Category Archives: literature

book reviews, faith, literature, personal

Book Reviews, March 2015

In March I read two books from the Girl Canon, a list of “books not necessarily for girls but which investigate, address, or represent the female experience in some essential way.”  I’ve read a few of the books on that list already, but I found it a useful guide to add even more to my ever-growing “to read” list.  It’s almost like there are too many books!  I also, sad to say, have my first negative review this month.  It’s more fun to recommend good and great books, but it is useful to know which books to steer away from.

  • Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh is a classic in children’s lit (it says so on the back cover!), but I managed to never read it.  I’m glad I did, though.  Even before we started having kids, I liked to pick up YA lit or kids’ classics that I missed growing up every once in a while.  Some of it is nostalgia, I’m sure, but some of it is a curiosity to know what kids are reading these days or what my own kids will someday read.  And I just like good stories, so I’m not bothered if they happen to come in packages meant for a younger crowd.  If it was the only thing in my reading diet, that might be a problem.  But usually it’s once or twice a year as a change of pace.  Anyway, enough about me, what about Harriet?  I enjoyed most the aspect of her spying/observing the world.  She spends much of her time each day observing her classmates or the people in her neighborhood, jotting down questions, stray thoughts, and sharp barbs.  Some of it is simplistic (she is in sixth grade, after all), but much of it is her learning about people and how they relate to the world.  It’s not explicitly said, but she is learning about social stratification and class structure and her place in that structure.  She’s practicing to be a writer someday, and she is learning the empathy necessary to write about all kinds of people.  There are lots of misadventures along the way (it is a kids’ book after all), but she learns to be a better person herself, too.
  • The Forgers by Bradford Morrow is a disappointing thriller about books and forgery.  I had high hopes when I picked up the book on the NEW shelf at the library on a whim.  I’m a sucker for books about the love of books (I’ve got a future post percolating on the subject), but they sometimes disappoint, and when they do it’s a big letdown.  The Forgers isn’t bad, but it starts with more promise than it delivers.  It starts with the blurbs.  I picked up the book based on the gushing from respectable writers like Michael Cunningham and Joyce Carol Oates.  I figured if they liked a book labeled a thriller, it must be pretty good.  But I suspect they liked it for its meditations on fakery and deception, both literary and personal.  The beginning also hooked me in with the description of a grisly murder of a man in the rare book world (possibly a forger) who has had his hands chopped off.   I was compelled by the mystery for the majority of the book, but I expected more of a payoff at the end.  It seemed that the action dragged in the final third as if the reader was expected to get more out of the contemplation of duplicity and double-ness of forgery.  I guess I expected more thriller from my literary thriller.  Though it has its moments, I’m sad to say I don’t think I’d recommend this book.
  • Scripture and the Authority of God by N.T. Wright is a helpful book on a difficult topic.  Part of my difficulty was my confusion on what exactly “the authority of scripture” means.  Wright contends that the authority of scripture only makes sense as shorthand for “the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through scripture.”  The Bible is not a rule book or a book of doctrines, or at least not primarily so.  Rather, “most of its constituent parts, and all of it when put together […] can best be described as story.”  And this story is one that is ongoing.  In Wright’s formulation, we are currently in the last act of a five-act play: “creation, ‘fall,’ Israel, Jesus, and the church.”  The culmination of the story is the salvation of all of creation, not merely individual souls.  I liked all of these ideas, but it still remained mostly on a theoretical level, so I was glad that he presented some examples at the end of the book.  The first example of how to understand the Sabbath for today was particularly enlightening for me.  I liked the discussion about how Sabbath is sacred time (analogous to the Temple as sacred space) and the related theme of Jubilee.  Jubilee occurred every seventh year with the forgiveness of debts and then a great Jubilee on the fiftieth year (after seven seven year periods) with the restoration of land and the freedom of slaves.  It is the picture of the restoration of creation that Jesus inaugurated but that is not yet complete.  He closes the book with his second example of monogamy, which is more troublesome.  He contends that one man/one woman is the intended order of creation and the polygamy of the Old Testament was a sign of the disordered-ness of humanity after the first act of the play.  While it fits with his overall system and understanding of scripture, it doesn’t take into account LGBTQ individuals.  Despite my hesitation at the end of the book, I would still recommend it for anyone interested in the Bible and how to understand it.
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is delightfully macabre story of two sisters ostracized by their community.  When we first meet the narrator Mary Catherine Blackwood (affectionately called Merricat by her sister), she is shopping in the village.  She goes into town twice a week to get groceries and other necessities.  Their large house is outside of the small village, secluded from prying eyes.  They live apart, and that suits them and the villagers both fine.  Merricat lives with her sister Constance and their uncle Julian, who is an invalid.  The rest of the family, we soon learn, all died under mysterious circumstances years ago.  The Blackwoods are the object of morbid curiosity by the villagers, leading to confrontations as the sisters would rather live cloistered away from view.  Jackson gives us a wonderful narrator in Merricat, a woman we sympathize with and root for even as she does strange things like burying trinkets and money on their property or saying secret words to ward off impending danger.  The book is satisfying but not overlong, and still I wished I could spend more time with these delightfully eccentric sisters.  I’d recommend this novel to anyone who likes a slightly twisted and dark story.  As a side note, the edition I read had an introduction by Jonathan Lethem that gave some of Jackson’s bio and explicated the story, revealing most of the key plot points.  I skipped the intro initially and read it only after I had finished the book.  I wish books that had this kind of introduction would move it to the back of the book so that readers who don’t want to read spoilers could more easily avoid them.
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book reviews, comics, literature

