I'm not an audiobooks gal. I need to read the words on the page to engage with a story. But I am a fan of podcasts, and that's how I discovered ToI'm not an audiobooks gal. I need to read the words on the page to engage with a story. But I am a fan of podcasts, and that's how I discovered Tom Holland and his epic history of Christianity, Dominion. Tom appeared recently on one of my favorite podcasts, Honestly, from the writers and producers of the independent online journal, The Free Press (which I also love). After hearing Tom interviewed, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy of Dominion. The paperback arrived, all 612 pages in freakin' 7-point font. It would take me until summer to get through this thing. But Spotify offered me the audiobook for free, all 22 hours of it, and I thought, what if I treated each 1-hour chapter like a podcast and listened during my daily walks with Daisy?
Off to the races.
I loved this book. It is popular narrative history at its best: entertaining, but not light. Deeply, intensively researched but recounted with a storyteller’s wry charm. Profound, but not prescriptive. Holland asserts a serious theme: that Christianity has created the shape, heft, color, breadth and depth of Western civilization, more than any other political, social, religious tradition or system. That’s quite a claim coming from an unbeliever in an era when Christianity is at an all-time ebb in Europe and the United States. But Holland painstakingly walks his readers (and listeners!) through 2,500 years of history to show that ideas we assume have come to us through Greek or Roman schools of thought, through humanistic philosophy, through political movement and social change owe their Genesis (sorry, couldn’t resist) to a cohort of Jews who believed the Messiah walked in their midst.
It’s not so much the premise, which is hardly a new one, that resonates. It’s Holland’s approach to his subject matter. He uses historical hinge points, beginning in 479 B.C. and the Greco-Persian Wars through to #MeToo (the book was published in 2019) to explore moral movements and the characters who led, or were led by, them. The best stories don’t just tell us what happened. They tell us who it happened to and how they reacted, how the events reverberated through time and culture. Holland brings us into the cathedral, the castle, the battlefield, walks us alongside Paul, Constantine, Martin Luther, Christopher Columbus, Winstanley, Nietzsche, Lenin, and Lennon. To convey something of the ambience of settings across 2,500 years of world history is simply astonishing.
One of the drawbacks of listening to Dominion is the number of times I wanted to note a historical character, place or event, set the book aside and follow a rabbit hole of research. Dominion is necessarily a survey. Entire libraries of research could be filled by just one chapter; indeed, Holland’s bibliography is exhaustive.
Tom Holland’s point isn’t to venerate Christianity or its believers. He portrays a very nuanced and balanced portrait of a faith, its darkest chapters and brightest lights. His is a fascination with the lasting influence of a faith that has permeated in ways most of us take for granted....more
...history itself ceases to exist when it degenerates into a mere collection of facts unconnected by a story—and this story cannot be found without a ...history itself ceases to exist when it degenerates into a mere collection of facts unconnected by a story—and this story cannot be found without a transcendent dimension that sees these facts from within and beyond.
Such is the thesis statement of the life of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus' closest companions—some speculate his lover or his wife—the first witness to the Resurrection, and the purported author of the Gospel of Mary, rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century. (Note: the actual written text was not penned by Mary herself, but recorded by someone or someones unknown, likely in Greek, before being translated into the discovered text's language, Coptic).
Attempts to suppress the Gospel of Mary have only served to elevate it, and its author, into the realm of legend and mysticism. Leloup, a French theologian, translated the Gospel from its original Coptic (Egyptian) into French and provided extensive commentary and interpretation of Mary's words and her role in Christianity. This book is an English translation of his original, which was published in 1997.
Mary, Miriam as she is known in Hebrew, represents the Feminine, the Imaginal, the nous aspects of Christianity that elevate it to its most spiritual—the act of faith—and yet ground it in the utter simplicity of its fundamental message—that of love.
My reaction to this book is a set of swirling ribbons of thought and emotion. I am fascinated by Mary Magadalene's life and found many doors opening into the novel idea that's needling my brain. As a reader long fascinated by this era of history, I'm eager to explore more. As a person who was raised an evangelical Christian, who walked away from the church many years ago, and who is now reexamining her spirituality, I connected at a profound head and heart level with the Gnosticism inherent to Mary's gospel and its message of transcendence and transformation....more
Jane Alison's inventive and insightful exploration of non-traditional ways to expand story narrative can be appreciated by readers and writers alike. Jane Alison's inventive and insightful exploration of non-traditional ways to expand story narrative can be appreciated by readers and writers alike. I was drawn to it as a craft resource, wanting to juice my writer's brain at the start of a new year, but soon realized I was enjoying it at least as much from the perspective of an avid reader.
The second, and much longer, section is Patterns. Here, Alison uses geometric shapes and patterns such as waves, spirals, cells, and fractals, among others, to show how story arcs move a reader through time, space, thought, and emotion. In each instance, she dives deep into a text to demonstrate an author's brilliance at creating energy and tension and drama that subverts the dominant paradigm.
This is all heady stuff and the texts that Alison uses to illustrate her point are literary classics that I would argue are outside of many readers' personal canons, including Marguerite Duras's The Lover, W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth, and several novels published in the 1980s and 1990s by writers I've never heard of. More recognizable examples are David Mitchell's 2004 Cloud Atlas, a mind-blowing matryoshka doll of a novel that has seen recent imitators (Anthony Doerr, Emily St John Mandel) but none that match his artistry, and Raymond Carver, whose spare short stories evoked layers of meaning.
