Hi friends,
December was a really fun month for our family. I’ve always enjoyed Christmas, but it is just so much fun with little kids in the house. We got into the Christmas spirit with some cookie making and caroling, and then all enjoyed the Christmas program at Church the Sunday before Christmas as well as a Christmas Eve nativity reenactment with my in-laws and nieces and nephews. Since there are six of us now and my parents and brother were visiting, Christmas morning was full to bursting with fun and presents. The highlight was the new jungle gym and swingset that Dan and I got for the kids. It was so unseasonably warm on Christmas that my dad, brother, and Dan had no problem spending most of Christmas and Boxing Day assembling it. The kids love it. So far, their favorite game to play has been pirate, and we’ve had only one bloody nose from Lincoln falling off the monkey bars. So, I’d call that a success!
My present to myself was six books that I got signed by the authors at Dragonsteel Nexus. A perfect gift!
I also got in a few good reads this month, with the longest book I’ve read this year taking up most of my reading time for the month. Let me know what you think of these books and if you have any recommendations for further reading.
Happy New Year!
Tonya
Sounded in Every Ear 1955-2020 (Saints #4) by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This is the last volume in the Church’s official telling of its own history, and it read really similarly to the other three volumes. It was kind of weird to read about events that happened in my life time as “history,” and I definitely got the feeling that I’m getting old…. Beyond that, it’s fairly obvious that the writing is done by committee and not individual. As a person who does writing by committee professionally, I can tell the style. I would remind anyone picking up these books that this is the Church telling its own history, and the book is quite up front about that, so don’t expect to get a detailed rundown of all the awkward and embarrassing moments from Church history of the past 70 years. That being said, the recounting of the lifting of the priesthood ban for people of African descent largely aligned with what I had read in Second Hand Saints, and didn’t shy away from presenting the harms that Black members suffered as a result of the ban. Reading a current history like this always makes me wonder how events that we’re experiencing today will age and be presented to future generations. Hopefully, I’m around long enough to see Volume 5 in this series be published. We’ll see! I’d recommend this book and the other three for all members of the Church to better understand the history of our faith.
The Strength of the Few (Hierarchy #2) by James Islington
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: The second book in the Hierarchy series picks up immediately where the first book left off and answers some of the cliff hanger questions we were left with at the end of that book. That being said, this book has a very different feel than the first. We follow three separate-ish point-of-views instead of just one and get to learn so much more about the magic that dictates this world’s social and political order. The action was great, and Vis continued to be way too good at everything that he tried, including learning the ins and outs of how to wield his new magic and throwing rocks really far. I’m not kidding about the rocks. This one did feel like it had less morale conflict for Vis than the first. In the first, Vis is super conflicted about using the will-based magic system where the vast majority of the plebeian population cedes their life force (a.k.a will) to a select few in the upper echelons of society. In this one, this conflict is quickly resolved as Vis has to perpetuate the double life that he’s committed to. A lot of this book felt like set up for the next installment, and this one was sufficiently well written that I will definitely be picking it up.
Shadows Upon Time (Sun Eater #7) by Christopher Ruocchio
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This is the last installment in Ruocchio’s epic scifi masterpiece. In this one, we get to see the resolution of Hadrian’s promised sun eating. From page one of the first book, Hadrian has been narrating his life story explaining his side of the story and justifying why he blew up an entire sun, wiping out an entire alien species while also killing billions of humans. I had conflicting feelings about this book. I really liked the action sequences and enjoyed seeing Hadrian fulfill his promised destiny, and I always enjoy Hadrian’s extremely melodramatic prose. However, this book was over 1,300 pages long, and while I don’t mind reading long books, I do feel like they have to justify the page count, and I don’t think this one did. Some of the climax fight scenes felt way too drawn out, and a lot of the beginning of the book felt repetitive of conflicts we’d already seen in previous installments. That being said there were some epic and emotional moments, especially with Hadrian and the emperor, who was the only not-Hadrian character that really stood out in this book to me. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ending. Many commentators online theorize that Hadrian is lying to the reader at the end to protect the people he loves from his enemies since he's supposedly drafting his memoirs following the conclusion of the story. I hope that’s the case because otherwise it feels like he just gives up when he decides that he’s fulfilled his divine calling to save mankind and destroy humanity's enemies. There were some epic reveals with the corrupt religion of the empire, and there’s definitely space for Ruochhio to write more in this universe, though he’s made clear that it won’t be from Hadrian’s point of view. I will likely tune into those as I really enjoy the universe that Ruocchio has created. Overall, I think the series peaked at book three for me. Book four was super dark and torturey, which I did not like, and book five was an extension of Hadrian’s loss and pain from book four. Books six and seven both felt a bit redundant as Ruocchio continued to expand on themes that he already explored in the other books. Overall though, I would recommend the series as there aren’t many scifi series of this size and scope being published today. It creates a unique reading experience, and one that you can’t find many other places.