Women Can, and Should, Be Superheroes, Too!

A brief follow up to my post from last summer where I talked about, among other things, the poor representation of women in comic books.  I’m here to report that there are some encouraging signs (though, as ever, there are still problems like Spider-woman’s butt and the poor treatment of Batwoman from editors and writers).  I just finished reading three of Marvel’s recent series featuring female characters, and they were all pretty great (plus two were actually written by women!).

Captain Marvel (written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and illustrated by David Lopez) and She-Hulk (written by Charles Soule and illustrated by Javier Pulido, primarily) are well rounded and capable heroes.  Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, is an Avenger, but she leaves Earth to patrol the galaxy.  I didn’t used to care much for cosmic heroes and stories because I thought it was too unrealistic (as if any superhero was “realistic”).  Now I’m simply looking for a good story well told, regardless of setting.  Carol is brave, if not a bit rash, but even when she bites off more than she can chew, she manages against the odds, just as any superhero does.  She doesn’t need to be rescued.  Jennifer Walters, aka She-Hulk, is a lawyer, despite her green skin, and a good one at that.  This new series takes her work as a lawyer seriously (which makes sense as the writer Soule is a practicing lawyer himself), foregrounding it more than the superhero action, though it has that, too.  Both series are refreshing in their portrayals of real women in superhero stories.  And the art in both books, though drawn by men in each instance, refrains from the cheesecake that so often mars comic books.

But the most exciting series of the bunch is Ms. Marvel (written by G. Willow Wilson and illustrated by Adrian Alphona).  It stars Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim teenage girl, who takes on the name of her hero Carol Danvers.  In many ways, Kamala is the new Spider-Man, a teenager who suddenly finds herself with superpowers, but still has to deal with the confusing world of being a teenager.  The story takes her seriously on every level, with her family, her friends, and her religion.  And, oh yeah, with her new powers and her new life as a superhero.  The art by Alphona gets teenagers right, which is no surprise after his previous work on Runaways.  It’s simultaneously a surprise and no wonder that the book is a success.  A book this complete should be a hit, but so often a book starring a character not the typical stereotype hero though written well is a critical darling before getting an early cancellation.  Fortunately, Kamala seems to be the exception.  I hope this is beginning of more and better representations of women for the comics industry.  This is a good start.

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book reviews, faith, history, literature, personal, science

Book Reviews, January 2015

Here is the first installment of mini book reviews that I promised earlier this year.  I’m planning on writing these reviews for nearly every book I read, first posting them on goodreads.com and then collecting them monthly to post here (so you can eagerly anticipate the next installment on February 28th!).  My goals for this project are twofold.  Most importantly, I want to make sure that I am paying attention and digesting what I read.  I’m hoping that the process of writing these reviews will encourage closer reading and understanding on my part.  The secondary goal is to provide useful book recommendations for anyone who reads my blog (I’ll try to avoid spoilers for the fiction reviews).  Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments.

