bryson’s first work of natural history, is that it retains most of the best parts of his writing style and drops the most irritating aspects. That is, in Bryson’s travel writings I’m always annoyed at the way his cranky “get off my lawn” disposition stands in tension with a clear-eyed excitement and wonder about the places he’s going and the things he learns there. Much of this, at least in his UK work, is because he’s seen these places before, has spent much of his career trying to preserve them, and is embittered about the way they’re changing. In A Brief History, the subject matter precludes some of this personal irritation but retains his wonder about the nature of reality itself and the story of man’s investigation of it, and this to great effect.

Bryson is a writer who can pretty much—it seems—do whatever he wants. So when he came to the realization that he didn’t know much about the natural history of the planet he’s spend a career traveling around on, no one told him that he didn’t have the training or the background to write a compelling treatment. He just started reading books and talking to specialists, and A Brief History is what we got. Despite my expectations returning to the book after nearly a decade and a PhD later, I think he largely succeeds.

Now, of course there are errors and misrepresentations. Any specialist reading a book in which Bryson tries to cover so much ground is going to find one or two. At one point, for instance, Bryson causally mentions a distance to Betelgeuse that I think is off by an order of magnitude. But in general terms, he does a remarkably good job of taking a non-specialist on a tour of the physical world, through space and time but focusing primarily on our own planet and our own (sometimes misguided) attempts to understand it, highlighting all the while just how amazing it all is. And, of course, because it’s Bryson, all the weirdness and randomness and strange stories involved in the (largely male) folks who figured this stuff out figure prominently.

Of course, that approach lends itself to certain pitfalls in writing historical treatments of science, and Bryson doesn’t avoid these. The entire work is suffused with Whiggism. That is, Bryson is interested in explaining how we “got to” our (assumedly correct) modern understanding of things. In fairness, he recognizes how much uncertainty and conjecture there is in discussion of, for instance, our early history and origins as a species. But largely, his story is a narrative of how different scientists “got it right” or “almost got it right.” What they did is interpreted with the final modern synthesis in sight. He’s not interested in understanding the context in which someone like Isaac Newton was working or evaluating his theories by their own terms and historical context; he holds them up as a modernist looking through interesting oddities, pulling old things from a drawer and laughing at how quaint certain aspects appear.

But I can forgive a lot in this work, because there are so many interesting things to bring to light and Bryson still does such a great job of unearthing them. He admits that his work is in no way a standardized, authoritative, or comprehensive treatment. It’s not a textbook, and a different writer would have pulled out different interesting bits. Rather, as with Bryson’s other books, it’s a meander. But here we don’t get vignettes of Bryson falling asleep on a bus only to wake and berate the fate of a random seaside village; here we get instead a lot of genuine wonder and accessible prose leading us along into this big wide world and our long and tangled explorations of it.