Happy New Year, everyone!
As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve finished another month of reading, so let’s close
out my log of books read over 2024 with a short description of December’s reading.
First up, I enjoyed reading the second entry in
Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War series:
The Bayern Agenda.
As with the previous entry,
this was a fun spy thriller, with a cold war science fictional setting.
Dan Moren has a deft hand as an author, weaving a
plot which balances ratcheting tension and building suspense, while treating
the reader—and his characters—with respect. I will enjoy reading the remaining
entries in the series in the coming months.
My second novel was very different: I re-read George MacDonald’s
Lilith, a fantasy,
first published in 1895. MacDonald was a Scottish author (and Congregational
minister) who mentored Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), and whose work inspired
and influenced other religiously inflected writers of fantasy, such as J. R. R. Tolkien,
Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis. Lilith is an odd book: it’s the story of Mr Vane,
a man whose life centres on his library (and, we later discover, his love of horses), and
who has few significant relationships with other people. His library seems to be haunted
by its former librarian, and soon, Mr Vane is transported to another world, many adventures
are had, mistakes are made and lessons are learned. (I’m being very general and schematic
here. I’d rather leave it for you to
read to learn the
details for yourself.) What most interested me most in this re-reading was MacDonald’s
view of conversion and personal transformation. MacDonald was a universalist (one who
believes that God will save everyone in the end), and in Lilith, MacDonald’s universalism
is on display, telling a tale in which the resolution is not one where the antagonists are
destroyed, but rather, move towards reconciliation.
There were three non-fiction books in December. I read each with some notion of trying
to understand more about the situation we find ourselves in, as we head into 2025. I will briefly
mention them here, and let you draw your own conclusions of why they might be especially relevant
in the year ahead:
-
Angrynomics, (Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth) — on the social and psychological consequences of austerity and increasing inequality, and what we might do about it.
-
We Become what we
Normalize,
(David Dark) — David Dark has
a good sense of the phenomenology of conversation, both face-to-face and
online. Dark is the boy who cries out that the emperor has no clothes, where
the emperor is the tacit web of conventions that all-too-often lead us to
ignore what we would (in any other circumstance) recognise is right, and
lead us to treat our neighbours as something less than fellow humans worth
our respect and care.
-
You’re Not Listening, (Kate Murphy)
— Dark’s books pairs well with this easy-to-read journalistic book on what is involved in
really listening to others. It’s a compilation of anecdotes and examples, strung together
well by Kate Murphy, a journalist for whom listening to others is the wellspring of her trade.
This was a fitting reminder to me, as my own work finds me alternating between the intensely
private world of reading and thinking and pondering and writing, where I am “in
my own head” for hours at a time, and the equally intensely social and dialogical
world of teaching, whether that be in large group lectures, small group
tutorials, or one-on-one supervision. I love the opportunity to work in both those spaces,
but as someone whose comfort zone is introversion, I must work at doing the
social and dialogical thing well. Murphy’s book was a good reminder of the
benefits of doing that work, as well as a trove of examples of different ways it can be done.
My goal for 2024 was to average five books per-month, and I closed out the year
with 66 books read since I started keeping track in March, which amounts to 5.5 per month
over the year. So, the discipline of writing a book summary each month (or so)
here seems to have paid off well.
I won’t promise that I’ll keep writing these up in the same depth over 2025, but I’m confident that I’ll keep reading over this next year.
