I like novels that are about something. But I also don’t like novels “about something.” It is easy to joke about books that are doing the classic after school special, “on a very special episode of…”

The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is a fiction book, but one that is largely about spiritual formation and counseling. I don’t object to fiction books dealing with harder things like a marriage falling apart or a man coming to deal with the ways he had repressed his emotions. I do object to the speed of the healing.

I don’t think it is suprising that Intervarsity Press, which also has a series of fiction books on spirituial formation with a group of women has another book that is similar, but written from a male perspective. The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell is different, but I have a similar objection to both, in that a fictional book often wants a cleaner ending and faster resolution than what happens in real life.

But I also was solidly engaged with the book. I thought it was well written. I thought the unfolding of the story worked well, even if too fast. And that there is real value in helping to illustrate what counseling and internal work can look like for Christians who take their faith seriously. There is always a problem with Christian men’s books that want to show what “real men” are like and just growl and “take charge”.

Elijah Campbell isn’t in touch with his emotions or his family history. He has been encouraged to repress things and his family of origin is a significant factor in that unhealthy patterns. I also think that it is a not insignificant that Elijah is a “successful” professional Christian who has done what he can to look good to others without dealing with the internal. But the main point here is that he should be involved with his emotion and that this is the path forward to becoming healthy enough to be a good husband and father.

I am a bit ambivalent about this The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell. On the one hand, I was engaged and devoured the book. I alternated between audio and kindle (both of which I picked up on sale, kindle is still on sale as I am writing). I finished in three days. But I also think that the story can be a bit heavy handed at times and is too neat and tidy.

The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell: A Novel by Kelly Flanagan Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I very much appreciated the biography of James Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs recently wrote. Part of how Boggs came to write the biography was coming across the out of print Little Man, Little Man and discovering eventually that the illustrator was not dead as he had been told, but very much alive.

Over a couple years Boggs was able to get a new edition of the book into print and interview Yoran Cazac and those around him several times. It was original research on an aspect of Baldwin’s life which had largely not been explored.

Once I finished the biography, I picked up a copy of Little Man, Little Man. It was Baldwin’s only children’s book. And it was written in large part because his young nephew asked James Baldwin to write a book about him. This was a book about a young boy and his community in Harlem in the mid 1970s.

Primarily I find it interesting as a historical artifact and an example of an alternate side of Baldwin. The art is interesting, but Cazac had never been to New York, and the characters based on Baldwin’s nieces and nephews were only a handful of snapshots from Baldwin to Cazac, so it is a somewhat dreamscape of Harlem.

The story is simple and involves introducing the reader to the characters and neighborhood and the task of going to the store. This is James Baldwin. Issues of poverty and grief and police brutality are present, but they are in the setting not central features of the story. The central feature is the characters and the way they are cared for by the community.

Little Man, Little Man is not a book I would recommend that every one go out and get. But it is a book that I would try to check out from your library and read. There are a couple of introductory essays, but the main book is a children’s book that can be read in an hour or less. I am glad that I could see another aspect of Baldwin’s writing and I am glad that Boggs was able to get a new edition into the world.

Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood by James Baldwin, Yoran Cazac illustrator Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition 

I read the Book of Hope as part of a book group that I am have been a part of for the past several years. This group is based at the Ignatius House, a Jesuit retreat house near me. I did my spiritual direction training here and I have been on three retreats here in addition to this book group since 2022. I rarely love the books that we discuss. But I love the people. The group is made up of mostly women in their late 60s to early 80s. There are a few outside of that, but it is most of the group. A bit over half the group is Catholic, most of the rest are Episcopal. The group is pretty solidly on the political left with a mix of theological perspectives. Generally these are people who appreciate contemplative spirituality and justice.

The Book of Hope is formatted mostly as an interview. Douglas Adams’ previous book was framed as a conversation between the Dali Lama and Bishop Tutu and it was called The Book of Joy. I am mixed on the format. Adams is a character in the book. He discusses his place in the conversation but mostly is setting up Jane Goodall to talk about her own thoughts on hope. Contextually, the hope is mostly about hope in the face of environmental catastrophe, but that isn’t the only issue in the book.

