I decided that in 2016 I wanted to read more, and so set a goal of completing the 52 in 52 challenge – to read one book per week for the entire year. Over the course of the year I read a lot, learned a lot, and ultimately exceeded the goal, coming it a total of 79 books. And instead of coming out of that feeling burnt out or tired of reading, I honestly felt excited to give the challenge another go. I knew the Spring 2017 semester was going to be my busiest yet, but also thought it’d be fun to try and maintain the pace I’d set for myself amidst all the chaos.
Well, now having reached the end of the year, I can say that I once again exceeded the goal, finishing the year with 90 books completed. 2017’s bunch was more diverse than last year’s, in part because many of the books I read were for class, and so on topics that I would otherwise not have explored on my own. That being said, there were very few books that I read this year that I didn’t enjoy, or that I saw as more of a task to finish than a pleasure. Reading more diversely in order to complete these challenges has perhaps made me more forgiving in terms of the quality of what I’m reading, or at least maybe more willing to try and appreciate a writer for what they’re trying to accomplish sometimes more than what they actually succeeded in completing.
In any case, looking back over the list of books I completed this year really got me thinking about what I’d taken away from them all, which ones I’d learned a lot from or enjoyed the most, and which I’d like to read again, someday. So in thinking about writing a blog post about the books, I decided that it’d be maybe interesting to review or make note of at least some of them, rather than simply providing a big list of what I’d read that would likely not really interest anyone. What I elected to do was review, in brief, one book from each month of the year, with the whole list of books included at the end of this post. Instead of this blog acting merely as a list for some kind of bragging rights, I hope it can be read as a way of me recommending some of my favorite books from this past year to any interested parties.
January
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle
As a Christian ostensibly working in the artistic field, or at least one related to the artistic production of media artifacts, questions of how faith and art interact–particularly in postmodern reality of contemporary society–are highly pressing and incredibly difficult to answer. This book is fascinating in that it mainly acts as a window into the mind, heart, and soul of someone pretty much universally recognized as an incredible artist as she tries to untangle these relationships for herself. L’Engle is brilliant, and the connections she draws and explanations she offers are insightful, witty, and phenomenally helpful for any Christian artist struggling to define their beliefs. But perhaps most importantly for that particular type of reader, this book shows L’Engle as emphatically relatable, noting time and time again the difficulty that answering such questions entails, and recognizing that not even she has all the answers.
February
Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images by David M. Lubin
The paradox of JFK has always fascinated me: in life a gleaming, international icon of hope and the American dream, in retrospect a scummy, philandering, dangerous individual. And then there’s his assassination, the images of which are practically seared into the memory of the American consciousness–even for someone like me, decades removed from the incident. This rather insightful–if sometimes overreaching and speculative–book recognizes the prescience of the assassination images, but uses a whole slew of images in the years leading up to the assassination to build a case for another reason the grainy frames of the Zapruder film are so captivating. Lubin’s thesis is effectively that years of images and representations of JFK, Jackie, and the rest of their family have often called to mind famous images from throughout American history, immediately associating the Kennedy’s with a lineage of well-known art and other artifacts that helped endear them to the American public. Part rhetorical analysis, part visual analysis, and part cultural critique, Lubin’s history of the images of the Kennedy’s is interesting in that the assassination’s images pervade every page, yet every individual image is made to stand on its own as a part of the JFK mythos.
March
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Technology has consequences. Even seemingly low-tech technologies like maps and watches dramatically influence how cultures grow and change, the values that people ascribe to and apply to others, and even the behavior of individuals as they go about their day. Neil Postman argues in his work Technopoly that the insidious part of all of this is how the use and more importantly the effects of most technologies often go unnoticed and unexamined by the general public–a criticism which may be leveled at the internet perhaps more easily than any prior generation of technology. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr attempts to interrogate the internet to understand just what it is doing to its users. What he finds is, in short, not good. From shortened attention spans, to the automation of human activity, to overall decreases in things like reading ability and intelligence, the internet has major and far more disastrous consequence associated with its uninformed use than maybe any technology that has come before. Carr’s book is sometimes a scary read, and something that many will want to refute or laugh and say that his assertions may be true in general but do not apply to them–and they will be wrong. For as much widespread attention as this book got (it was a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) it deserves far more, and more and more with each passing day.
