Field Notes for the Wilderness, by Sarah Bessey

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Sarah Bessey’s writing appeals to me for the same reason that it sometimes slightly disappoints me: she has struggled with, and thought through, many of the same issues that I have. Which is great, but it does mean that sometimes what she is revealing as her own hard-won learning strikes me as a bit of “well, I already knew that.” That was the case with her book Jesus Feminist, which I really liked when I read it about ten years ago — it spoke to me, but mostly in the way of confirming things I had already known and believed for a long time. Bessey writes for people who, like me, have their heritage and the beginning of their spiritual journey firmly planted in conservative Christian denominations, but who have either left those churches, or remained uneasily in them, loving things about their tradition but critical of leadership and of some teachings.

Field Notes for the Wilderness speaks to people in both these situations, assuring them that it’s OK for faith to grow and change throughout our lives (in fact, it’d be weird if it didn’t) while also acknowledging that these changes can be painful and involve real losses — loss of relationships, loss of community. Bessey doesn’t glibly assure readers that forging new relationship and community is easy — she recognizes that following your conscience can be a difficult path. There were times in this book when I wanted fewer words spent reassuring me that it’s OK to be on the journey I’m on — “I already know that!” — and more practical suggestions. But that reassurance is just what a lot of people need, people who are still questioning whether they might, after all, end up in an eternally burning hell they’re not sure they believe in, if they take steps outside the known boundaries of church teachings. I think those are the people that most need to read this book and be encouraged by Sarah’s wise and experienced voice.

Great Big Beautiful Life, by Emily Henry

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Emily Henry is such a reliable writer. You know there’s going to be a young-but-not-cringingly-young couple, both connected to the world of books in some way (writer, editor, publisher, librarian, bookstore employee … you get it) who will go through the predictable romance tropes of meeting, attraction, obstacles, and eventual resolution with wit, charm, and a moderate degree of steaminess. And there will be a happy ending.

Great Big Beautiful Life is no exception. With an opening premise that reminiscent of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, struggling journalist Alice is hired by a reclusive heiress who disappeared from the public eye decades ago, to write her biography.

Or at least, Alice is sort-of hired. Turns out she’s actually on trial, with the old lady meeting alternately with Alice and another writer, the much-more-successful Hayden, who’s already written one best-selling celebrity bio. Her plan is to allow both of them to interview her separately, then to decide who’ll get to write the book. Alice, who is smitten with the handsome but reserved Hayden almost as soon as they meet, is sure he’ll get the job — but she’ll also do everything she can to win this weird competition.

That’s the set-up, and of course the story goes exactly as you’d expect it to go. But what a great ride it is, and it includes some genuinely unpredictable twists and turns (at least, I didn’t see them coming). I had loads of fun reading this.

The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff

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This book was recommended to me awhile ago and I finally got to read it. I usually really enjoy novels set in India, and this one has a great premise — a woman who is suspected of murdering her husband (she didn’t; he just disappeared) is approached by other women in the village who want help getting rid of their unwanted husbands also. It was a quick and engaging read, though it felt a little tonally off in some places — I guess it’s the kind of “dark humour” (there are actual deaths involved) where it can be hard to strike that balance between the humour and the darkness. The husbands certainly deserve it, as they are in some cases very abusive, but it still felt like the author was trying to walk a bit of a tightrope between an empowering comedy of sisterhood, and a darker tale about abuse and murder. I enjoyed reading this but I had reservations.

Conclave, by Robert Harris

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Earlier this year, when everyone was talking about the movie Conclave, I realized it was based on a book by Robert Harris, a writer whose historical novels I love. This one isn’t historical; it’s quite contemporary — although in a way it feels like it could be historical, because the rites and rituals surrounding a papal conclave are so ancient that it feels like the cardinals at the centre of the story are living in the modern world and in medieval times simultaneously.

Harris always does excellent research, so I am sure he got most of the details of how a papal conclave works right, even though he takes liberties for fiction’s sake and of course the whole thing is so shrouded in secrecy there are details we may never be sure of the accuracy of. What feels so true to me (knowing a lot about religious people though nothing about Catholic cardinals specifically) is how the ambition, the jockeying for power, sits uneasily alongside what for most of these men is a deep a genuine faith. I’m not sure everyone writing about Vatican politics would get that right; I’m not sure if the movie (which I haven’t seen yet) conveys that. But I felt strongly that despite their flaws and the self-serving things some of them do, these men — especially the main character, Cardinal Lomelli — genuinely believe in the Church’s mission and desire to serve God, and are troubled by doubts and driven by faith, just like Christians in much humbler and less powerful positions who also sometimes do bad things in the course of trying to do God’s work.

