Hello Monthly Book Recommendation Post!

From the Bookshelf, April 2024

Apr 19, 2024

Rotunda of the Bank of England, Joseph Michael Gandy, 1798

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”

-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Hello all! Happy Friday!

Today we’re talking about a few books I’ve read recently that I really enjoyed!

We’ll be doing this once a month going forward, and do note that when I say “book,” I use the term rather broadly. On one end of things, I of course mean literal, physical books. I do read those. But! One, it is worth noting that quite often my own reading is done via audiobook because car rides and laundry folding sessions are all too often the best time I have to tackle the books I want to get to. So audiobooks count. And two! I also really love film and animation… so movie and television series recommendations will typically be here as well.

Now. Why are we doing this? Well, first of all, it’s fun. I love getting book recommendations from people. Beyond that, however… you see, while I am writing a book, I haven’t exactly got a book to share with you all yet. It’s going to be a little while before that tome is ready to face the world, and sending updates about writing it and nothing else seems to me like it could be a little boring to you. Unless you are also a novelist who likes to listen to other people talk about writing their novels. I am that person. I know that’s not everyone, however. So I figured that book recommendations could be a bit more relevant to you and I hope you can enjoy them!

Most of the recommendations will be addressed toward adult readers, but I will throw in one children’s book recommendation at the end of every round of this as well — because I have a two year old and I spend a lot of time with picture books.

It is also worth noting that — while it feels somewhat silly to have to say this, but hello internet — a recommendation here does not mean that I believe the book to be perfect or that I agree with every single thing that it says. Only that overall I think it gets more right than it does wrong and that in reading it, you’ll find valuable and insightful ideas within, once having sifted through it like the capable and intelligent adult you undoubtedly are :)

With that out of the way, let us begin!

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Shocking though it may be, I never read a page of Jane Austen until I was twenty seven years old.1

Meaning… not until this January.

Now, I went into 2024 seeking to remedy this issue, and that does remain my goal, so please prepare yourself for a lot of Jane Austen talk in the coming months. Either way, Pride and Prejudice is probably Austen’s most famous work, so I figured I would start there.

Aaaaaand I loved it. I really, really loved it.

I knew the general gist of the story, the central characters and conflicts and who would get together in the end. There were few surprises for me in terms of the novel’s content, but I’ve never been a reader bothered by story spoilers anyway. It’s always more about how we get there that leaves the impression for me. And indeed did Pride and Prejudice leave an impression.

This is by no means an extensive review — these never will be — but I do want to note two things about the book that very much stood out to me.

First of all, I’m always a characters first kind of reader and writer. I read and write because people are fascinating, plain and simple. But I really love the way Jane Austen handles her characters and their inner lives. Their change and growth is subtle and organic and slow, which both grounds the story very realistically and creates a slow burn that is gut-wrenching to sit through at times. And I dunno, I think there’s just something really nice about characters actively wrestling with the demands of virtue and the universal need for self-reflection and reform within the context of an everyday life that, while different in many ways from my own, has that struggle in common. I think it’s neat.

Moving on.

Secondly, the language. It’s been a little while since I’ve read a more classic piece of literature. For the past decade or so, I haven’t been that focused on reading at all, given my long journey into the world of anime and manga that very much (happily) defined my college years. And even when my lack of reading started to really bother me circa 2022, I turned my attention to Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere novels,2 and he has a pretty modern, sparse style of prose. Jane Austen, on the other hand, while very not-by-textbook-2024-writing-advice in the details she chooses to focus on versus skim over, clearly poured thought, effort, and deliberation into every word on every page she wrote. It’s been quite some time that I’ve been in love with and left to mull over not only the events of a story and the characters and themes therein, but the very words with which those things are expressed. There were so many turns of phrase that I wanted to burn into my memory and reread over and over again simply by virtue of the beauty and wit of the language. This is not something I paid much attention to as a young reader, but now as an adult reader and most especially as a writer, it is something that very much captures me.

So. To more Jane Austen in 2024!

Next up…

Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport

So yeah. This was a very appropriate read to undertake during a Lent in which I turned my smartphone into a dumb-ish phone.3

And I very much appreciate Digital Minimalism because I think it’s both balanced and challenging. It’s not a “you must throw out your smartphone and go live on a farm NOW” kind of book, but he does suggest you do more than you might think you need to do in order to have a healthy relationship with the technology in your life — making the most of it without being controlled by it.