  • Saving Darwin by Karl W. Giberson is a decent overview of the creation/evolution debate from a theistic evolutionist, if not as in depth as I would sometimes like.  But sometimes it’s good to step back and view many facets of a debate instead of focusing solely on particulars.  While I am in the same camp as Giberson (someone of faith who accepts evolution), I am still learning much about the issue.  So while I’ve enjoyed more thorough treatments of the Scopes trial by Edward Larson or the history of young earth creationism by Ronald Numbers, it was helpful to read a summary of the U.S. court cases since Scopes and an analysis of the “dark companions” of evolution such as social Darwinism and eugenics.  Giberson is well read on all aspects of the debate so I found his end notes especially helpful in preparing a further reading list to delve deeper on some of these issues.  As a Christian, I especially liked the section where he wrestled with intelligent design, admitting that he wished that the argument from design were true.  He cannot accept it theologically though because of what it would say about God when one considers bad designs (human knees that wear out) or seemingly horrific designs (various parasites).  Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone of faith willing to consider evolution and looking for a solid overview of the debate.
  • The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer is an enjoyable Sherlock Holmes adventure, filling in a perceived gap in the canonical works by Arthur Conan Doyle.  I only finished reading the complete Sherlock Holmes stories last year (though they were given to me when I was in junior high by my older brother—thanks Alex!), so I was looking for something more now that the BBC’s Sherlock is between seasons as well.  Meyer’s book was a decent “fix” for my itch.  Watson narrates, as he does most of the original stories, and his voice is a credible facsimile.  I never felt taken out of the story because of the narration.  The plot concerns Holmes’s addiction to cocaine (the “seven-per-cent solution” also mentioned in the original stories) and his heretofore unmentioned meeting with Sigmund Freud.  It’s all very clever and well done, but that’s part of what I didn’t love about the book.  It seems that books (or movies) like these—prequels, reboots, or continuations of famous characters or series—often succumb too much to fan service instead of trying to do something new.  By fan service, I mean bringing back beloved elements or tying together every last unexplained detail in the original or having a huge crossover event (world’s most famous detective meets the father of psychoanalysis!).  But maybe it’s the predictability of the original series that makes it beloved in the first place.  So a reasonable facsimile can keep people happy in the meantime.  I was reasonably entertained.
  • Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail by Robert E. Webber is a book I needed to read.  Perhaps it would have been even better if I had read it when I first started attending an Episcopal church in grad school.  The book is mostly a story, the first half Webber’s personal story from evangelicalism to the Episcopal church, and the second half the stories of other like-minded evangelical pilgrims on the Canterbury trail, so to speak.  Webber frames his own story as a search for six needs that he found fulfilled in the Anglican tradition: mystery, worship, sacraments, historic identity, ecumenicalism, and a holistic spirituality.  Sometimes I wished he would spend more time on any of these topics, but he was more concerned with telling his story instead of deep analysis of liturgy.  I suppose that means I need to look somewhere else for that kind of book.  I found Webber’s and his co-pilgrim’s stories comforting as they found richness and freedom in the same way as I have in the Episcopal church.  The book is not meant as a critique of the evangelical churches that they left, but merely a way to tell through personal spiritual journeys how not everyone’s needs are met in an evangelical church.  Webber points out the many strengths of evangelicalism and how the two traditions can learn from each other.  I think this is a book that any evangelical who is interested in liturgical worship should read.  Episcopalians should also seek out this book to find out why evangelicals (like me) were attracted to their door. [Please note that there is a newer edition of the book which keeps all of Webber’s text and story, but replaces the original co-pilgrims’ stories with newer examples.  I have not read this new edition, so I cannot say if I prefer it over the original.]
  • The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould is an excellent history of science that argues against biological determinism of intelligence.  His main argument is that intelligence is not a single, innate, heritable, quantifiable entity, able to be ranked.  By going back and looking at the data and methodology of key figures along the way, Gould is able to show where scientists erred.  He shows how easy it was for scientists’ bias to affect how they measured the size of skulls in the 19th century or how IQ tests for U.S. Army recruits in World War I were inadequately administered and the content biased against immigrants and those without formal education.  This history is humbling for science, a warning always to be aware of bias.  However, I had trouble following his arguments against the theory of general intelligence (g) by Spearman and later Burt.  It involves factor analysis, a method of statistics initially invented to analyze mental tests (but used for many other things).  I don’t have any background in statistics, so I couldn’t tell if his critiques hit the mark or not.  But I did understand when he pointed out that the correlations between a set of mental tests could just as easily show the advantages or deficits of environment as a biological IQ.  He also explained how using other statistical methods on the same data, it is possible to see multiple intelligences (as in Gardner) instead of one general intelligence underlying everything.  Gould wrote the book originally in 1981, but revised it after The Bell Curve came out in 1994 so that he could add a few supplementary essays rebutting it.  The Bell Curve made a big splash when it was published, but Gould feels that it was merely rehashing the same biological determinism of intelligence that he had already shown was mistaken.  I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the history of science or the science of intelligence. [Please note the comment below about the controversy surrounding this book]
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literature, personal

