Summer Reading List 2018 – halfway point

Summer has reached its height. The temperatures are awful, the storms are coming fast and furious, and it’s a good time to just sit inside, turn that AC on high, and read.

Back at Memorial Day, I announced the 2018 version of the Summer Reading List Challenge. Your task: 3 books read by Labor Day. As of today, you have 32 days remaining, so how are you doing?

Although I’m writing this on July 19, the two weeks between then and now won’t see me finishing a third book for the challenge. There’s just too much else to do. But that’s okay. I’ve got 2 so far:

Fiction

Title: The Core
Author: Peter V. Brett
Genre: Fiction/fantasy
Year: 2017

This is the final part of the five-book Demon Cycle that started way back when with The Warded Man. I’ve followed along through the whole thing, and I have this to say about the series as a whole: the worldbuilding is excellent. Here we have what’s basically a distant post-apocalyptic setting. Demons come up out of the ground every night, preying on humans, keeping them corralled into a handful of cities and numerous small villages. There’s magic, war, sex, violence, and pretty much everything you’d want out of an epic fantasy saga.

Well, this book cranks everything up to 11. That’s really the only way to put it. And it works, for the most part. The worst complaint I’ve heard about the Demon Cycle is the author’s use of dialect, which some found confusing or even incomprehensible. As someone who is used to Southern and Appalachian speech, it never bothered me one bit. Instead, I was more annoyed by the fanboy-like fawning over a certain group of people, the sometimes blatant Mary Sue nature of quite a few characters, and the Mass Effect 3 ending.

Other than that, it was a fun read, a fun journey. I won’t say The Core is the best book I’ve ever read, and at over 700 pages, it’s a pretty big investment, but this one was worth it. I love worldbuilding, I love interesting settings, and I love cinematic action. Going by that standard, this book’s got it all.

Nonfiction

Title: From Tyndale to Madison
Author: Michael Farris
Genre: Nonfiction/history
Year: 2007

One of the requirements of the Summer Reading List challenge is a nonfiction book. My choice for this year is a fairly obscure work I got from…somewhere, entitled From Tyndale to Madison. Its goal is to link William Tyndale’s 16th-century attempt to translate the Bible into English with the concept of freedom of religion expressed in the 1st Amendment.

Well, it pretty much fails at that. I have nothing against Christianity per se, or indeed Christian authors, but this book is a case where an author looked at a topic from a biased angle and, wonder of wonders, came to a biased conclusion. The historical parts of the book, a series of cases where the established English (and later Colonial) church used its power to suppress lesser sects, work just fine. They’re informative even for someone like me, someone who has researched the period to some slight degree.

Where I take issue is the notion that these nonconformists were the sole reason why the Founding Fathers made sure to include the free exercise of religion (or the lack of such) into our country’s second most important document. The author tries to prove that this had nothing to do with the Enlightenment, the single most pivotal era in the history of science, philosophy, and rationality. He also dismisses the very well established evidence that many of those who founded the US, who were responsible for ensuring that Christianity in any guise would not reign supreme, were deists.

Yeah, that doesn’t exactly work. Even in its own text, the “debunking” fails. The colonial laws of tolerance the author so often quotes as being the precursors to the Bill of Rights invariably continue to outlaw deism, atheism, and other non-Christian philosophies. If, as his theory supposes, these were what Madison and the others of his time were trying for, then they failed miserably. And it’s a good thing they did.

So I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. The history parts are fine, but it’s blatantly obvious that the author has an agenda, and he’s willing to distort the evidence to confirm it. Leave that to Fox News. We don’t need it in our books.

Coming up

There’s still a #3. I haven’t decided what it’ll be just yet, but I’ve got a few ideas. I do want to read something a little older, maybe even a classic. The box I have yet to check is “a genre you don’t normally write”, so fantasy won’t cut it. Probably not sci-fi, either, unless I go for something a little…out of the ordinary. I’ll tell you around Labor Day, or you can follow me on the Fediverse (using Mastodon, Pleroma, or whatever your favorite platform): @mikey@toot.love. Keep reading!

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