Review: The New Testament and the People of God

The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first of N.T. Wright's epic 5 part book series on the origins of Christianity. Specifically, the series seeks to address two questions outlined in the first chapter, with respect to the New Testament:

1. How did Christianity begin, and why did it take the shape that it did?
2. What does Christianity believe, and does it make sense?

As the first title in the series, The NT and the People of God functions mainly to introduce the problems to be addressed by the rest of the series, as well the methodology that Wright intends to use while doing so, a process that he terms "critical realism." This is followed by a rather meaty set of chapters dedicated to explaining the historical context of both first century Judaism and the early Christian church at the time of the writing of the New Testament, as is known by modern scholarship today.

Much of Wright's attention is spent responding to the theories put forward by previous Biblical scholars (particularly Bultmann, whose name came up fairly often) in the modern/postmodern age, and his critical realism method is meant in part to address the flaws and mistaken assumptions that he sees in these theories. A lot of these issues are attributed to many a modern scholar's tendency or unwillingness to address the story of early Christianity on its own terms, preferring to read anachronistic post-Enlightenment ideas into the past (such as Christianity emerging from a Hellenistic or Gnostic worldview first and foremost as opposed to a Jewish one), rather than seeking to understand the historical context of a religion that more than likely sought to subvert the worldview of its Jewish predecessor in radical ways, or so Wright judges from the evidence available.

I can't really comment on how effective he is in making his argument due to a lack of familiarity with the theories in question, but from a layperson's perspective, his ideas are generally sound and help bring to light some insightful ways of understanding the New Testament that I hadn't realized before, particularly with respect to the different methods used in critical reading (pre-critical, historical, theological, and postmodern) and how the early Christians perceived themselves with respect to the existing traditions. Many of his claims are backed up with extensive research that can be referenced in the footnotes and extensive bibliography provided in the back of the book. His writing style is surprisingly accessible for reading in spite of all of this, which I think makes this a great gateway text for getting into further research in the field of biblical studies if desired.

Wright can be a little repetitive at times (lost track of how many times he used some variant of the phrase "investing space-time reality with its theological significance"), and at other points his argument feels a little incomplete or lacking in depth, which he even acknowledges sometimes, though part of this can be attributed to the low amount of available resources from the first century to go off of aside from the NT. Also, I'm not entirely sure if I agree with his proposal for critical realism as a sufficient epistemological method for general purposes, but at least it seems to serve this project well. Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing how the rest of the series plays out.

Review: Ulysses

Ulysses by James Joyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So this novel is rather wildly inaccessible for a first time read-through. I know it draws a lot of attention for turning up on a bunch of "best of the 20th century" novel lists like the Modern Library one, but it's not something anyone should feel obligated to read to be honest, considering how much work it takes to get to a point of understanding it. But if you're open to exploring a fairly unique reading experience, then it ends up being a pretty worthwhile one in the long run, especially on multiple re-readings because there's so much more to be gleaned than is possible on an initial reading... although I feel like I've been saying this a lot for other books already, haha. Just don't expect to understand everything the first time around, because you won't.

Being a mostly stream-of-consciousness work, there isn't much of an interesting plot persay; it's practically ~780 pages covering an average day in the life of an Irish-Jewish man (is that a proper-proper adjective?). Rather, this is a book that's worth reading more for its experimentation with narrative techniques and linguistic wordplay, and the ways in which Joyce uses those to enrich an ordinary everyman's day with a sense of both bewilderment and grandeur. It makes you realize how incredibly complex our lives are even in the most basic of details, and how often we tend to just glance over them without realizing it. Some parts of the book are actually really moving once you get into it- one of the most affecting takes on the struggle for human connection and (surprisingly) surrogate fatherhood that I've read, ever, maybe.

Given how difficult it is to read for the first time, a few tips that come to mind when reading:

1. Read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first. It precedes this work in time and gives a lot of insight into the backstory of Stephen Dedalus and his mental state, for which this novel functions almost as a sequel to. It's also shorter and technically more accessible, as it introduces you to some of the writing techniques that are expanded on in this book. If you can get past the stream of consciousness in that work, then this one won't feel quite so bad.