I made a conscious decision when I first learned of both the book and the movie, to wait awhile to read them. Pope Francis was in poor health at the time, and, knowing he couldn’t last forever, I thought it would be interesting to read the book and watch the film in the period between the pope’s death and the selection of a new pope. While the pope who has just died in Conclave is never named, all the popes leading up to him are historically accurate up to Benedict/Ratzinger, and the dead pope is extremely similar to Francis in many biographical details. So this felt like a timely read in a way that was both sad and appropriate.

The Capital of Dreams, by Heather O’Neill

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I think it might be time to admit that Heather O’Neill’s writing, while beautiful and highly acclaimed, is just not the best match for my brain. I admire the scope and ambition of her novels, but for me there’s always something lacking in engagement with the story and characters, and I think it’s just a question of writing style and reading style not syncing up, just as it was with Lullabies for Little Criminals and When We Lost Our Heads.

Like that latter book, The Capital of Dreams both is, and is not, a historical novel. It’s set in a fictional European (probably Eastern European) country called Elysium, at the beginning of a war that seems to be the Second World War, though “The Enemy” of the novel is never identified as German or Nazi. While Elysium is fictional and the Enemy is vague, there are references to real places (someone is living in Paris) so the mythic world is somewhat anchored within the real world. Elysium, a small country struggling to maintain both its political and its cultural independence, is invaded and occupied by the Enemy, and fourteen-year-old Sofia, daughter of an acclaimed Elysian writer who is more into being a writer than being a mother, is being sent away from the Capital (nameless, like the Enemy) to safety with a group of other children. So begins a picaresque journey through a war-torn countryside, in company with a talking goose: a meditation on war, motherhood, the power of art, and human cruelty. Interesting and well-written, but I wasn’t as emotionally engaged in the story as I would have liked to be.

The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy; The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks, by Mackenzi Lee

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These two sequels pick up where The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue leaves off. Or rather, the Lady’s Guide picks up not too long afterwards, with Felicity (Monty’s sister from the first novel) desperately trying to figure out how to become a doctor at a time when women were banned from studying medicine, and ending up on a madcap voyage through Europe. The Nobleman’s Guide picks up the story twenty years later, when the baby sibling Monty and Felicity left behind has grown to young manhood and meets the siblings he never knew he had. This is perhaps the biggest flaw with the third novel: it has to happen twenty years later in order for Adrian to grow up, but Monty and Felicity don’t feel like people approaching or just past forty; their reactions, problems, and solutions are still those of the young people they were in the first two books.

Despite this, these are fun historical romps (with some deliberate anachronisms and the occasional touch of the paranormal) that continue to answer the question: how did people cope with supposedly “modern” issues (bisexuality, asexuality, feminism, mental illness, etc etc etc) at a time when all those things existed but without the understanding and language we currently have to talk about them. While the Montague siblings’ adventures often stretch credibility, they’re always fun journey and a little bit thought-provoking.

Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green

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If, like me, you’re a fan of John Green’s social media presence on the YouTube channel and podcast he shares with his brother Hank (Vlogbrothers; Dear Hank and John) won’t be surprised by the content of his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. Green, who was already deeply committed to supporting local health care initiatives in African countries (specifically, supporting and raising funds for a maternal health care centre in Sierra Leone) became interested in tuberculosis while visiting Sierra Leone. Showcasing the same ability to take deep dives into subjects that he demonstrated in his essay collection The Anthropocene Reviewed, he began to learn as much as he could about the history of this disease, and how it can still be killing so many people every year when reliable cures have existed for decades.

The answer is, of course, injustice. As John Green points out repeatedly in this book, tuberculosis travels along trails humans have blazed for it, continuing to run rampant in poorer countries while being virtually eradicated in rich countries. he tells this story in an entertaining way, with lots of anecdotes about how everything from cowboy hats to Adirondack chairs can trace their history back to tuberculosis. Between the facts, the history, and the passionate argument that we can in fact do better, the linking thread tying this book together is the story of a young man named Henry Reider, a tuberculosis patient Green got to know in Sierra Leone.