It’s a very practical book, filled with tangible suggested practices. Take long, quiet walks to have the solitude that allows you to think well. Use things like text messaging primarily to set up times for visits or phone/video calls rather than just chasing endless trains of chats. Define set, limited times in which you engage with online content that you find genuinely helpful and let the rest go. Take up meaningful, creative forms of leisure that edify you and bring the best out of you rather than filling your limited free time with numbing distraction.

Just to name a few.

Of course, that’s all easier said than done for someone who, like me, has used digital technologies as a crutch in many ways for many years. Which is why Newport recommends a window of about 30 days of what he calls a “digital declutter” in which you remove almost all non-essential technology from your life so you have time to rediscover analog interests and forms of social interaction. THEN you decide what you still really want in your digital life afterward. And believe me… you want less after than you did before. Not because it’s all bad, no. But with a little time away, you realize how much of life you were being taken away from when spending so, so much time in a virtual one. And only the best online things, the most helpful online things are the ones you will carefully and deliberately let back in.

It’s a great book. Read it.

Well-argued, well-researched. Extremely practical. Applicable to a lot of different life states and situations. A simple book, but it’s actually probably one of the few books that I would recommend to absolutely everyone. Because, one, we all have to manage our relationship with technology and, two, Newport really seems to respect his readers’ ability to take what he says and reapply it in their own particular ways. His proposal is challenging, but it’s very much up to you what you make of it. So give it a shot. It’s an incredibly helpful book.

Aaaaand finally…

The Chosen

Yeah… it’s good. The Chosen is very good.

It took me long enough to get around with it, truly years worth of recommendations from family and friends, and at the start of February, the whole house was sick, which meant quite a lot of TV time. And so we watched all three seasons of The Chosen in a week. With no regrets whatsoever.

For context, I’ve been disappointed by Christian media before. It’s just so easy to do it poorly. And unfortunately, good intentions are often not enough to make up for sub-par writing or production quality, overly simplified and preachy messaging, or any number of other problems that plague far too much Christian film-making. Good Christian art necessarily must be both good as Christian and good as art. To neglect craft and gloss over nuance in one’s work is to do a disservice to both of these necessary forms of goodness.

I’m happy to say that The Chosen as a series does not do that. It’s extremely well put together both from a production standpoint4 and a writing one. I love, love, love to see the lives of the Apostles fleshed out as they are. Knowing plenty of additions of course to be fictional liberties, they are nonetheless very real and very human and I truly love to see them. Jonathan Roumie as Jesus is excellent, but you probably knew that already. And it is just so plainly obvious that so much care and attention and enthusiasm, not to mention genuine faith, was put into every moment of the show.

I’m not without my quibbles, both theological and artistic, but overall, The Chosen really is one of the best things I’ve watched in quite some time.

And, you know, it did what it was supposed to do as well. It made me long for Christ in a totally new way. As such, I followed up my viewing of the first three seasons of The Chosen by reading the four gospels in their entirety for Lent this year. Which deepened that longing all over again. I’m now moving onto Acts, and I hope to match my scriptural studies with some other more historical research and other primary source reading with respect to the early Church in the near future.5

Anyway. No, this is not wholly due to The Chosen. I’d known I needed to reapproach the Gospels in full for quite some time, because it had been a while since I read them properly and we need to encounter Christ anew over and over again over the course of our lives as we grow and change. So no, I’m not going to say something like “The Chosen changed my life!!!” But, it did accelerate this process of seeking for me. It helped deepen my love for my faith after a bit of a spiritually drier period in life. It brought back to the forefront of my mind the utterly strange and utterly awe-inspiring reality of those days in Galilee two millennia ago.

And so I’ll give it some credit for sure :)

And now one for the kiddos!

Bear Snores On — or as we call them in our house, “the Bear books,” because there are several and we own five total — is kind of just the best. It’s a quick little board book with lovely art. It’s written in verse that is so easy and playful to read. The premise of all the little animals throwing a party in Bear’s lair as he sleeps is ever so endearing. And yes, I’ve read it so many times over the course of the past year or so that I can recite the whole thing from memory. BUT I’m still not tired of it. That’s what’s most impressive.

“In a cave in the woods,
in his deep, dark lair,
through the long, cold winter
sleeps a great brown bear…”

But… yeah. That’s it for today!

Have you read any of the above books? If so, what are your thoughts on them? I’d love to hear down in the comments. Feel free to give some other book recommendations as well!

OH! And one more silly thing. If you are more well-versed in Jane Austen than I am, I’d love to hear your recommended Jane Austen reading order. Her works are short enough that I think I can finish them by the end of 2024 without issue, but I hear a million different things about which ones are best and how to read them… so I’d love to hear your thoughts and reasons for them as well to help me decide :)