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.
