This teaching semester has been keeping me so busy that I have not kept up with my monthly reading logs. I’ve had enough time to read, but I haven’t found the time to keep you, my reader, up with what I’ve been reading. I’ll attempt to remedy this now, by giving a very brisk run-down of my reading over the last three months.
This last three months has been dominated by fiction reading, so let me start
with the little pile of non-fiction that I enjoyed. First, for the philosophy,
I enjoyed Todd May’s Friendship in an
age of
Economics,
a nice little work in moral/social psychology on the value of friendship and
its usefulness as giving us insight into value that does not register in our
econometric age. For theology, I enjoyed one longer book, Women and the
Gender of
God,
by Amy Peeler, and two very slim books, Why Did
Jesus Have to
Die?,
by Jane Williams and
Passions of the
Soul, by
Jane’s husband, Rowan Williams.
The little Buddhist text on mindul living, The Practice of Not
Thinking,
by Ryunosuke Koike was a fun read, too. The final non-fiction book from the
last three months was very different to all of the others: Daniel P.
Friedman and David Thrane
Christiansen’s fun little dialogue The Little
Typer was a sweet little introduction to
dependent type theory, which I’ve been thinking
about lately, and I plan to
think about this some more in the coming year.
Here’s the fiction from the last three months: I started off September reading Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, a tale of a failed(?) Jesuit interplanetary mission to another (interstellar) planet. It’s a haunting, unsettling story, about faith, expectations, taking a leap into the dark, and what happens when everything goes wrong. Another novel about expectations was Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young African-American worker on a presidential campaign for a young charismatic African-American Senator from Illinois (never named). I read this early in October, and the resonances and the dissimilarities with the 2024 US presidential campaign were striking.
I also enjoyed two (short) novels from prize-winning authors: The Vegetarian, by Han Kang and Morning and Evening, by Jon Fosse, were both striking, beautifully written, tales from places (Korea, and Norway) the extremities of life, that I have not seen so starkly portrayed. Both stories will stay with me for a long time.
For a fun escapade, I read The Caledonian Gambit, the first entryt in Dan Moren’s sci-fi/espionage thriller. I enjoyed the ride so much I immediately devoured Pilot Error, the follow-up short story, and look forward to continuing the story with The Bayern Agenda, soon.
However, with the tension of the upcoming US election building (and then the disappointing but unsurprising let-down of the result), I decided to return to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, which I first read in on their release, in the 1990s. The three novels, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars tell the centuries-long tale of the human settlement of Mars, starting with the original mission of the first hundred, a US/Russian/International team of 100 scientists, and the scientific, engineering, social and political struggles involved in establishing human settlement in a new world. This time I added to my reading The Martians, the collection of associated short stories set in the same context (or interestingly alternate contexts, to consider some counterfactual scenarios where other choices are made.)
KSR always tells a thoughtful tale, in which we take a human perspective on world-historical events, and it was refreshing to spend time with smart folks trying to work their way into a liveable future for themselves and their neigbours (on Earth, and by the end of Green Mars, across the solar system), in the face of division, crisis and an unstable environment. Perhaps there’s something in that for all of us. There was something in that for me, at least, as we head into the uncertain future of the coming years.