As the group discussed the book at our last meeting, most people thought the book got better the longer it went. The start was too much introduction and “chit chat”. The stronger sections on what hope was and how to work to build hope was good. When I started reading this I had just finished reading Racial Justice for the Long Haul, which was mostly also about the hope required to continue working on social issues in the face of discouragement. I am in process right now of reading A Systematic Theology of Love by Thomas Jay Oord, which is not about hope directly, but it is largely about the role of the problem of evil in our understanding of who God is and how God works in the world. Which is in part about these overlapping discussions.

The group I read this with is an overtly Christian group. It almost always opens and closes in prayer. We always discuss matters of faith. But this book was not particularly religious. It was vaguely spiritual, but whatever Goodall’s spiritual faith is rooted in, she was not talking about it. It is not that I think you need to have faith to have hope, but I do think that it is hard to talk about why you as an individual or as a group have faith and not discuss what that hope is rooted in. Goodall has hope because of youth, because she thinks that we are designed to have hope and that it is a survival skill. She thinks that hope can be encouraged and developed. And she is opposed to a faith surface level hope that denies hard things. But again, that felt too amorphous.

I was skeptical of the book going in because I suspected it may be too vaguely progressive for my preferences. And I think that is exactly what happened. But there was there in it that I thought were helpful. I learned more about Goodall’s life and family, but not much more. I learned more about her work of advocacy in the past few decades and I admire her for that. But I also wonder about what wasn’t said.

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I have a lot of theological disagreements with Tim Keller even as I respect him and think the evangelical world would be much better off if there were more people like him. That is not to start with outlining of my disagreements, but to frame my thoughts here as largely those of an admirer who strongly disagrees.

I think my main issue, both with the book and with Keller is summed up in this quote.

“By his 1975 graduation from Gordon-Conwell, most of Keller’s enduring theological commitments had been settled. He subscribed to the Westminster Standards and Presbyterian-Reformed theology. He advocated for penal substitution, classic covenant theology, amillennialism, and what would later come to be known as a “complementarian” view of gender roles in the home and church. He believed in a historic, specially created Adam and Eve, in an old earth, and in the reality of biological evolution. He aligned with the neo-Calvinist approach to culture that combined evangelism and social justice. He resisted tying the church to one political agenda. He wanted the church to approach homosexuality with pastoral care without compromising the biblical sexual ethic. He prayed for the kind of revival Edwards saw in his day. The popularity of these beliefs might wax and wane, both inside and outside the church. But Keller didn’t do anything more than tweak some of these views after 1975.” (p103)

For every aspect that I really appriciate about Keller, his focus on ecumenical activity and evangelism and his advocacy of justice and a robust understanding of culture, there are others that are not just sometime I find problematic, but heralded here. For example, just after a long exploration of Keller’s understanding of the relationship to preaching about grace and not turning the Old Testament into moralism, Hansen talks about Keller promoting Jay Adams and biblical counseling, which expressly is about moralism. Or in the sections about how Kathy Keller became convinced that women should not be in church leadership, it was largely because of the teaching of Elizabeth Elliot that Kathy changed her position from being in favor of the ordination of women to being opposed to the ordination of women. But it was because of the seminary teaching and missionary experience of Elliot that Kathy and then Timothy Keller changed their minds. (Experience they would not have had if they were at a school that was more complementarian.)

Again, I can’t help but be influenced by my experience of Keller and those Keller was influenced by. Hansen emphasizes how Keller emphasized grace and revival and opposed the moralizing of the gospel, but then cites people who I have experience with as being those who emphasize external morality. My experience of Elliot seems to be the exact opposite of what Keller took from her.

Especially in the quotes from Keller about contextualization and justice, I find almost nothing that I disagree with about the relationship of the gospel to culture and the importance of justice to the reality of the gospel. I know that people like Brandon O’Brien who worked for Keller and whom I very much respect. But then I also wonder at how TGC seems to be so strongly wrong at most every cultural take on movies or music or art if it was so strongly influenced by Keller’s understanding of culture and contextualization. Keller strongly spoke to the sin of racism, but TGC seems to be more attracted to Doug Wilson’s orientation toward ethnic nationalism than Keller’s pluralism.