2. Other topics that help provide insight into the story: the general characters and structure of the Odyssey, Shakespeare's life and his major works, Irish national history at the turn of the 20th century, some of the major stories from the Bible, and the basic tenets of Catholicism... to name a few. But it's not really likely that most people reading this book would have all of that covered beforehand anyway; I would see these more as knowledge that would enhance subsequent readings.

3. Each of the chapters in the book functions as a largely standalone episode and relies on a different kind of writing style, ranging anywhere from the usual Joycean stream of consciousness, to a theater script with stage directions, to a Catholic-styled question and answer catechism, to a chaotic punctuation-and-paragraph-less thought blob that feels as though Joyce just vomited the novel onto its pages. In other words, they each read very differently. The difficulty fluctuates a lot, so one section of the book isn't generally representative of the rest of it. The beginning three Stephen-centric chapters in particular, while setting up for the rest of the novel, are a bit misleading as they differ a lot in tone from Bloom's chapters that take up the majority of the book.

4. I found it helpful to read a guidebook concurrently to get an overall feel of what was happening when I was having trouble with the writing style, and it actually made the process of re-reading individual passages a lot better as well, as you start to recognize a lot of details that you wouldn't notice on a first reading anyway. The Annotated book is also helpful for explaining the encyclopedic amount of allusions and external references, but isn't really necessary for a first go-over unless you like to interrupt your reading often.

5. Pay attention to objects and memories and sayings that occur more than once. Sometimes the details of a scene or memory won't be explained until several chapters after it's been introduced (you might not even have noticed it until that point), which ends up revealing that first appearance of it in a rather different light. It's really like trying to experience the memories/thoughts of another person without having any background knowledge of their past- it's not like you have to explain the context behind your own thoughts to yourself whenever you think them, right?

6. Don't take everything that's said or done at face value, because the line between what's happening in the external world and what's happening in people's minds is generally blurred to the point that the perspective will often switch between character thoughts and external narration mid-sentence. Not every conversation is actually being said, nor are people's impressions of what they see at any given moment necessarily accurate.

7. Just don't take the book that seriously to begin with. While there are overarching reasons for the narrative and word choices and references made, a lot of other stuff is just there because James Joyce is one of the biggest trolls in all of literature. (But that also makes for half of the fun with this book.)

Review: Pale Fire

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book can be deceiving, as it doesn't look anything like a novel, but it arguably is one. It basically consists of a foreword written by one author, a 999 line poem written by another, and an extensive commentary sorted into footnotes by the first author, and an index. The commentary itself is the real novel here, as the poem itself is... all right by poetry standards, I guess. But don't ask me cause I'm not a poetry person. Protip: don't listen to Kinbote in the foreword when he says to read the commentary before, during, and after the poem. You can do whatever the hell you want with this book.

But seriously, this book was one of the most fun reading experiences I've had in a long while. If there were ever a book in which writing notes in the margins significantly enhances the experience, I'd say it was this one. Sure, it relies on a lot of cross-referencing between the poem and the index and the footnoted commentary, but the ride became such a thrill as the "story" progressed that I didn't really mind it at all.

For lack of spoilers I won't say more, except to say that as usual, Nabokov's prose is king. He's so good at writing like an egotistical maniac. Although I have to wonder if he really is one... (From what I've heard, kinda probably.)

Review: A Dance with Dragons

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better than the last book, A Feast for Crows; the story finally feels like it's heading somewhere again. I guess it helps that Tyrion, Jon Snow, and Daenerys are finally back to give the plot a sense of direction, as without them the rest of the POV character chapters just feel like aimless, arbitrary distractions (granted, distractions that made for entertaining romps into the world of Westeros- that much I can appreciate). Even Theon's storyline alone in this book seems to accomplish more than the majority of AFFC, though, and what little details mattered from that book are continued in last third of this one anyway.

But at the same time, this book essentially suffers from the same problem that AFFC had: overwriting. In a way, most of the Song of Ice and Fire books have always had this problem, but the original first three had the benefit of taking on a conventional plot structure where their climaxes actually felt like an appropriate reward given (or in spite of) the length of each book.