April
What Is Cinema?: Volume One by André Bazin
A classic of film studies and classical film theory, Bazin’s work is basically setting out to answer the question of what exactly cinema is, i.e., what separates the cinema from other art forms that have come before? Most famously, in this volume’s opening essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin makes the case that what distinguishes the cinematic medium is its reliance upon photography, which brings with it an aesthetic of realism that is unparalleled and simply unattainable by any other type of art. Throughout this and many of the other essays in the book, Bazin lays out some of the most foundational and influential ideas in all of film studies, concepts and thoughts that are still being actively discussed in the literature today. I’m not saying that I comprehensively understood even most of this book, let alone all of it, but it was incredible to dig into, and is certainly something I’m sure I’ll return to often in years to come.
May
Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality by Stephen Prince
[For the record, May was chock full of incredible reads, it was maybe the best month I had overall in terms of the quality of what I was reading in one contained time period. Picking one was hard, but I think this one does ultimately rise to the top.]
The topic for my MA thesis is centered around digital characters and effects in film, and this book by Stephen Prince is not only one of the key texts for the argument I’m making in that work, but it is also just a darn fine book to explore and read. Understandably, it helps if you are really into filmmaking and perhaps even more into the details of how and why things are done in particular ways during the making of a film. Stephen Prince is one of only a handful of film scholars that I’ve encountered who actively turns to the filmmaking process and the work and words of actual filmmakers to inform his theorizing and scholarship on the topics he is discussing. This was particularly interesting for his extended ruminations on the function and form of digital visual effects and how they change and impact both the processes of filmmaking and the actual films themselves. The perspective that filmmakers bring to bear is often given a great deal of emphasis in Prince’s work, and so makes his own analysis and critiques of the deployment of digital technologies, techniques, and effects fairly authoritative and more well-informed than many others writing on these topics. Again, it’s kind of a niche interest that will in no way appeal to everyone, but if it does appeal to you, you won’t be disappointed.
June
It by Stephen King
Though the dominance of non-fiction on this review list makes it seem like I ignore fiction altogether, that’s really not true at all. I’ve read more non-fiction since starting graduate school, but still make sure to spend as much time as I can in fictional worlds–and I do have something of a penchant for those of Stephen King. I’ve read It before, but the release of the film adaptation (which is excellent) this past summer inspired a re-read, and in no way was I disappointed to delve back into the darkness of Derry. For all its problems–it is a bit too long, the end confrontation is anticlimactic, and the scene with the children down in the sewers is certainly problematic–It is one of my favorite King novels for the sheer concentration of ideas and storytelling that are packed into its pages. Though I’ve already admitted there are parts that could be trimmed down, you still get an incredible bang for your buck in this book, effectively taking in the entire history of one small Maine town in incredible detail. King paints a picture of pure evil infesting the geography and people of the town, and muses on the beauty of childhood and the real consequences of lost innocence and adulthood. Come for the creepy clown and its related horrors, stay for the kids and the tenderness of their relationship, and the memories of your own childhood that emerge in the telling.
July
The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr
Like his book The Shallows, mentioned earlier, this quick read is a must for anyone concerned with how their technology is affecting them. Here, Carr turns from the specific medium of the internet to the devices that let us interact with it (and do so much else). Carr’s primary worry is that of automation: that human beings will continually offload tasks ranging from the menial to the intellectual onto machines. The cost, he argues, will be a significant decrease in human capability and skill in countless areas, many of which we are already seeing evidence of degrading abilities. Navigation, for instance, is one easily illustrated area–the introduction and proliferation of GPS has eradicated the need for maps, and drastically influenced the ability of people to recognize directions and to generally feel emplaced, or confident in their orientation to their physical surroundings. This example and countless others abound in Carr’s work, which is a phenomenal companion to his earlier book, such that the two should really be read in conjunction with one another if you can swing the time and attention.
