As I’ve mentioned here before, I
love books, and I prefer the printed kind to ebooks, although I do read books
occasionally on my iPad. Lately, though, things have gotten a little out of
control. A couple of months ago, I counted and was mildly surprised to learn
that I was reading eight books at the same time. And that didn’t count the
issue of Dialogue I was reading while I shaved in the mornings or the
issue of the Journal of Mormon History I was reading during lunch at
work. I was reading two books at work to give me a break from editing. One was
Christopher Blythe’s fine volume Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and
the American Apocalypse, which I finished last month. The other was a book
by one of our BYU Studies authors, Greg Dundas. I’m still enjoying his Explaining
Mormonism: A Believing Skeptic’s Guide to the Latter-day Saint Worldview. My
only complaint about his book is the subtitle. Compared to the questions I have
in my own head, he’s not really a skeptic, but what I would consider a true
believer. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting book.
That means I was reading six books
simultaneously at home. This requires a little unpacking. Two of the books are
on my iPad, and I read them only Tuesday and Thursday mornings while I’m
logging miles on the elliptical in the basement. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
I get my exercise on the basketball court, with a group that is kind enough to still
let me play at my age. These two early-morning ebooks are the Maxwell
Institute’s Early Christians and the University of Utah Press
publication Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects
in the Development of Mormon Christianity. The other four books I was
reading mostly in the evening. I was slowly working my way through Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich’s A Houseful of Women, which I also finished last month.
The other three were books that,
for various reasons, I couldn’t read more than a couple of pages in without
putting them down. One is a book by Swedish-American physicist and cosmologist
Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of
Reality. This book was recommended to me by a reader of my Dialogue
essay on cosmology. It is a fascinating book, but it is about twelve stories
over my head. I understand maybe a tenth of what I’m reading, so after wading
through a couple of pages, my brain is on overload. The second is one I picked
up after Stephen Cranney mentioned it in a blog post on Times and Seasons. It
is titled Confessions of a Sociopath and is written by a Latter-day
Saint law professor (pseudonym M. E. Thomas) who takes great joy in describing
her amoral approach to life. Some curious readers have figured out what her
real name is and have posted it online, but it’s not really relevant to what I’m
writing about here. I’ll finish this book eventually, but after a couple of
pages I get tired of the author’s narcissism and braggadocio. The earlier
chapters about her childhood and how she navigates being an active member of
the Church without any apparent conscience or moral center were more
interesting than her later chapters about how she finds great satisfaction in
using and destroying people. All that matters to her is her own superiority.
It’s kind of like listening to Donald Trump for more than a minute. The final
book is The Catcher in the Rye, which I also finished last month and which
was certainly more attention-grabbing than either of the two books just
mentioned. But still, reading the ramblings of a depressed, judgmental teenager
who smokes a lot while wandering around New York City is not exactly like
reading David Baldacci or John Grisham. A page-turner it ain’t.
Catcher, though, is part of
my attempt to make up for a gap in my education when I was young. Somehow I
made it through high school and six years of college without reading a lot of
books considered classics. So, in the recent past I’ve read books like The
Road by Cormac McCarthy (which, by the way, was a fascinating read) and
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (which was not). And here I must disappoint
anyone who loves the whale book. As a three-time novelist and a thirty-year
editor, reading Moby Dick was unexpectedly agonizing. I know it’s
supposed to be great literature, but I have never read an author who tortures
the English language or bores his readers quite like Melville. Yes, I now know
more about sperm whales than anyone other than a whaler or a cetologist has any
right to know, but for heaven’s sake, the white whale doesn’t even show up in
the story until page 552. And the climax of this story is largely
underwhelming. Sorry for disparaging what some people regard as the greatest
book they have ever read, but for me it was pure misery. It took me years to
finish it, and at the end, I can’t say I’m glad I read it.
I can’t say the same thing,
however, for the book I started once I’d finished Catcher in the Rye.
When I want to read an excellent writer, I pick up a Scott Turow novel. I’m
slowly working my way through his legal sagas of the fictitious Kindle County
and its fascinating inhabitants. Turow’s descriptions are superb, but it is how
he delves into the souls and personalities of his characters that sets him
apart from the aforementioned Grishams and Baldaccis of the literary world. His
plots are intricate and his characters complex, and these two primary elements
of literature weave together to create satisfying stories that reflect so much
of real life that they very well could be. Because his characters are wonderfully
flawed, his stories often include, shall we say, the darker aspects of
mortality that Mormon fiction too often avoids. In other words, his stories are
definitely R-rated. But then, so is life.
I have a list of books I intend to
get to eventually, but for now I think I’d better keep my reading to a more
manageable six simultaneous volumes. Maybe next spring when I retire, I’ll have
more time to expand my smorgasbord of books. Or maybe I’ll even try writing
another novel. We’ll see.