The Beginning

As I intimated at the end of my 10 Books post, I do have some thoughts to share about Chaim Potok’s novel In the Beginning.  It started off slower than his other novels, but I ended up loving it just as much as I have the others.  Perhaps one of the reasons it took me longer to get into the book is that I find I read books in smaller and smaller chunks at a time.  I rarely have the luxury to sit down and become fully absorbed in a book and read 100 pages at a time as I did in earlier days.  Now I have to prioritize more which books I even pick up.  I find that I set down a book much quicker than I used to.  I used to try to finish nearly everything I started.  These days, not so much.

In the Beginning is the story of David Lurie, a boy born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  David is a bookish and sickly little boy.  He has problems with a local bully who hates him because he is Jewish.  Because of its historical setting—it starts in the late 1920s before the stock market crash—I knew some of what to expect.  It was a Depression-era story, followed by World War II.  I knew about some of the American anti-Semitism of the time because of Philip Roth’s alternate history novel The Plot Against America.  But I still cried when the narrator and his family find out the full extent of the Nazi atrocities against Jews.

Like the other Potok novels I’ve read, it’s a book about fathers and sons, and the inevitability of conflict.  They’re all told from the perspective of the sons.  In this novel, the conflict stems from expectations, as it often will.  Before coming to America, David’s mother had been married briefly before to his father’s brother.  They had no children before he was killed in a pogrom—an organized anti-Jewish riot, often a massacre.  His father then stepped in and married his brother’s widow according to the ancient tradition of levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25: 5-10), though he could have easily gotten out of it.  He is a man of honor and his word.

David looks up to his father, but he doesn’t understand him.  He thinks about his dead uncle whom he is named after, and how he wouldn’t exist if his uncle hadn’t been killed.  He considers the contingency of his being.  Out of death comes life.  I’ve considered my own contingency lately.  Like many kids, when I was little I had a security blanket.  Mine was handmade by my Grandma.  It was red, white, and blue with the number 76 on it for America’s bicentennial.  The thing is, I was born in 1977.  The blanket had been intended for someone else—someone whose existence would’ve precluded my own.  But that baby didn’t survive a full nine months gestation, and so I had a chance at life.  It’s terrible to think my parents had to suffer such grief for me to enter the world.

When David considers his contingency on the death of his uncle David, he still “wants to be [his] own David” (311).  And I need to be my own person, too.  I’m still figuring it out.  In my own family, I’m a bit of an outlier.  I still have the faith that I was taught as a child, but it’s changed.  I no longer attend an evangelical church, instead finding solace in Episcopal services.  On political issues I’m often on the opposite side of the spectrum.  And while both my wife and I came from homes where our moms stayed home, now I’m the one home with the kids.  It’s traditional, except not in the expected way.  Fortunately, none of these differences has lead to any breaks with my family.  We still love each other very much.