I appriciate that Hansen is not trying to write a traditional biography. He says the point of the book is to explore the people and thinkers who influenced Keller. And largely I think that focus makes sense. But this does verge on haigiography. And often it is comments that are show an insular perspective where this shows most strongly. In a discussion of the movie Babbette’s Feast, he says, that if you have seen the movie or read the book it is probably because of a recommendation from Tim Keller. And then says that Keller first mentioned the movie in 1997 in a sermon. But there was wide support of the movie by Christian from its earliest days. I saw it in the theater because my church went.

I also really wish there was more evaluation and exploration of Keller. I have the expanded version that was expanded after Keller’s death. But the concluding thoughts are thin. There is very little about how Keller has become someone to push back against by Aaron Renn and James Wood and others who seem to have this reverse nostalgia that thinks that starting a church in NYC in the late 80s and early 90s when NYC was less than 1% evangelical was some how “easy”.

I don’t think Hansen is probably the right person to do that deeper evaluation and it probably is too early to do that. But I think that is what this book needs. I am all for this type of exploration of his intellectual formation, but when the framing is that Keller really didn’t change any significant positions after 1975, then it is hard to really explore what those intellectual formation was all about.

I thought this was worth reading. I have respected him, even as I have disagreed with many things because he was someone that seems to have the ability to disagree and still relate. I learned things and I found people that I want to learn more about. But I also thought that this was too fluffy and could have been just as respectful and affirming of the man and dig a bit deeper.

Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I would not have picked this up except it was part of a book group. I was not completely new to the topic. I have read Peter Brown’s book on the early church’s view of wealth. And I have read a bit of the early church fathers and general Christian histories and was broadly aware of the early church’s teaching against wealth.

The oversimplification of the early church’s teaching was that if you had wealth, it was for the purpose of caring for others. So if you hoarded wealth, then it was a misuse of wealth, and therefore sin.

The main task of the book is to document that not only hoarded wealth, but many of the aspects of our modern capitalistic system were viewed as either sin or at least it was viewed skeptically by the early church. I think broadly that point is well made. Although it is a bit repetitive because it uses the same or similar quote multiple times to make slightly different points.

The author is an democratic socialist who started out to write a Christian book against capitalism and thought it better to separate out the early church’s view into its own book. While I have read socialist and marxist arguments before, I think those aspects were less successful. The last two chapters were a defense of using marxist analysis and the need for creating a new imagination about the possibility of alternatives to capitalism. I think The Economics of Good and Evil does a better job looking at the different ways that economics and morality have been understood to work together over time and that type of book would be more helpful for a skeptical audience than this one.

I also think Tom Holland’s Dominion makes a good case for why care for the poor and vulnerable is an important feature of Christianity without needing to bring in marxist theory. (Rodney Stark also makes similar arguments in several of his books as well.)

I also think that part of the problem with the framing of this book is that more work needs to be done to look at the differences in how our economics works from the early church. The economics of the Roman era did not tend to charge interest except in predatory ways. So the early church’s opposition to interest and usury isn’t exactly the same as taking out a loan to buy a house or get student loans. Interest can absolutely be predatory and inappropriate. But interest is also a means of cooperation and there is little nuance here to understand how the different economics systems impact the way the economic morality works.

I am all for a more highly regulated economy that is designed to more explicitly protect the vulnerable and the poor. I would not consider myself a neo-liberal globalist. But I also know that we live in a capitalist system and there are ways to think about how to act with Christian morality in that system.

A project like this that helps to recover Christian origins of understanding the morality of economics can be helpful. I am glad that I read it, but I also think it is a bit dry and repetitive so I won’t strongly recommend it.

