Posts tagged books

This week we've been posting about some of our favorite cultural artifacts of the year—books, movies and music not necessarily made in 2009, but consumed, pondered, enjoyed and treasured by each of us along the way. Earlier this week we heard from Nate Barksdale and Christy Tennant; today Andy Crouch finishes up the series.

There were a handful of cultural artifacts that took my breath away in 2009. Here they are, in roughly the order I encountered them:

Of course, I had heard of Over the Rhine before 2009. But I had never heard them in person. In 2009, I finally did, twice. Their sly, stylish, hook-laden yet depths-sounding music is a wonder.

Also in the "better late than never" category, I got around to listening to Pierce Pettis's 2001 album State of Grace, a meditation on the South that connected me to my own Southern roots and the beautiful, broken stories of my Scotch-Irish ancestors.

At a distance, I've been thrilled to see the success of Fringe Atlanta, the most unlikely chamber music program in the nation: serious, stirring performances of the classical repertoire mixed up with the spinning sounds of one of Atlanta's hottest DJs, Little Jen. What other classical music program is selling out tickets to an under-35 crowd and has them clapping and whooping after a viola solo in the middle of a string quartet?

The 5-part documentary Brick City, which aired on the Sundance Channel in September, is a tour de force, not least because of the walking tour de force who is one of its principal subjects: Cory Booker, the energetic young mayor of Newark, New Jersey. If you care about cities, leadership, gangs, violence and peacemaking, or redemption—or almost any other aspect of culture making—this series will provoke, disturb, and encourage you.

I read some marvelous books this year, and two that I read just this month are likely to stick with me for a long time. Both are memoirs (the genre of the new millennium, it seems). Kent Annan's Following Jesus through the Eye of the Needle is an unsparingly honest story of relocation to Haiti that captures the complexities of crossing differences of power, wealth, and culture in hopes of being part of God's work of transformation, without and within. It's funny, gritty, and strangely hopeful—just what a Christian memoir should be.

The same words could apply to the biggest surprise of my reading in 2009, a self-published memoir by Amy Julia Becker, Penelope Ayers. This book might seem to have everything against it. "Self-published" is usually another way of saying "self-indulgent." The subject, the death of the author's mother-in-law from cancer, is so common that, as I have written in the past, every editor has a pile of unusable manuscripts from people trying to capture the experience of accompanying a loved one through illness unto death. Usually they fall into unintentional clichés, sentimentality, and too much detail.

But Penelope Ayers is written with an unerring voice, a keen eye for hard and beautiful truth, and almost no false notes. Especially significant is the way that Amy Julia (whom I met this fall through a mutual friend) manages to weave honest reflections about faith into the story without in any way giving in to Christianese or insider platitudes. This is one book a Christian could give to a non-believing friend and say, "This is what it's like to believe, from the inside." We'll be hearing more from Amy Julia Becker—perhaps, with any luck, in 2010.

This is the second of three posts from this site's current contributors, about our favorite books, music, and movies of 2009—not necessarily made in 2009, but consumed, pondered, enjoyed and treasured by each of us during the past year. Yesterday we heard from Nate Barksdale; tomorrow we'll close the series with Andy Crouch's recommendations.

Two of the movies that moved me most in 2009 deal with human suffering and hope in the midst of despair: Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a haunting story of survival and the sometimes blurry lines between right and wrong, and Scott Blanding/Brad LaBriola/Greg Heller's documentary, Women in War Zones, which tells the story of two survivors of sexual violence in the Congo. I was also surprisingly touched by Kenny Ortega's This is It, a film documenting the last few months of Michael Jackson's life, rehumanizing The Gloved One and presenting him as the phenomenally talented, humble and generous, albeit broken, entertainer he was.

After years of reading mostly non-fiction, I read several novels in 2009 that had a tremendous impact on me. One was My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. Its insight into the mind of a visual artist was very helpful to me as someone who is trying to understand how visual artists see the world. I also appreciated the author's profound insight into Christ's crucifixion from the perspective of a Hasidic Jew. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead was very moving to me on several levels, not the least of which was the way the main character was awakened by tender eros in his twilight years. But the book I read in 2009 that I was most stirred by was actually an unpublished manuscript by a very promising author practicing law near the University of Virginia. Corban Addison Klug's A Walk Across the Sun deals with the issue of human trafficking in both the US and India. It was the first time in a while I have had serious trouble putting a book down; I was riveted from page one.

My non-fiction treasures of 2009 include Michael Card's A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament, Nicholas Wolterstorff's Art in Action, Dan Siedell's God in the Gallery, Eugene Peterson's A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (a pastorally-guided exploration up the Psalms of Ascents), and Lewis Hyde's The Gift, required reading at International Arts Movement as we seek to approach the arts not in terms of commodity, but rather in terms of gift.

This is the first of a series of posts from all three of this site's current contributors, about our favorite books, music, and movies of 2009—not necessarily made in 2009, but consumed, pondered, enjoyed and treasured by each of us during the past year. Tomorrow we'll hear from Christy Tennant, with Andy Crouch rounding out the series on Wednesday.

Movies (well, DVDs): Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven; Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven, Chang-dong Lee's Oasis, and Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard. 3/4 of the top tier have heaven-ish titles; all are about refuge in one way or another.