This is less so with ADWD: Martin wound up writing so much for this and the last book that the major events that this book builds up to (The Battle of Slaver's Bay and The Battle of the North) got moved to the beginning of the next book, The Winds of Winter, and instead we're left with a bunch of cliffhanger moments that make it feel almost as if we've been stopped and left stranded right before the top of the roller coaster. There's no real resolution or conclusion of anything that's happened so far by the end, and given that we've had to trudge through over a thousand pages to get there, it almost feels like a rip-off. I say almost since I'm assuming the next book will come out... hopefully sometime in the next year or two. But you never know.

I recognize that Martin had issues trying to write both this and the last book in a coherent way - hence the splitting of POVs between the books by geographical location rather than making AFFC a two-volume work - but as this became less consistent towards the end of the book and more AFFC character POVs started coming back, it made me realize how flexible the chapter placement in this series is... and how awkward it is to suddenly have random characters turn up who you'd forgotten about from 500-pages-into-the-last-book ago.

I think it would've been more effective if he'd stuck to a normal chronological order and focused on making the character chapters more concise, perhaps condensing some of the aimless exposition details (so much writing about FOOD- no, I'm not interested in how cooked the locusts looked) and even scrapping some of the minor character POVs that barely contributed to the main plot; how many Greyjoy or Dorne character chapters do we really need anyway? Too much overwriting and even the likes of Tyrion or Jon Snow or Daenerys (well, especially Daenerys in this case... unfortunately) will seem whiny and frivolous. And if that happens, this series will lose a lot of what it has going for it.

Review: Children of Dune

Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

On first look, it kind of surprises me how polarizing the reaction to this book seems. A number of fans of the original Dune (and perhaps less-so Dune Messiah) seem to hate on this book and the rest of the series, whereas others would see it as just as good if not better than before - one of my friends went so far as to tell me that Children is actually the REAL Dune. So I went into this book curious of that prospect, mentioning last time that the previous sequel, Messiah, felt significant but incomplete in some senses.

Having finished it, I would say that I appreciate Dune Messiah more now after reading this, as I realize now how that book could stand alone without this one. It really was meant to be a more introspective look into Paul's character post-Dune, whereas Children of Dune for the most part feels very different without Paul as the central narrative focus. As the title would suggest, the attention in this book is on his children who were born at the end of the previous book, the twins Leto and Ghanima, although the attention goes more towards Leto- particularly so in the latter half as the story progresses towards him confronting the issues that his father was unable to deal with at the end of Messiah. Children is effectively Leto's coming of age story just as Dune was for Paul, but with much different results, and as such it feels like the beginning of a new arc as much as it does a conclusion to Paul's story.

The plot here is better balanced between action and talking/plotting than Messiah was, which I think is partly due to the longer length of Children. I guess a Dune book wouldn't be complete without lots and lots of competing factions and interests and political machinations going down, and there's plenty of that to be had here. Alia's internal conflict as a pre-born "Abomination" serves as one of the driving forces of the events in this book, and combined with Leto's rise to power, it makes for a rather engaging story overall. However, none of the characters really reach up to the same level of depth or interest as Paul did in the previous books, to be honest (although I'm glad Jessica is back, after missing her in the last one). Leto probably comes closest, but his (and Ghanima's) unusually precocious nature as a 9-year-old makes him come across as infinitely more creepy than Alia ever did, and that makes it rather harder to appreciate him as a main character in the same vein as Paul.

In addition, one of the major events in this book doesn't really make much... narrative sense, to me anyway. I won't say what it is for risk of spoiling, but the book claims the presence of foreshadowing in Messiah that I felt was vague enough in that book to potentially have been anything. So when this moment does come, it feels very out of the blue, and from my understanding is part of the reason why some of the other reviewers on goodreads feel that the Dune series went off the deep end with this book. And I can sympathize with that, because to be frankly honest, the manner in which this event resolves most of the of the plot threads in this book and its influence on future ones feels almost like a deus ex machina. If it weren't for my interest in the conflicts themselves, it would've made my eyes roll.

