Recent Reads January 2024

 

The Mysteries – Watterson and Kascht

 

Everyone was excited that Watterson had a new project coming out.

 

But the buzz died down once it was released.

 

You can get this book and read through it in a few minutes.

 

It’s about the unknown and how we capture the unknown and it loses its power once we describe it and how the universe moves on without us.

 

It’s not that’s its bad but that people of my generation have such warm memories of what Watterson created before that anything was going to be something of a letdown. And that’s what this is, a bit of a letdown. At least the art is cool.

 

How the South Won Civil War – Heather Cox Richardson

 

I went through a couple of weeks there just reading books with depressing subject matter, and this was one of the more depressing.

 

Richardson covers just a litany about how racism was built into the country at its founding, and how it continues. What was interesting to me was how she traced the move of southern racism to go with the expanding west – an ideal of a lone cowboy on the frontier that replaced the tidewater cavaliers.

 

The only drawback is there are places where the narrative lags and feels a bit repetitive, which is balanced out by the shortness of the text.

 

A Creature Wanting Form – Luke O’Neil

O’Neil is one of my favorite writers working today, publishing in his “Welcome to Hellworld” newsletter where he shows his readers things to be both sad and mad about. This is a related text to that project, but it is his fictions (fictions that are very close to the real world but that allow him to shape the narrative some). They’re short and punch you in the gut and the best description is that these stories are like what emo would be if emo were a literary form and not a musical genre.  

 

Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict – Crossley & James

I enjoyed reading this materialist approach to the life of Jesus. It was a good exploration of both what his life would have been like and the world he lived in, as well as the construction of the gospels and the epistles. The author did a really good job putting the construction of the books of the bible in context in looking at similarities and differences in the stories between Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and examining how that represented what might have been going on in the larger “Jesus Movement” that sprang forth 2000 years ago. Even as an atheist, this book made me want to go back to the original text to look at it with fresh eyes.

 

A Fear of Too Much Justice – Bright & Kwak

 

Our authors here show the myriad ways that the justice system does not serve justice, from how differently different jurisdictions apply the death penalty and how hard it is to appeal those cases, to the problem of all-white juries to how disproportionate justice is meted out to the poor than it is to the rich (the right to an attorney being more on paper than in practice). It seems that the justice system in America exists more as a form of social control than a way to actually attain justice for any victims, real or perceived. It’s not that I didn’t know this going in, but books like this are good in that they lay out the case in a well-organized manner that gets you all red and mad with the system and those that perpetuate it. The problem, of course, is that it is way easier to look at the problems than to make a single fix. You can spend your whole career trying to reform just one little piece of the larger issues and though you would be doing a lot of good to the world, the system would still be 99.99% as bad as it was when you found it broken and wanted to go about fixing it.