10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children’s Lives by Jean M. Twenge
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: The more I hear about kids and smartphones and social media, the more worried I become for my children and their teenage years. I’m not alone in these feelings as Twenge’s book has topped several bestseller’s lists and there seem to be millions of other parents also desperately searching for help navigating the merging of our digital and social lives in ways that just weren't possible when we were kids. I didn't get a cell phone at all until I graduate high school and didn't get my first smartphone until I was 22! Twenge seems to have hit the right moment with her parenting advice. This book is quite literally as advertised in the title: ten rules to help manage your children’s smartphone and social media use. The rules made sense to me, and I plan to apply them as my kids get older and start asking for smartphones and social media accounts. Some of the rules include: no smartphone until they have a driver’s license; no social media accounts until they turn 16; and no devices in the bedroom past bedtime. I’m sure that applying some of these rules would also help adults moderate their screen time and be more present as well. In any case, I plan to buy a print copy of this book—I read an ebook checked out from the library—and make my kids and husband read it.
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I read this book on a recommendation from a bestseller’s list, and I remember very little of it. To be fair, it is quite short. It felt like an essay that had been stretched quite a bit to make it a short book. It’s a self-help book, but not a personal self-help book. Is a self-help book written for society a policy book? In any case, the premise of this expanded essay is taking lessons on reciprocity from the natural world and applying them to human economics. Kimmerer uses the example of the serviceberry, which is a wonderfully delicious berry that grows near her home in the Midwest, to argue that our scarcity-defined economic system is not the only option to organize human activities. She advocates that we can implement an economic system instead that’s based on abundance and communal sharing of resources at scale. She gives the example of small stands that arise around the harvest every year in her rural community that give away surplus vegetables from people’s gardens for free. I don’t know quite know how we would practically pivot so drastically from our current hyper-capitalistic system of economics to one based on abundance and reciprocity, but it does seem like such a system would result in a much better world to live in and pass on to our children, so I’m personally open to it!
Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: This was the book release that coincided with Dragonsteel Nexus this year, so I was able to get my hands on a signed, stamped, and numbered copy as part of my registration. Yes, that was a book worm’s brag. It’s a collection of short scifi/fantasy stories that Sanderson has written over the span of his entire career. I’d read some of them before, but I reread all of the collection so that they would be fresh in my memory. The capstone of this collection is a new short story called Moment Zero where Sanderson writes a collapsing timeline where two cop partners are pitched one forward and one backward in time and then have to stop a runaway experiment that threatens the nature of reality from their different points in the timeline. It was super fast-paced and action packed. I was not expecting a zombie story in this collection! The character work was excellent too, and Sanderson delivered on his signature big payoffs as expected just in a shorter span. The other stories were written at different points throughout his career and all of them were followed by annotations explaining when they were written and giving further notes on their development. I really liked Firstborn and Perfect State as well. I definitely recommend this for people who are already fans of Sanderson and for those who want to get an idea if they would like his writing before committing to an epic 500-1,000 page read.
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by John Mark Comer
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Recommendation: yes
Review: I read this for a book club pick for January. One of the things I like about book clubs is that they make me try books that I otherwise would not have tried. Sometimes this results in new favorites, and sometimes I’m reminded of why I have preferences for some genres and styles over others. This is a self-help book with a heavy Christian lean. The author is a Christian pastor who left a megachurch so that he could better devote his life to his apprenticeship to Christ. He talks about the decision to leave what I assume is the career ladder for pastors to watch over a smaller flock in downtown Portland, OR. Would it seem too on the nose to assert that a book written by a pastor is preachy? That was probably my main problem with this book. A lot of the advice he gave made sense to me, and I’m even trying to apply some of his rules, but yeah, I did not like his authorial voice/tone. Maybe this is just because I don’t like being told what to do? It was also weird for me to read a self-help book that talked heavily about how to better follow Christ by someone who isn’t a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although I did have a realization that all of our General Conference talks are basically self-help sermons, which is a weird way to think about them. Despite our shared Christian faith, we use different vocabularies and come from different perspectives on how to apply and follow Christ’s teachings. All that being said, most of the advice in this book kind of boiled down to: have better self-discipline. I did like how he framed his rules in the last chapter about asking ourselves what Christ would do if he lived here and now: in 21st century America instead of 1st century Palestine. This question sparked some interesting thoughts from me as well. Most of Comer’s advice centered around distancing ourselves from digital media and focusing on quiet moments and relationships, which yeah, seems like good advice.