August
I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People by Stephen Hirst
This summer my wife, Kathleen, and I traveled to Havasu Falls, a natural waterfall in the Grand Canyon, located specifically on the reservation lands of the Havasupai tribe. The experience was incredible in its beauty, as well as the nearly overwhelming tension that pervaded the whole trip. Throughout the whole of the trip–which entailed hiking down ten miles into the canyon, spending time around the waterfall, camping overnight, and then hiking back out the next morning–there was a pervasive and tangible sense of ambivalence from those in the reservation village and around the campsite that was appropriately uncomfortable and fascinating. Here we were, guests at this campsite which was made open to the paying public and advertised as such, and yet it was very clear that many of the locals did not like us nor want us here. Additionally, the reservation itself bore all the marks of the stereotypical Native American reservation, a situation which felt complicated and made stranger by the presence of us and other paying tourists. In short, the experience was fascinating and confusing and uncomfortable and absolutely wonderful all at the same time. Upon returning home, I wanted to learn more about both the Havasupai people and Native American relations and communities in general. This chronicle of the history of the Havasupai and their struggle to regain their homelands and maintain their traditions was my first step in that journey of understanding what we experienced, and was helpful in providing a far greater degree of context to the places and people we were around. This might not be as fascinating a read for those who haven’t had the same experience that we did, but if you find the topic of Native American tribes and histories interesting, it’s certainly worth looking into.
September
The Crossing of the Visible by Jean-Luc Marion
Another part of my thesis reading, this one is a pretty hard sell for the general audience–it’s an incredibly dense phenomenology of painting, specifically examining the phenomenon of religious iconography and the question of how paintings can seem embodied and thus relatable and significant to viewers without being idolatrous. Whatever your theological take on the specific phenomenon of icons, the questions Marion is asking are important in painting and imaging in general–what is it about flat, two-dimensional depictions that can make them seem real, even three-dimensional? The answers he comes to are complex and winding, and the road he takes to get there even more convoluted, but I appreciated the terms of his discussion and the emphasis he places on the physical work that goes into the creation of an artistic work, a process that ties the creator to the created and speaks of a higher power influencing the direction and message of the work in general. This, he argues, gives paintings and other artworks a “Weight of Glory” that things like electronic or mechanical production simply miss out on. Not all will agree with his conclusions, and wading into his dense and complex web of thinking is not for everyone, but anyone truly interested in this topic owes it to themselves to explore this at least a little bit.
October
Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
I took a class this semester on confessional and autobiographical literature, which turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. This book, Nietzsche’s autobiography that was completed literally days before the total mental breakdown from which he never recovered, was one of the semester’s highlights. Frustratingly dense for such a small book, the overall conceit of the project and its historical rootedness are in some instances more interesting than the actual text (which includes chapters like “Why I Write Such Excellent Books” to give you a taste of Nietzsche’s thoughts on himself). Literally titled after Pilate’s statement to the crowd in Jerusalem about Christ, Nietzsche is here positioning himself and his philosophies in direct opposition to Jesus and his teaching, making the text and its ruminations on his earlier philosophical works a kind of statement about the way a life without Jesus ought to be lived. For all his madness and heresy, Nietzsche hits on an incredibly interesting point in arguing that most Christians see their religion and Jesus’s teaching as a religion and not as a lifestyle, which would be the more authentic perspective to take. Jesus was not merely a good teacher, in Nietzsche’s view, or even simply a philosopher, rather he was a radical figure whose life was shaped by his philosophy, and who lived that philosophy in each and every breath that he took–and this embodied, significant commitment to this way of life is something that Nietzsche argues most Christians do not appreciate or even truly seek to emulate. For all his egomania and ramblings, I think that Nietzsche is right in this regard, and though some of this book may be regarded as perhaps a precursor to his insanity, I will always be grateful for the reflections his observations on the religion of his day inspired about the religion of my own day.
November
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by Richard Rodriguez
Another book from my autobiography class, this one was perhaps the most relatable book that we read in that class, in spite of the tremendous differences that exist between myself and the author. The main conceit of the work is how things like education can actually become problematic and alienating if those around you are not participating in the same experiences that you are. For Rodriguez, whose parents immigrated from Mexico and spoke Spanish at home, every new development in his education distanced himself from his origins, breaking down relationships and opportunities for intimacy and communication where previously these things had flourished. Additional reflections in the book deal with the changes in religion that cultural shifts bring about, and the final chapter of the book raises questions of the ethics of writing and reflecting about people who are still alive to read those words. It is hard to describe just how affecting this book can be. Rodriguez’s prose is beautiful and it is clear that the thinking he has done on these questions has been deep and extensive, and only after much soul-searching was the writing of this book even possible. Joining him in thinking through these questions through the reading of the book is an immense pleasure.