As he grows older, David asks the hard questions about Judaism.  He becomes interested in source criticism.  He wishes to defend Torah from attack, but first he must learn what the goyim say.  He starts by reading books given to him by an old neighbor.  He finds books that are critical of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis.  Basically, this hypothesis posits that there are various sources that have been edited together to make up the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible traditionally ascribed to Moses.  Reading these books, even though they defend Torah, is frowned upon by his family and community.  They are dangerous to contemplate and read.  His father will not allow him to read books written by Germans while he is in the same room, even though they are written by important Orthodox rabbis.  No one in the community wants to consider what modern scholarship might say if it could destroy Torah.

I relate to David’s predicament.  When I was in Bible college I had a confrontation with a Bible professor about the inherent worth of studying secular literature.  At the time, I was an English major, and all I wanted to do was figure out how a Christian should relate to and read literature.  In my own way, I wanted to be a David and defend Christianity and the Bible from the evils of deconstructionism and other literary critical theories.  But my professor saw the reading of secular literature as a sullying influence, one that could easily lead one into sin.  Reading salacious stories could inflame lust in the mind, which was just as bad as committing sin with the body.

David’s curiosity for books and knowledge is insatiable.  One of my favorite moments in the book is when David finishes reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  He’s at a cabin on a lake with his family for an August holiday.  He spends a moment reflecting on how great the book is and how his understanding has changed because of it.  Then he goes back into the cabin to find another book to read.  I’m not nearly as prodigious in my reading or intellect as David, but I still relate to his curiosity.  I want to learn about so many things.  This blog is the testament to my curiosity, the place where I lay out what I am learning and starting to think.

In the end is his beginning.  David pursues his studies of the Bible as literature to the tremendous disappointment of his parents.  I’m about to embark on my own intellectual journey on a smaller scale.  Though practically having majored in Bible while at Bible college, I’ve never seriously grappled with any modern scholarship.  I’d like to know what scholars have to say about where the Bible came from and who the original audience for it was.  It’s important to my faith that I seek the truth about the book that is the vehicle for my knowledge of God.  I’m planning on reading through James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, in which he attempts to thread the needle between ancient interpreters and modern biblical scholars.  In his designation, the ancient interpreters are the basis for today’s traditional understandings of the Bible, while modern biblical scholars arose about 150 years ago and are those who read the Bible “‘scientifically’ and without presuppositions” (xiii).  I assume he means the presupposition of belief in its literal truth and divine origin, which in itself would be a presupposition.  I’ll have to read more to find out exactly what he means (chapter One is helpfully titled “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship”).  I say that he is threading the needle because he claims traditional faith, even as he wrestles with scholarship that “contradict[s] the accepted teachings of Judaism and Christianity” (xvi).  Kugel, by his own account, is a modern David Lurie.  I’d like to find out what he has learned in his journey.  I’ll report back on my own journey.

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literature, personal

10 Books

Not too long ago on Facebook, there was a meme making the rounds of 10 books that made an impression; basically an excuse to list one’s favorite books. I’m a sucker for lists and list-making. No one asked me to make a list, so I figured I’d do one for the blog, with explanations. I’m following the guide of books that made an impression, rather than my ten favorite books (which would be hard to figure out). I’m putting them in the approximate order that I read them.

Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
Perhaps the first book I read by an African American, and considering I was a freshman in college when I read it, that is very sad. Given to me by my sister, a beat up paperback held together with a rubber band. I remember being struck by many moments in the book, first of which was young Malcolm being told by a teacher that he couldn’t be a lawyer when he grew up, instead he should plan on something more realistic. Another moment was his descriptions of getting a “conk,” a lye treatment to straighten his hair. It opened my eyes to a cultural experience that I had never imagined (and later learned even more about when I saw Chris Rock’s Good Hair). I hope to have a lot more to say about Malcolm X soon as I’d like to read the recent biography by Manning Marable.

A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
I’ve talked about this book previously and how it changed my views on the universe. Until I read it, I felt comfortable in my insulated worldview of a young universe created approximately 10,000 years ago. It shook everything up.

Rose (Li-Young Lee)
This collection of poems, Lee’s first, is important to me personally for two reasons. I can’t remember reading a contemporary poet’s collection before this one. I was drawn in by the poems about memory and inheritance. It’s a lovely collection. But even more importantly, it was the first gift I gave to my future wife (that and a mix CD—ha! remember those?)