I bristle at the notion that the conventional arc is somehow lesser than or more boring in comparison to the esoteric texts that Jane Alison presents. A review of Meander, Spiral, Explode in The New Yorker rightly identifies this contention as a straw man. Generations of readers and millions of books would belie the notion that readers are even asking for or somehow missing something by reading books that flow along according to storytelling tradition (which has been present for millenia).
But perhaps that's at the heart of her point. She challenges us to (re)explore writers who took chances and expanded our understanding of what literature can do. I came away refreshed and curious, determined to be more alert to patterns as I read and as I write....more
A pithy long-form essay with lots of good quotes but little of anything new or useful to say. Write if you want to write and if you aren't writing, maA pithy long-form essay with lots of good quotes but little of anything new or useful to say. Write if you want to write and if you aren't writing, maybe you don't want to be a writer.
"I sometimes wonder if writer’s block should be received as a blessing. It’s treated as a pathology, a disease. Maybe it’s a sign of health, or at least of a cure taking. It’s the writer’s brain saying, “You don’t need to do this anymore. Go do something else with your life.� If writing involves failure in its essence, is not-writing the final sign of success?"...more
This was heaps of fun and contained some really great perspectives on craft. I've not read any Benjamin Percy fiction—he writes in genres (speculativeThis was heaps of fun and contained some really great perspectives on craft. I've not read any Benjamin Percy fiction—he writes in genres (speculative, horror) that are not my cuppa—but I enjoyed his down-to-earth approach and conversational style. Because Thrill Me is a collection of previously published essays or lectures delivered to MFA students, don't expect a cohesive, linear guide to fiction writing. You can pick up the book at any chapter and emerge with a few great takeaways before moving on to the next.
Percy is a very visual writer, heavily influenced by cinema and comics, so expect a lot of "bro" advice that favors action, delivered in a slightly preening, hipster style. Don't let this distract you from seeing the gems in his advice: there are plenty, and I had several a-ha moments. Things that I knew instinctually or have learned in my own writing, but hadn't seen it articulated in quite this way: clearly, succinctly, with great examples.
The chapter "Set Pieces" is one such gem. Percy presents those stand-out scenes in a movie that you carry with you, indelible images that become iconic representations of the story. He goes on to provide examples from literature and shows how the images so often connect the inciting incident with the climax (think the menstrual blood scene and the pig's blood scene in Stephen King's Carrie). I realized I had done this very thing in my current novel in progress, using the sudden, startling appearance of a wild animal in an early chapter, just as my protagonist is realizing there's trouble in River City, and right before the "All is Lost" moment near the end. Writers absorb these deeply ingrained storytelling rituals and principles and employ them without thinking about it or understanding exactly why. Benjamin Percy does a terrific job pointing them out and explaining why they work so well.
He's down on too much dialogue, ultra-down on backstory, and downright spiteful about interiority. Unless you can do any of it so well, it works. That's the thing about a lot of his advice. The key is to Absorb, reflect, and set it up against your own work, then step back as objectively as you can to see how it lands on your story and your voice. Like any well-delivered critique, you need to let craft advice soak in, pay attention to your resistance, and use what resonates in the end.
Percy is a champion of genre fiction, kicking to the curb any notion that "literary" fiction is somehow superior or doesn't need to follow the same storytelling principles as any other style of narrative.
Even after completing four novels (and starting a fifth), I never enter the writing at the same point and I'm always searching for the elusive (non-existent) magic formula to crafting a novel with ease and joy. Of course I didn't find the answers here, but I found reinforcement for what already works for me, if only because Percy and I approach the process in much the same way: a sense of an ending and a clear, profound consideration of what our characters want, what they think they need. But unlike Percy, who says he spends a year brainstorming and making notes before he even touches a keyboard, I typically write to find out where I'm going. It might take me six weeks to complete a first draft, as it did my second novel, The Crows of Beara or three years, as it did with my current novel.
I withhold a star for unnecessary snark. Holding up Dan Brown as an example of what not to do is just cheap laughs, a wink wink nudge nudge to the peanut gallery. Tacky tacky to diss other writers in a book on craft. And the dig at Neil Gaiman felt personal. So, bad form.
But Percy did inspire me to start an image board. I'm also a very visual writer and creating an idea board with scraps of phrases, screen grabs of articles and postcards sounds like just the right way to capture inspiration for the stories to come....more
A week ago Saturday, my partner and I brought home a 9-week-old Lab-Rottweiler. On Thursday, a work colleague recommended this book. We picked up a coA week ago Saturday, my partner and I brought home a 9-week-old Lab-Rottweiler. On Thursday, a work colleague recommended this book. We picked up a copy the next day and devoured it over the weekend. It could not have come at a better time (although, had we read it before adopting this little kid, we may have reconsidered. We've both adopted older puppies in our lives- 6 months or so- but never one so young. SO MUCH WORK). There is a lot that we didn't know or were already doing wrong, and this book answered all of our questions, reinforced our best guesses, and made us realize that we have it in us to guide Daisy to becoming a wonderful, trust, smart and engaging companion.
The good news: we introduced her to a crate the very first day and she spends her nap times, her time-out times and all night hours in there, giving us and our 3 cats needed breaks. She's great on a leash after just two days, rarely has accidents, is smart, sweet, makes excellent eye contact, and the bonding is already strong. There's not really any bad news, just work to do to stop the jumping, mouthing, and the work we need to do to be solid disciplinarians, alpha leads, and to grow with her.
It's a massive commitment of time, money, physical and emotional energy to bring a dog into your home. Read this first, or get it at your earliest possible moment-don't raise baby without it!...more
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