December
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
I knew coming in that this was a classic, and so obviously there were lots of good things that people liked about the book–but I still wasn’t totally prepared for how good of a book this would end up being. We’re all familiar with the phrase that this book introduced into popular language, but it is truly impressive how deep and pervasive the concept is throughout the text of the novel. Every chapter has its characters locked in tight, recursive loops of bureaucracy and idiocy that are simultaneously hilarious and sometimes downright heartbreaking. And as the book builds and builds these webs of interconnected loops, the horrific climax lands with a terrible and impressive force. The switch that the book makes towards the end into a lucid, deafening nightmare is incredible for the reader to experience–once it arrives it is both shocking and somehow carries a certain weight of inevitability with it, like we should have been expecting it all along. That I felt this horror tangibly as I read was something that I found to be profound and stupefying. I went into this book knowing that it would be good–but I had no way of knowing just how good it would ultimately be.
*
The Complete List
- Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread by Alex Pentland
- Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green
- The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
- The Field of Cultural Production by Pierre Bourdieu
- The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
- The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film by David Blakesely (Editor)
- Rethinking Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy: The Living Art of Michael C. Leff by Antonia De Velasco, John Angus Campbell, and David Henry (Editors)
- Ubik by Philip K. Dick
- Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle
- Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
- Rhetorical Vectors of memory in National and International Holocaust Trials by Marouf Hasian Jr.
- Superchurch: The Rhetoric and Politics of American Fundamentalism by Jonathan J. Edwards
- Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images by David M. Lubin
- Signs and Meaning in the Cinema by Peter Wollen
- Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick
- Masters of Cinema: George Lucas by Karina Longworth
- The Human Science of Communicology: A Phenomenology of Discourse in Foucault and Merleau-Ponty by Richard L. Lanigan
- What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund
- Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick
- Hunt the Devil: A Demonology of US War Culture by Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner
- Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say by Douglas Rushkoff
- No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites
- Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut
- George Lucas: Interviews by Sally Kline (Editor)
- Architecture in Transition by Konstantinos Doxiadis
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
- Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics by Shawn J. Perry-Giles
- Excellence & Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities by Stephen Miller
- Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again by Bradford Vivian
- Mercedes by Stephen King
- Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials by Greg Dickinson, Carol Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Editors)
- Finders Keepers by Stephen King
- Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression by Cara Finnegan
- What is Cinema?: Volume 1 by André Bazin
- End of Watch by Stephen King
- Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film by Carl R. Plantinga
- The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost
- National Endowment for the Arts: A History
- Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality by Stephen Prince
- The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience by Vivian Sobchack
- George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones
- Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema by Kristen Whissel
- Firestarter by Stephen King
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
- The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
- The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs
- Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
- It by Stephen King
- Night by Elie Weisel
- The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr
- The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich
- Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen
- In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch
- I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People by Stephen Hirst
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture by Vivian Sobchack
- Confessions by Augustine
- Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan
- The Crossing of the Visible by Jean-Luc Marion
- Gorgias by Plato
- The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Jean-Francois Lyotard
- Ordinary People by Judith Guest
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Letters to a Young Scientist by Edward O. Wilson
- Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema by Lisa Purse
- Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth by Don Ihde
- Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Out of Africa by Isak Denison
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
- Ake: The Years of Childhood by Woly Soyinka
- Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
- Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
- The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
- Thinner by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
- Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga by Richard Kelly
- Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound by Don Ihde
- Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing by Max Van Manen
- Exploring Christian Heritage by C. Douglas Weaver
- Catch–22 by Joseph Heller
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- The Serial Killer Whisperer: How One Man’s Tragedy Helped Unlock the Deadliest Secrets of the World’s Most Terrifying Killers
- Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
- A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
- A Glitch in the World by Alex Drozd
- Hoot by Carl Hiaasen
- The Elements of Writing About Literature and Film by Elizabeth McMahon, Robert Funk, and Susan Day
Zachary Sheldon 