Honorable mention to Bette Davis in The Letter, the beautiful Apollo mission footage of For All Mankind, the sublime Flamenco of Carlos Saura's Bodas de Sangre, and the quasi-New England cookiness of The Devil and Daniel Webster. I've also been trying to increase my Bollywood literacy, enjoying some 70s classics like Deewaar as well as, most recently, the hyperactive neon camp of Kutch Kutch Hota Hai, which is a bit like watching a revival of Grease in a gumdrop factory.

In my reading, the stand-out was Dave Eggers' autobiography of a Sudanese 'lost boy', What Is the What. I also dug Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger on the levels of both story and history, as well as Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and the first half of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor.

Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854–1967 was sublime and led me along all sorts of 19th-century-American-literary trails. Ted Gioia's history, Delta Blues, got me thinking about music and filling out my playlists with Charley Patton and Skip James.

For a long time I'd been meaning to read Mungo Park's 18th century Travels in the Interior of Africa, and now I have, and it was good. Ditto, except for the being-good part, for Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. The hypothetical version I'd carried around in my head was so much better.

I could read nothing but Lawrence Weschler and be quite content. Somehow I didn't get around to Vermeer in Bosnia till a few months ago. Well worth the wait, if that's what it was.

Finally, a few of my favorite tracks that found their way into my music library in 2009. Coming up with the list, I was struck by how much more personal all the associations were for songs as compared to music or books that captured, in terms of focussed minutes, far less of my attention than most books or movies. The blessing and the curse of songs is that they're generally what's playing while other things and thoughts are happening. We invite them into our world; more often, books and movies invite us into theirs.

My friend Adam McHugh, whose first (very good) book is about to be published, wrote me asking if I had any advice. He was going through the roller coaster of excitement, nervousness, anxiety, and eagerness of a first-time author. It's a common experience (and not just for authors), and with his permission I thought I'd share what I wrote in reply.

Well, first of all, congratulations! Enjoy opening the first box of books—it's pretty fun.

It is good to keep in mind Mark Twain's admittedly harsh dictum, "Most books come into the world with all the fanfare of a stillborn child." The truth is that unlike, say, your wedding day, there will be a great and utter lack of excitement about your book the day it is published. And the day after. And most days after that. Believe me. My book has done well, perhaps embarrassingly so, and the truth is it just is not that big a deal. Considering that "doing well" in these latter days means that maybe 25,000 people read a book over the course of its first year—that would be 0.1% 0.01% of the American population—it's not surprising that it just doesn't rise to the level of a big event for anyone except the author. (The foregoing does not apply, at least not entirely, if you are Bill Clinton, Dan Brown, or Donald Miller. But you are not, so no worries!)

What Absolutely Does Not Matter and Should Be Ignored If At All Possible is the Amazon rank of your book. It means nothing. (There are whole Web pages documenting this.) If your book is doing well enough for the Amazon rank to provide any meaningful information (say, less than 250 or so) you will know that anyway, because people will be calling to say they saw you on Oprah. If it is among the vast majority of books, including very good, solidly selling, important, and influential books, the number will fluctuate maddeningly and inscrutably, providing you with periodic endorphin rushes that will get you hooked but will tell you nothing about the success, let alone the worth, of the book. So I recommend never checking it. But of course you will. At least know that you're basically just feeding your endorphin needs, nothing else.

What will be a big deal, hopefully, over the coming months, are individual letters, emails, conversations and even (we hope!) reviews from grateful readers. This is what makes it worth doing, in my opinion—the amazing chance to meet people for whom your words were genuinely, even dramatically, helpful. And then further down the road, to hear stories about people who actually created something or started something or persevered in something because you wrote the book. But of course by definition, all these truly worthwhile outcomes will happen months or years from the date of publication. We authors play a long game, which is a very good thing.

The other big deal will be the opportunities, whether few or many, that come to speak to groups and find that for some strange reason, they actually listen to you now that you have published a book, even though you are basically saying the same things you said before you published a book and basically have the same gifts and limitations you did before you published a book. It is a truly mysterious thing, and in many ways a bit absurd, but you will find yourself with an additional quantum of cultural power. I knew about this in the abstract when I wrote Culture Making (the importance of concrete cultural artifacts rather than disembodied ideas) but I must confess I still find myself surprised at how true it is.

So, as with all events that confer additional power and also expose insecurities and fears, this is mostly an opportunity to deepen your own prayer life, entrusting both the elation (assuming there is any—see first few paragraphs above) and the deflation to God. I have found John Wesley's Covenant Prayer to be incredibly useful in turbulent times like these.

Oh, one other thing: I highly recommend never responding to critical comments (in reviews, blog posts, comment threads, etc.) online. I have done so a handful of times and regretted it every time. You are very unlikely to be able to respond to criticism in a constructive way in the heat of the online moment, and once the moment has passed you will realize it is faintly ridiculous to respond to things that were written after half a moment's thought and most likely not even based on the slightest serious engagement with what you have written. You've had the great privilege of being able to spend a great deal of time shaping and polishing your ideas, then interacting with editors and early readers to refine them further. Why throw that all away with a hastily (and probably angrily/nervously/defensively/imprudently) composed reply? And furthermore, a hastily composed reply that, unlike your carefully written book, will be instantly accessible via a Google search for your name for ever and ever? I highly recommend simply taking online criticism as a chance to pray John Wesley's Covenant Prayer again.

I hope these thoughts are in some way helpful! Godspeed and I hope to see you somewhere in person soon!