All Riches Come From Injustice: The Anti-mammon Witness of the Early Church & Its Anti-capitalist Relevance by Stephen Morrison Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition

There have been several biographies of James Baldwin. David Leemings’ biography is well worth reading, but Leeming was close to Baldwin, working at times as his secretary, travel companion and corespondent. That type of closeness has a benefit to a biographer, but it also has some weaknesses. I tend to think that we get a lot from biographies written by people close to the subject, but we also need a good biography from someone that isn’t personally close to the subject.

Nicholas Boggs is fulfilling that role for Baldwin. Leeming’s biography came out in 1995, but since that time there has not been a full biography of James Baldwin. Boggs main focus is connecting Baldwin’s writing to his life and his life to his writing. And at the same time showing how the fiction informed the non-fiction and how the non-fiction informed the fiction. Lemming discussed the writing as well, you can’t be a biographer of an author like Baldwin without discussing the writing, but I think Boggs made the writing a more central feature of the biography.

It is at the end of the book, one of the main contributions of this biography is a long exploration of Baldwin’s relationship with Yoran Cazac, a french painter that he originally met in Baldwin’s early days in Paris, but with whom they reconnected in the last 1960s. Baldwin had a “type”. He seemed to be attracted to men who were primarily attracted to women but still related well to him. There was a pattern with Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, David Leeming and Yoran Cazac and others. These men may not have had sexual relationships with Baldwin, but they were relationally intimate. Boggs suggests that Yoran Cazac was the last significant relationship that Baldwin had. Cazac was likely originally introduced to Baldwin through Baldwin’s mentor Beauford Delaney. And it is also likely that it was through Delaney that they became reacquainted.

Boggs found a copy of a out of print book that Baldwin wrote and Cazac illustrated, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of a Childhood. Boggs explored that little known book and found Cazac and befriended him and his family and worked to get Baldwin’s only children’s book republished. And in the mean time, interviewed Cazac and his ex-wife and children and those around him to get a view on a portion of Baldwin’s life that was almost barely mentioned in Leeming’s work. Part of what Boggs’ is illustrating in how he suggests that Baldwin’s writing was not just biographical or psychologically informative, but also descriptive of unrealized desires and realities. After Baldwin and Cazac reconnected, Cazac married Beatrice Mathews. When Beatrice was about six month pregnant with their first child (Cazac had another child from an earlier relationship), and her and Cazac were living in a rural Tuscan house without running water or electricity, Cazac and Baldwin spent about six weeks together at Balwin’s french home with Baldwin writing and Cazac painting and them spending time together. After the birth, Baldwin and his entourage went to Tuscany and Baldwin became the godparent of their son (just like Baldwin was the godparent of Lucian’s first son). And all of that was not unlike Giovanni’s Room where the one lover returns to his fiancé to get married and live out that domestic life. Baldwin wanted a domestic life and talked about marriage and children but never was able to achieve for long that domestic life that he kept trying to find.

At the end of the book in the author’s notes, Boggs talks about how Baldwin was an iconic figure for him as a gay man. Baldwin mostly did not talk about his relationships publicly. But he did write about relationships fictionally, and you can see the connections. Boggs explores Baldwin’s sexuality more than other biographers, but not focused on the details as much as the ways that Baldwin’s emotional life mattered to his writing live and vice versa. As Boggs notes several times, Baldwin often became physically sick after emotionally taxing relational difficulties. And many of his closest relationships where there was clear love, do not seem to have been sexually consummated (as with Delaney or Mary Painter and others). The point in the exploration is that this relational connection between people was important to who Baldwin was. Not just because being a gay black man was part of his identity, but because that identity influenced how he saw the world in ways that wasn’t true of everyone. Boggs asserts that while Baldwin did not always see the ways that oppression intersected across various identities, over time he came to see how sexism within the Black community or the racism within the gay community or the classism within the expatriate community intersected to mean that oppression does not simply run one way.