The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
Searing Vietnam stories that show the power of storytelling in the aftermath of trauma. That doesn’t make it sound nearly as good as it actually is. Memory shifts, unbalancing the reader. And the stories accumulate and adhere and echo, and the fiction all becomes more true.

The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Layers of fiction where a novel within a novel is more true than the story the narrator of the main novel tells. I’m not sure if I still go for that kind of book, but at the time I read it, I was fascinated by the slipperiness of truth, and how we tell ourselves stories (even bold fictions) to make sense of our lives.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Kathleen Norris)
This book came at an important time in my life. I had recently moved to North Dakota as a grad student and didn’t know anybody there. I was looking for a different church experience and found comfort in the Episcopal service. I also found Norris, first The Cloister Walk and then Amazing Grace. She talked about Christian community that was rooted in history, tradition, and literature. Her books, too, were comforting.

So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell)
When I first read So Long, See You Tomorrow, I didn’t imagine Maxwell would become my favorite author. I read it too quickly for a class assignment. But I read it again on my own, and then his other novels and stories. I don’t think I’ve come across a writer with so much empathy and compassion for other people. And he writes such beautiful sentences.

Virtually Normal (Andrew Sullivan)
This book (along with What God Has Joined Together by David Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni) made me rethink gay marriage. I realized that disallowing gays and lesbians from traditions and social institutions and then condemning them for not conforming to traditions and social institutions makes no sense. And I’m not the only one. Public opinion on gay marriage has changed quite a bit since he wrote the book in the mid-90s.

My Antonia (Willa Cather)
This is a beautiful coming of age story set on the American prairie, tinged with sadness. The title character is only seen at a distance, through the eyes of the narrator Jim Burden. It’s a story told in episodes, much the way our memory works. I supposedly read it in high school, but I had trouble reading for class back then. I read a lot on my own, but I didn’t like being told to read a book. I rediscovered the book shortly before moving to South Dakota. I wanted to read a novel of the prairie, and I ended up falling in love with Cather’s books.

My Name Is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok)
It was hard to choose which Potok book for this list. I’ve only read three of his so far, but I’ve loved each of them (and I just started a fourth). This was the first one I read, and our oldest son’s middle name is Asher. What I love about Potok is that he takes religious belief seriously in his characters. Though his characters live in the world of Hasidim and Orthodox Judaism I can see the similarities and parallels in the fundamentalism I grew up in. Purity and piety are prized above all else. There is no room for art because it is dangerous. Asher Lev wrestles with the twin pulls of God and artistic expression in this beautiful novel. Perhaps I’ll manage to have something worthwhile to say about the current book I’m reading in the near future. I hope not to take so long between posts in the future.

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literature, personal

He-Man Woman Haters Club?

I recently finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books (all six of them), and I’m sad that there are no more.    The Earthsea books have magic and dragons, but what really impressed me is the depth of the female characters.  As much as I enjoy Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it’s really a story about dudes.  Sure, you have Eowyn disguising herself as a man and killing the witch-king, but by the end of the story she’s given up fighting to settle down as a healer and wife.  I’ve also enjoyed George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which has many well-rounded female characters, but the world in which they live is so brutal.  You wouldn’t wish it on your ex-girlfriend (I hope!). Thus it was a welcome change to read Le Guin’s series, especially the books in the series that treat the roles of women as interesting.

The first and third Earthsea books have familiar quest narrative plots, the kind of thing Tolkien made famous and has been copied time and again in the fantasy genre [e.g. a young man, raised by his uncle, growing up on a farm, always dreaming of the world beyond the horizon and feeling different from the other kids, meets a mysterious stranger and suddenly his life is an adventure with elves and magic and stuff].  That’s not to say that Le Guin doesn’t do a good job with the quest trope: the narrative in the first book follows naturally out of the main character’s personality and motivations (his name is Ged, by the way, a deliciously ridiculous fantasy name).  By the third book he is older and wiser, but again on a typical fantasy quest to the land of the dead.  However, it’s when the series departs from the exploits of Ged and focuses on women, especially Tenar, that it really shines and stands apart from the fantasy that I’ve read.