The trick of this book is making the subject of tuberculosis both intriguing enough and personal enough to make people care about it. This book hitting bookstore shelves just as the US massively slashes its foreign aid budget, almost guaranteeing the fight against TB will move backwards instead of forward, is certainly something John Green could not have predicted when he started writing this. But it means the message of Everything is Tuberculosis is more important than ever right now.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, by Lisa See

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Once again, as with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See takes us into the world of Chinese women’s history, a cloistered world circumscribed by strict rules of social class, family structure, and protocol. This novel takes us several hundred years earlier, into the Ming Dynasty (what we’d call medieval times in European history; the subject of this novel, a real woman named Tan Yunxian, lived from 1461–1554). Lady Tan was known as a “woman doctor,” and this novel stitches together the little that is known about her life with Lisa See’s strong research into women’s lives in that period, to create a picture of how a woman could have gotten, and been able to use, an education in medicine. This was a fascinating glance into a little-known world.

On the Hippie Trail, by Rick Steeves

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This was a fun, quick audiobook listen — travel writer and presented Rick Steeves reading (unedited) the journal he kept in his early 20s when he and a friend went on Rick’s first major trip outside Europe. It was the late 70s, just before the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when, as long as you didn’t mind being uncomfortable, you could take a bus all the way to India — and lots of young Americans did. This is definitely a snapshot of a moment in time — Rick points out in the intro that he didn’t edit his youthful journals to try to smooth over some of his views at the time, and you definitely get the sense that he would not have used some of the same descriptors and stereotypes today as he did then when encountering people from different cultures. But even with his admittedly limited perspective at the time, you can already see in him an openness to people and experiences that would go on to make him a great travel writer. Knowing that that “hippie trail” journey would shortly become impossible due to political upheavals in the region adds to the feeling that this journal captures a fleeting slice of life that can’t be revisited, anymore than our own youth (much less adventurous than Rick Steeves’s youth, for most of us) can.

Circle of Hope, by Eliza Griswold

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This was a really interesting book. Journalist Eliza Griswold spent several years researching and interviewing people involved in a progressive evangelical church called “Circle of Hope.” Initially, she intended the project to be about shedding light on a little-understood corner of American Christianity — people who hold to most of the key tenets of evangelical Christianity, but who, rather than embracing Christian nationalism and right-wing politics as so many conservative Christians have done, instead tend to lean either generally to the left, or to remain determinedly apolitical. (Circle of Hope, specifically, is in the Anabaptist tradition, so their position was always to be beyond politics and not get caught up in political divisions).

However, as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement unfolded in 2020, and the church’s founders took a step back to make way for new leadership, Griswold found herself chronicling something else entirely: how a progressive community founded on ideals of love, mutual help, and social justice, essentially imploded and fell apart.

It’s a sad and very human story that feels extremely relevant to those of us who go to church, but also to people involved more generally in collective endeavours, especially of the doing-good kind — a lot of the thing that happened at Circle will sound familiar to anyone who has worked or volunteered in the non-profit sector, including a pretty significant case of founders’ syndrome from the pastoral couple who were supposed to be stepping back from leadership.

There’s no shocking sexual-abuse or money-embezzling scandal here, and most of the issues the divided Circle’s four pastors and their congregations weren’t even theological. The decision over whether to fully affirm LGBTQ members created some fault lines, but for the most part, members and leaders remaining generally on the same Anabaptist page, theologically speaking. Where they divided was over how to do what they saw themselves called to do — represent God and live out God’s love in the world. For some, this involved making anti-racism a key part of their mission, while others felt that it was enough just to not be overtly racist, and that there were other issues just as important as racism.

What ends up happening, as pretty much anyone who’s ever been part of a human institution can tell you, is that it quickly stops being about ideas and ideals and becomes about personalities — particularly the personalities of the four current pastors and the semi-retired founders. Griswold tells the story from each of the pastors’ perspectives, based on extensive interviews and extended periods of time immersed in the four congregations, observing how well-meaning conflicts over how best to share God’s love with neighbours devolved into accusations, sniping, and recriminations.

There are no clear moral-of-the-story lessons here, no guidebook for how churches or other organizations might avoid the kind of unravelling that happened at Circle of Hope. Rather, Griswold simply invites the reader to do what she did for four years — observe, listen, empathize with people on all sides of this conflict, and decide for ourselves what messages we can take away from this sad tale of well-meaning people trying to do God’s work, and letting human nature get in the way.