Greg Garret’s Gospel According to Baldwin makes a similar claim. I also think that Garret may have a better framing of how the homophobia of 1940-60s, when Baldwin is coming of age, prevented the deep connection that Baldwin seems to be forever searching for. The very nature of hiding your sexuality, even if Baldwin hid it less than many others did, makes it difficult to have an abiding public relationship. There is a reality to way that George Yancy’s framing of anti-sexist sexist works in Baldwin. Baldwin wanted a domestic household. But he also wanted someone to do the domestic work as he created. Beatrice Mathews says the same thing about Cazac to Boggs when he interviews her. She says that Cazac needed someone to care for everything around him so that he could paint. And that Baldwin and Cazac both wanted someone else to do that for them. There is a reality of sexism in that desire to have others care for you that seems common among many men that have imbibed a bit of narcissism in their approach to the domestic sphere. And it seems that Lucian and some of the others whom Baldwin loved, wanted to share the spotlight not just support his own spotlight. Baldwin often fell in love with artists or musicians or writers and tried to help them with their own creativity through funding or connections or lessons, but there seems to be a bit of jealousy, or at least control, that was part of the breakdown of many of those relationships.

Baldwin: A Love Story is a long biography. Many will not be interested in nearly 800 pages on Baldwin, let alone reading it paired with nearly 500 pages by Leeming, but I do wish that there was another 50 pages or so about the last decade of Baldwin’s life. James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era by Joseph Vogel is entirely about the end of Baldwin’s life framed around the work Baldwin produced at the end. And while I don’t think that Boggs completely ignores the 1980s, it is given much shorter shrift. There is more that could have been written there.

Boggs did correct the historical record in places where Baldwin’s memory was not perfect. I think the meeting with Bobby Kennedy in 1963 was handled as well as either of the two books that have been written just about that meeting. Boggs’ PhD in literature shines through in his literary analysis of Baldwin and as with any good biography, I want to read or re-read more of Baldwin. I am going to start with Little Man, Little Man, but also read Another Country and some more of the non-fiction that I have not previously read. Baldwin does seem to be just as relevant as he was in the 1950s and 60s. And I think Boggs rightly picks up on the ways that the narrative of creative decline that plagued Baldwin in the 70s and 80s was more about the lack of understanding of what Baldwin was trying to do, and the ways that he was changing styles and experimenting, especially around his plays, than actual decline. It was during this era that If Beale Street Could Talk was written and that has up until this point been my favorite of his fiction. I need to revisit it to see if that continues to be the case.

Mostly I read this in print, but when I saw that it had won some awards for the narration, I picked up the audiobook as well and listened to a couple hours of audio in the last quarter of the book. The audiobook is well done if you choose to listen to it. I am glad that I mostly read it in print because of the quotes and references are clearer in print.

There are always questions that I have after reading good biographies. And one of those is about Baldwin’s influences in literature and ideas. It is clear that Baldwin was a voracious reader. But I wish I knew more about that. I also wonder about the very specific question of if he met or read Howard Thurman. There are overlapping ideas there, and I don’t know if Baldwin ever met Thurman or read Jesus and the Disinherited or other books or if they just had some parallel ideas that grew independently. Thurman was a generation older, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had met or read one another.

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I first read John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars and then read a number of his other books over a couple of years. Then I moved on and I didn’t pick up a Scalzi novel for about six years or so. Last year there was a 2 for 1 sale and I saw one book I wanted and Scalzi’s Starter Villain was essentially free. And a year later I actually picked up Starter Villain on a whim and remembered why I like Scalzi.

He is funny. He takes ideas that have been well done and then gives it a new spin that both stands alone as a story, but also is even better if you know the original. Redshirts was told from the perspective of the crew where the crew knew something was going on and if they went on an away mission they would probably die. Fuzzy Nation  is a spin on Henry Beam Piper’s 1962 Little Fuzzy. Old Man’s War is inspired by Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. There are a number of other books that are original, but it is often the “inspired by” book that are the most funny. And while I like the more serious scifi, I tend to use Scalzi’s funny novels to help break me out of reading slumps.

Kaiju Preservation Society is a covid novel. Jamie Gray left his English PhD program to work in communications for a start up. He gets fired, unfairly, just before covid hits NYC and he spends months working as a food delivery person before being offered a job by someone he knew from his grad program. Jamie is desperate for a job, his friend Tom is desperate to get someone at the last minute because he is leaving on a project and one of his team members has covid.