The second and fourth books focus on the lives of women and the options that they have in the world of Earthsea.  The stories are about the daily lives of women instead of merely writing another quest with a woman in the role of protagonist instead of a man.  The second book focuses on the childhood of Tenar when she is groomed to become the high priestess in a mysterious religion on the outskirts of Earthsea.  As a priestess she is isolated from everyone, especially men.  She has nominal power, but two old priestesses really run the show at the temple.  None of them have actual power anyway.  The fourth book is primarily a domestic novel.  Years later Tenar is a widow living on a small farm by herself.  Her children are grown, but she takes in an abused and abandoned girl and adopts her.  Their life together constitutes much of the book.  The contrast to the male quest narratives is stark.  Ultimately, the climax of this mostly quiet and excellent book is the most important revelation of the entire series.  It turns the patriarchal world of male wizards and monarchs on its head, setting up a conclusion of ultimate reconciliation in the sixth book.

The series can be described as feminist in a genre not known for its progressive attitudes towards women.  And it’s good, too.  The writing is strong and economical (the books are short compared to the usual heavy tomes associated with the genre).  It definitely deserves its place in the Fantasy Hall of Fame.  But its respect for female characters definitely makes it an outlier.  And it got me thinking about my enjoyment of other genre fiction.  When I’m not reading serious books, I enjoy getting swept up in a spy novel, a hard-boiled mystery, or some super-hero comics.  I try to be discriminating and find out which are the best of the best in these genres and stick to those.  But it doesn’t change the fact that these genres by and large have trouble with their depictions of women.

The A.V. Club had a feature up yesterday about the state of superhero comics in regard to gender and minority representation.  The panel discussion highlights some positive steps the comics industry has made (like a new teenage Muslim Ms. Marvel), while also talking about how much better it could and should be in the area of in its representations of women and minorities (seriously, check out the Hawkeye Initiative to see how ridiculous the representation of women can be).  Some of my favorite superhero stories of the last decade or so involve female characters (e.g. Renee Montoya in Gotham Central and later in Fifty Two, Batwoman first introduced in Fifty Two and then later getting her own series, and the most recent incarnation of Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello).  But all of these stories were still written by dudes.  Not that dudes can’t write good women characters (but they usually don’t), but there should be options.  DC and Marvel need to hire more women writers (and editors, artists, and colorists, etc.), not just to write women characters, but to tell good stories.

So what does that say about me?  Looking at the rows of comics on my bookshelf, I suddenly have the urge to trot out my feminist bona fides.  Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather are two of my very favorite authors.  My wife works while I stay home with the kids.  I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer (thanks to my wife).  I believe pay inequality is a real issue that needs correcting.  I listen to Lucinda Williams and Cat Power.  I think we’re long past due having a woman president.  I accept influence! Really!  But I can’t shake off my disturbed feeling at how much enjoyment I have derived from literature that does not treat women with adequate respect.  Just reading Ursula Le Guin doesn’t make up for it.

Often the only role a woman plays in a spy or detective novel – another of my (now guilty) pleasure genres — is the love interest.  Or the femme fatale.  And I usually gloss over the sad representation of women as I try to figure out who committed the murder or if the hero will get the intel out from behind enemy lines.  Sometimes I’ll notice how cliché or predictable the women characters are, but I forge on, even relishing the sad loner-ness of our anti-hero protagonist in his fight against the injustice of the world.  But mostly I sleepwalk through the stories, turning pages to find out what happens.

I’m waking up to it.  A lot of this escapist reading goes back to the type of reading I did as a kid.  Reading cold war spy novels or X-Men comics in my room.  It’s comforting to try to return to that seemingly simpler time.  A few years back I reread some of the authors I liked in high school and I was embarrassed for myself.  That’s nothing new, I suppose, but it was like cold water on the face.  The stuff I read now, more highbrow than what I read then (spy novels by le Carre or mysteries by Benjamin Black), still can hardly be called feminist lit.  It’s a good thing it’s not a large percentage of my literary diet.

Maybe reading is like the food pyramid.  It’s important to have a diverse and wide-ranging diet of authors and genres.  And it’s okay to have dessert, but not too much, or I’ll get sick.  Or to try another food analogy, maybe sexism in literature is like MSG.  It’s not good for me, but it’s in lots of yummy foods so I eat it anyway, hoping it won’t harm me.

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