This summer has been odd when it comes to reading. I haven’t read nearly as much as I usually do, and the books in this post might be partially why. My summer reading rhythm was thrown off by two books with endings that left me severely annoyed and maybe I just lost my confidence in what to pick next.
I’m just now getting back on track, so come back next week for better recommendations. Read on if you want to see which books irritated me so much.
Old-Fashioned On Purpose by Jill Winger
I picked this book up on a whim, and ended up finishing it on audio. It’s written by a homesteading blogger, and I enjoyed reading how she runs her farm, home life, and businesses with an old-fashioned perspective (or at least as old-fashioned as you can be when your business is largely online). I especially enjoyed her thoughts on cooking and developing in-person community, and I gained an excellent recipe for homemade all-purpose cleaner! If you would like inspiration or direction on developing old-fashioned skills, this is the book to read.
Content Notes: Nothing significant.
Bottom Line: Interesting read if you are into modern homesteading and old-timey things.
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Okay, this is going to be a longer one, because I have to explain why I didn’t like this book. I have been enjoying some of Connie Willis’s books in the past year, and thought I would try this time travel series. In this book, set sometime in the future, historians don’t just study historical texts - they travel back in time and observe history first hand (intriguing, right?). Many dangerous centuries have been closed to time travel, but the 1300’s just opened, and Kivrin, a young historian, travels back to 1320…except something goes wrong. Meanwhile her friends back at home are dealing with an epidemic and other catastrophes that are preventing them from getting Kivrin back from the Middle Ages.
Alot of this plot revolves around The Black Death, and when people start dying of the plague, alot of existential questions are raised about the existence of God, suffering, etc. Kivrin doesn’t believe in God’s existence and thinks some blasphemous things about God, while some in the Middle Ages have their faith strengthened by her presence there.
As her friend (Mr. Dunworthy) is trying to get her back, he starts thinking in analogies of God sending Jesus, and the people on earth crucifying Him. In Dunworthy’s version of God, God watches helplessly and can’t do anything about it, and Jesus, who just wanted to help the people, dies for no reason. So Dunworthy reflects a “god” who is impotent, Kirvin reflects a “Jesus” who helps people by caring for them but can’t heal their suffering in any way, and the town priest who believes Kivrin is a saint that has come to ease their way to Heaven is misguided.
I was hoping for more clarification or depth in the ending, but Willis leaves these questions and distorted views of God unresolved by the end of the book. The meaning in the end seems to be since God doesn’t exist or can’t stop bad things from happening, all we can do is take care of each other in bad times.
There is one comment from a young boy in the story that attempts to give some meaning to all this tragedy. Kivrin is relating how the town priest believed she was a saint that God sent from Heaven to help them in the plague, and the boy comments that is what she did - because she was there, no one had to die alone or be left unburied. The comment feels like a bone thrown to readers of faith, but in the end the people are all still dead, aren’t they? And that seems to be the point of the book. This book was a tragedy with no real comfort or answers, and the blasphemy and distortions of God’s character made the message of this book neither good nor true. So this was not one I’d recommend.
Additional Content Notes: A character comes across a couple fornicating in the Middle Ages timeline, lots of death.
Bottom Line: Would not recommend, unless you don’t care about my problems outlined above and want an interesting way to be depressed.
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks
Ah, another book I can’t recommend.
I decided to listen to this book after hearing a homeschool influencer speaking about it. The synopsis sounded intriguing, and she was saying that this book had a really realistic portrayal of marriage - particularly how two people can kind of drift apart, but also how that drift can be reversed. In her defense, she was only partway through the book when it was mentioned, and a lot of the problems I’m going to talk about happened in the last quarter of the book.
As the story opens, our main character has started to treat her unemployed husband in a patronizing way, sometimes embarrassed of him. They move to a modern, minimalist community deep in the Washington woods that relies heavily on modern technology. When a volcano erupts nearby, their technology-run community is cut off from the rest of the world, and the residents learn that Bigfoot may not actually be a myth.
I did indeed find the initial portrayal of the apathy that can develop in marriage pretty realistic. The wife clearly loved her husband but struggled with looking down on him. I was interested to see how their relationship dynamic might change as they started facing this crisis, and that’s what ultimately kept me reading.
Spoiler ahead.
There were hints of the wife seeing her husband in a new light as he takes initiative to help the other residents, but unfortunately it was never fully fleshed out. In the end (spoiler), the husband lays down his life to save his wife and another resident. The grief that such an event would bring was not explored very much, and she doesn’t ever consciously recognize that she lost a good man that was very worthy of all her respect. Instead, the wife pushes her grief aside and becomes a vicious killer who leaves the community, presumably to hunt down the remaining creatures who killed her husband. We are left with the implication that she has left some of her humanity and become her own kind of monster.
I found myself so disappointed, and very annoyed, with this ending. There could have been such a beautiful underlying message about marriage, and it would have made the book into something more than just a gratuitous Bigfoot horror story. Instead the marriage aspect of the story is lost completely and we’re left with a post-modern, evolutionary worldview dragging the ending down. I just can’t tell you how bummed I was. It could have been so good.
Additional Content Notes: Evolution assumed, homosexual couple, lots of cussing, VERY gruesome descriptions of deaths (in the last quarter of the book).
Bottom Line: Overall, would not recommend, unless you want to dwell on the brutality of nature and gruesome death.
I went back to my old standby genres after these books made me regret branching out, so I’ll share a few winners soon! Expect several book posts in the next couple weeks.
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