It is not much of a spoiler (since it is on the book description) that the job that Jamie is being hired to do is not on earth, or at least not on our earth. When humans started using nuclear power, they started opening up portals to alternate dimension of earth. Jamie is going to an earth that evolved Kaiju (Godzilla) as the dominant species. Everything on that version of earth will try to kill you.

As Scalzi says in the author’s note at the end, this is not intended to be a deep novel, it is intended to be a pop song. The plot is fairly predictable, but it is still fun. I alternated between the kindle and the audiobook. Wil Wheaton narrated the audiobook. I like Wheaton’s narration most of the time, but he has a narrow range of narration and if the character’s don’t really fit, he isn’t a great narrator. This one fits okay, but Wheaton does tend to make people a bit more snarky than necessary. One reviewer I read said that Wheaton’s narration always makes him want to punch him. I like Wheaton’s narration most of the time, but I get that impulse.

This is a fun book that I enjoyed and also fluffy in a very good way that we all need sometimes.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

The Camino is something I will never do. I would love to do it, but it is highly unlikely that I will ever do it. That being said, several people that are in a book group that I am in have done it. A married couple that I knew from college managed a way station for almost two decades. The son of one of my best friends has done it. And I know there are tons of memoirs and other books about it.

I picked up Call of the Camino because I am in a data entry phase of my work and I like to put light fiction on in the background to make the data work more tolerable. The kindle book was on sale and the audiobook was part of the Audible free library for members. So it was a very low cost to entry.

As I started I wasn’t really impressed. The book it telling two stories, at two points in time, simultaneously. This is something that is not new. You find out very quickly that the two stories are of a daughter in the present getting the chance to write a travel story about the Camino. And then the second story is about the daughter’s mother, who died when the daughter was a toddler. The daughter knows her father (who also died when she was in elementary school) and mother met while doing the Camino. There is obviously a pull to the Camino for the daughter. I think the motivation for the mother’s story is a bit far fetched, but once you suspend disbelief about the reason for the mother’s trip the rest is good.

I was surprised that I like this as much as I did. It is a novel of self discovery and light romance while on a trip that is traditionally associated with a spiritual pilgrimage. The novel is respectful of the spiritual pilgrimage, while not being oriented toward faith. I listened to it for two days while working. And then I was fully invested and read about 10 (short) chapters last night before finishing up the story today on audio.

The narration was good. The writing was engaging. The basic outline of the story was predicable, but still fun enough to follow along. Especially if you can pick it up on sale or borrow it from the library, it is an enjoyable read.

Call of the Camino: A Novel by Suzanne Redfearn Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

Note: This post has a lot of spoilers because I am trying to grapple with how Ishiguro uses the unreliable narrator to grapple with what really happened to the protagonist and those around him. The book also has been out for over 30 years and there is a movie adaptation, so I am not particularly concerned about revealing spoilers. 

I have been revisiting books that I have liked and adding more fiction this year than I normally do. My daughter is currently studying the lead up to World War 2 and I helped her work on a project reading several original documents about Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and then she had to make an argument about whether it had been the right policy or not.

It is almost impossible to put yourself in the position to really make these arguments when you are aware of the result of WWII. Personally, I lean toward pacifism, even if I am not completely pacifist. I think we should try diplomacy as much as possible prior to war. And so reading The Remains of the Day while helping my daughter with her project really does make me appreciate what Ishiguro is trying to do here. Almost no one thinks that appeasement was a good policy at this point. And at the time it was controversial.

The main positive arguments, according to the documents my daughter was assigned, was that the population of the UK was more unified going into 1940 because there was less opposition to the war because Germany had reneged on the Munich agreement and had taken land after agreeing to stop. And at the same time the UK had been ramping up their military and munitions. Those are decent arguments.