So at the end of it all, I'd say that Children of Dune has a lot of interesting ideas, but as with its predecessor, the execution feels a little off, but in the opposite sense from before. Where Messiah lacked in plot and pacing, it made up for it thematically in its handling of Paul's story arc, whereas conversely Children has a better plot but comes with some questionable design decisions in the story/characters and even in the context of the overall series. As before, I feel like I have to read the next book to really get the overall message here, but to be honest I don't really feel as interested or invested in doing so (or should I say, ugh... more Leto). It'll probably be a long while before I get to next one, if I ever do.

Review: Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, that adultery book where the adultery happens 100 pages in and the repercussions go on for another 700 pages. Typical Russian author.

Of course, it isn't really just about Anna or the adultery itself, since there's an entire half (more than half?) of the plot concerning the male co-protagonist Levin, whose story doesn't really have much to do with Anna at all but occasionally intertwines with hers at some points. It winds up making for an interesting parallel between the two, where one falls and the other rises, and less so because of their different genders (I suppose you could make a case for Tolstoy having a preference for family-oriented women... but I dunno about that) but rather because of their contrasting life philosophies in the face of their problems.

And I stress the word philosophies, because of how abstract and long-paragraph-winded the writing can get sometimes with all the talk about ideas and how Russian society should progress and the existential plight of the farmer and whatnot. A large part of this book would really be relevant to an educated Russian reader of the late 1800's, whereas for anyone today it would probably feel more like a chore to read.

But when it gets to the relationships and the social commentary and everyone's internal monologues, the prose is amazing. Tolstoy (and I guess by extension the translators - I read Pevear + Volokhonsky) really has a way with words, of putting succinctly observations about life and the situations we find ourselves in that we might vaguely realize but not yet know how to describe. I can't say I've had any experience with any of the situations described in this novel, but some of the thoughts and emotions conveyed by the characters felt very familiar and close to home... or maybe that's just a strength of the writing.

Towards the end I found myself starting to dislike Anna more, but I guess it's easy to judge someone for their irrational thoughts when you're looking at them from a distance and not trapped in their shoes. In spite of how annoyed I got with her thought process later, it didn't make her last chapter in the book any less exciting, though; compare with Levin, who I liked more as a person but found more tiring to follow at times. There's also a ton of other great characters in the book who take the spotlight at times to the point where it's easy to get lost without the help of a character list (per typical Russian novel fashion) like the one my version had at the beginning. I wonder if it's just me, but I actually liked Alexei Karenin... until near the end anyway.

Overall, a pretty good read; just expect to put a decent time investment into it because it's thick and dense and not easy and occasionally tangential (but there's definitely been a lot worse).

Review: Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexander Pushkin
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I don't think I can fairly rate this book as I have a harder time getting into poetry, or even narrative poetry in this case, compared with regular prose. Reading Eugene Onegin feels like reading one of Homer's poems, but with a heavy dose of Russian culture. Pushkin's significance to Russian literature is basically equivalent in the same sense (apparently in schools over there they even have to memorize parts of it?), although it's harder to pick up from just going off an English translation. That said, from an English perspective, the translation I read (Mitchell) did an impressive job with the rhymes it came up with and keeping the structure consistent with that of the original poem, so I can only imagine how much better it sounds to native Russian speakers.

As with a lot of Russian lit, knowing the historical context helps a lot in appreciating this work, and I think for some people reading about it might even be considerably more interesting than the poem itself (Nabokov's got a multi-volume translation of it that apparently sucks, but comes with an awesome self-researched encyclopedic volume of footnotes... note to look into it sometime). The characters are pretty archetypal and act in accordance with the popular Western-Russian social stereotypes of the time almost exactly to a fault, especially with Onegin being the somewhat careless Byronic hero. It's apparent that much of the tragedy in this story stems from how these standard social conventions and expectations don't work well in reality, something that Pushkin was probably trying to say about the culture he lived in. And from a modern point of view, I think most people would say that Onegin deserved what he got.

They say Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's version of what would've happened if Tatiana had made the opposite choice at the end of the day... I'm curious to see how that pans out. Sounds like it'd be just as depressing (or even moreso).