The best negative argument is that Hitler was not a reasonable negotiating partner and was never going to accept terms limiting his expansion, so any agreements made were just teaching Hitler and Germany to disregard those outside of Germany and giving Germany more time to consolidate power and build up its own munitions. Again at the time, mistrust of Hitler was high because he was not viewed as someone that was a viable negotiating partner.

I am tempted to give Mr Stephens, the main protagonist of Remains of the Day, the benefit of the doubt if he was simply trying to serve well and was unlucky enough to be employed by a lord with bad policy preferences. But the book shows all throughout that character is playing a role in how the reader should understand the unreliable narrator. Lord Darlington pursued appeasement and background negotiations, but could not himself speak difficult words to his own staff. Mr Stephens’ father was employed beyond the time when he could reasonably do the work he was assigned. But instead of directly addressing the problem, Darlington hinted at the problem. Later when Darlington asked Mr Stephens to “explain the birds and the bees” to his godson because Darlington didn’t want to. The boy’s father, who also was working on the secret conference to negotiate appeasement also was too scared to talk to his (23 year old) son who was about to be married and passed it off to Lord Darlington. Darlington then passed it off to Mr Stephens. That perfectly encapsulates how Ishiguro was framing appeasement, not just as diplomacy, but as the type of diplomacy that cowards attempt.

It is during that conference that Stephens was asked to share the “birds and the bees” and act as the planning host to about 20 people, most of whom had 2-5 staff with them, that Stephens’ father had a stroke and died. Stephens does not even go up to his father’s bedside, but keeps pouring port and caring for the guests. He tells the housekeeper (who is caring for his father) that his father would want it that way. Ishiguro is directly critiquing the very nature of “polite society” in the way he presents this flashback scene. Multiple people come up to Stephens and remark that he doesn’t look well and ask for about his welfare. There are tears on his cheeks that Stephens refused to acknowledge. And then there are others who still want to be waited on or who praise Stephens for his overwork.

I can’t help but in some ways think that the longer discussion of what it means to be a great butler, with which Ishiguro is using as the main subject of Stephens recalling these vignettes would also be a good framing of what it means to be a good pastor or a good christian. Stephens wants to claim to be in the line of greatness of the profession. And he was praised at the dinner above for “being in three places at once”, but Stephens was not at his father’s side and rejected his own humanity for the purpose of serving others. And some christians would give that same excuse for rejecting their own needs as they serve others. As I have mentioned before, there is an author who has a book I decried that calls people to submit to abuse for the purpose of others turning toward Christ. It may be that in fiction we can see the roll of the unreliable narrator can be used to reframe what it means to live our lives as christians as we should.

The next couple of chapters continue to expand on the idea of what it means to have character. Lord Halifax (the head of foreign policy during the lead up to World War II) is said by Stephens to have commented about how good the silver is polished, which makes him more comfortable in the home as Lord Darlington and Halifax again meet with other to discuss appeasing Hitler’s rise top power. (As opposed to more important things other than the superficial, which silver polishing particularly emphasizes.)

And then while Stephens expresses discomfort with it, he dismisses two maids who are Jewish because Darlington is concerned about having Jewish staff when Nazi party members or British sympathizers to come visit. Ishiguro again seems to draw on the exact idea of the problems of white moderates in Letter from a Birmingham Jail to suggest that Darlington was not personally antisemitic, but just that he wanted to not offend those who were. This gives rise to Stephens own bad behavior, which is framed as “teasing” Ms Kenton, which is the start of a longer series of events that causes her to leave the house. She is the former head housekeeper whom Stephens is driving to meet as he reflects on his life up on to that point. The “just teasing” and the “was never antisemitic” and “he always treated me with respect” framing of the book here follows the traditional path of Stephens taking no responsibility for his behavior or the behavior of his employer.

As Stephens describes his journey to meet Ms. Kenton he is sometimes thought to be a “gentleman” because of his borrowed car from the house and his nice clothes and speaking style. Some know that isn’t right because they have more experience with the gentry, and a chauffeur, and then later a doctor rightly pegs him as a butler. But in a village where he runs out of gas and a kind family takes him in, and then the rest of the village comes to introduce themselves, Stephens is happy to take on the role of “gentleman” and plays into it a bit. There is a reflection on the role of democracy and professionalism, but deeper in that discuss is dignity and claiming more for yourself than you are. And it is common for people to want others to see them as “greater than” they really are.

Later in the book Stephens and Ms Kenton meet. She is still married and while she has several times left her husband briefly, she is at that time back with her husband. She left her job as housekeeper and got married because she could not get Stephens to grapple with his own emotions and express his love for her. He loved her and she loved him. She married as an escape and describes how for years she didn’t love her husband and resented both Stephens and her husband. But over time she did come to love him and the life she has. She has children and grandchildren on the way. Her husband is about to retire and their live is good.

In the final reflection, Stephens comes to understand what he has lost in his devotion to “service.” But I also think that the unreliable narrator becomes a bit more reliable in this section, even if he isn’t entirely reliable. Stephens is grappling with his mortality and how he is aging and how he is increasingly making mistakes and can’t do everything he used to do. At the time of the reflections, Lord Darlington has passed away about 3 years earlier. As I said in my first reading, that had Stephens served a honorable Lord with better policies he would be in a different place.

But that isn’t wholly true. We can give ourselves over to “good” in ways that is still wrong. Part of what service means is embracing our humanity. This is a struggle even with mature people. Part of discernment that Ishiguro is working on in this book is that society plays a role in our giving us options. Stephens was in a life of service because his father was in a life of service. He was taught to reject his own emotions, that wasn’t solely a single choice that he made, but how he was taught to live by those around him. We do have the option to reject our upbringing and culture and choose more healthy options, but that is hard work.

The unreliable narrator in Remains of the Day can show us how to live our lives in a negative way.

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook

I picked this up on sale years ago, but like many books I pick up on sale, it can takes years get around to reading it. I read it today in part because I have been trying to decide whether to keep a Kindle Colorsoft that I purchased a few weeks ago.

I read it outside and that outside light offsets the fact that the Colorsoft is pretty dark generally. I won’t turn this into a review of the Colorsoft, but I do want to note that it was a digital ebook and it looked great in full color.

I am a fan of Nnedi Okorafor’s writing. LaGuardia is the 8th book/novella that I have read from her. She is writing scifi/fantasy from an African perspective. My favorite of her books is the Binti trilogy.

This is a near future story where Aliens (from space) were in both Nigeria and the United States. Contextually, it appears that the aliens came to Africa first. The main character, Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka, was born in the US to Nigerian parents who were doctors. Those doctors died in a terrorist bombing in the US that was protesting alien immigration to the US. After that bombing, Future, also a doctor, went back to Nigeria to start a medical clinic. As the story unfolds, the reader comes to figure out why the pregnant Future had returned to the US to have her baby.

Future’s grandmother, and only family, is an immigration lawyer. And much of the rest of the story is about immigration through LaGuardia with actual space aliens and humans from a different country that reframed the immigration debate of 2017-18 with specific country travels bans. Reading this in 2026 when the debate is no less xenophobic, but it still has shifted some of the area of discussion, Okorafor’s writing about “aliens” coming to the US and providing value, but being scapegoated for other problems, is still very relevant.

Any graphic novel is in part about the art. Many of the aliens in this book are plant based and part of the service that the give to humans is being able to graft their own plant parts onto humans to replace lost limbs. But that requires incorporating alien DNA into the humans who get help. That then impacts how others perceive them as human. If those who are human and alien because of the mixed DNA, then can people start calling for “human-only” institutions. This is very clearly a metaphor for various forms of segregation. And Okorafor isn’t only blaming the US here. Part of the reason that she has Future coming to the US, is that there was xenophobic movement in Nigeria. And the (space) aliens were themselves involve in a war across species that mirrored some of the ways that human racism or xenophobia occurs.

Novels and other fiction can reframe discussions. Graphic novels can be a way that draws people into texts for discussion who may not be willing to read a denser book. LaGuardia is worth reading, even if the story can be a bit heavy handed in its metaphors at times.

LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition