What I've Been Reading - Feburary '26 edition
Alright, not sure how long it's been since I talked about this, but here's some stuff I've been reading since the last time. We'll go in alphabetical order.
Bea Wolf
By Zach Weinersmith and Boulet
Bea Wolf is a delightful childified version of the story of Beowulf, where viking warriors and castles are replaced with kids eating candy in a treehouse, and the monster Grendel is replaced with a grumpy old neighbor whose very touch turns children into boring teenagers and adults. Weinersmith puts a lot of effort into keeping the original's poetic language and meter, and the art by Boulet is splendid.
I think my favorite part of the book, though, is the coda at the end: a long essay by Weinersmith about the history and the language of the original Beowulf, both informative and accessible to young readers. Really a treat.
A Fire Upon the Deep
By Vernor Vinge
I really enjoyed this book. I like sci-fi that has really alien aliens, right? Like, I'm not complaining about Stars Trek and Wars style sci-fi where the aliens are pretty much all humanoid, but I like when stories take the opportunity to explore some really weird ideas and possibilities. A Fire Upon the Deep goes hard on the weird aliens, and makes them major enough features of the plot (even perspective characters!) that we really get to explore some of the possibilities of sound-based hive minds and sentient oysters that use computers for short-term memory.
I also like hard-ish sci-fi that, instead of trying to come up with "realistic" explanations for how interstellar travel could work, comes up with some weird reason why the rules we think apply don't actually apply, and then really digs into the consequences of that, explores what it means and how it would play out. In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge postulates that the galaxy is divided into "zones of thought," with intelligence and technology being more limited in the zones closer to the galactic core, and faster and more free in the zones further from the core. Get too close to the core and you're in the "slow zone," where FTL travel is impossible and intelligence is limited to not much more than normal humanity. If you get further out, though, computers can be practically sentient, ships can jump across vast distances, but it's all still simple enough to be conceived by a human mind. Get too far out, though, into "the beyond," and it's the realm of Powers of unfathomable intelligence and inscrutable goals. It's an interesting idea that lets him place the story in a hard-ish sci-fi setting without needing to play by some of the more traditional rules of physics.
Sorry, this came out more "summary" and less "review," but that's because I liked it so much and I want to share some of the ideas it had that I liked! So in short, if any of this sounds interesting to you, I definitely recommend it.
Fluent Forever
By Gabriel Wyner
This is an excellent book for anyone who's trying to learn a new language. Wyner is an opera singer, who thus needs to be able to sing flawless Italian, German, Russian, etc., and is sharing how he's managed to learn so many languages so completely.
I'd been using Anki before I started reading the book, but he gave me several tricks to really take Anki to the next level - especially, incorporating google image searches to find an image for all my cards. An image search will give you immediate nuance that definitions can struggle to capture; for example, the literal definition of "癒やし系" is like "healing method" or "therapy," but if you google image search it, you only get images of cute young women. Turns out, the term is most often used to talk about a type of "healing girl," like a relationship goal type of thing. It doesn't necessarily mean people wouldn't know what you meant if you started talking about wanting therapy, but it's the sort of thing that could definitely lead to an embarrassing mistake.
Wyner is also a very big advocate for beginning your language learning with pronunciation, which I've always valued but now he's given me good reasons for. His main argument is that it's a problem if you think, say, "Descartes" and "Dezz-cartezz" are two different people, and learning how to pronounce words properly to begin with means that you don't have to relearn any of your vocabulary later.
If you're learning a new language or just interested in learning a new language, this is an easy recommend.
Forgotten God
By Francis Chan
I liked this book, but I feel kinda bad; I don't have a lot to say about it. Look, it's a solid book with some solid theology about the Holy Spirit. Very little of it is revolutionary, but it's a helpful refresher/primer on the third person of the Trinity, and the fact that he is, indeed, a Person and not a Thing. This should be your starting point if you feel like you have any gaps in your understanding of the Spirit.
One Thousand Gifts
By Ann Voskamp
So this is a classic of the, like, women's Bible study circuit, but I only heard about it recently. One Thousand Gifts is less a self-help/devotional book than it is an memoir about the author's path down a self-help-ish journey, relating the lessons she learned along the way. As such, it's remarkably grounded and practical in a way that I really appreciated.
The basic thrust of the text is about having gratitude for the stuff that's obviously good, as practice for having gratitude for stuff that we only know is good because God is good. It's easy to thank God in all circumstances when the weather is nice and we're relaxing on the porch with a glass of lemonade; it's harder to thank God when your son's hand gets mangled in an industrial fan. I really appreciated how Voskamp didn't hide from the hard questions and didn't shy away from expressing her own struggles in the midst of them. Her answers won't work for everyone, but sometimes when you read memoirs like this, it feels less like the author actually found peace in a situation, and more like they figured out how to move forward without dealing with it; that is not the case in this book.
The text is uniquely florid and poetic in a way that I know is a turn-off for many people, but I didn't mind it; it felt eccentric rather than try-hard or distracting, and helped ground things even more for me.
Prayer
By Timothy Keller
So this was my first Tim Keller book, which if you're not a Presbyterian you might not know is funny, but it is very funny. But I think the funniest part for me was how reading it made it obvious that I have been reading Tim Keller books for years, indirectly. I've heard so many sermons and lesson plans that were structured off of his points, that this book was kind of... like, it's good book and I did learn some stuff from it, but very little of it was new to me, right? Even down to the fundamental structure of its arguments; I could see where he was going with things from the first sentence of each chapter.
That made it not a particularly exciting book for me to read, and it means it's hard for me to point to anything in particular that I got out of it because most of it just blends perfectly with a lot of my past learning on prayer. But that doesn't mean it was a bad book or that I don't recommend it; just the opposite.
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
By John Mark Comer
This was a great book that I read at a great time in my life for it. Usually you read a self-help (is that the right word for this genre?) book when there's a thing that you're struggling with, but I read this one at a time when I had basically figured out how to elimate hurry from my life. What I was struggling wasn't hurry - it was the feeling of, I dunno, guilt? Laziness? That was accompanying my new lack of hurry, but this book helped show me why I had eliminated hurry from my life and why that was a good thing.
The title of the book comes from a conversation the author had with John Ortberg, where he'd asked Ortberg how to become the person he wanted to be. Ortberg thought for a moment and said (I'm paraphrasing), "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of spirituality." So he went on a bit of a journey exploring the harmful effects of hurry in his life and the benefits of a measured pace, and the book relays the fruits of that experience.
Comer's books are all countercultural, but the other books I read were like, countercultural for American Evangelical culture, right? This one is much more countercultural for mainstream American culture; for example, he recommends practices like driving the speed limit, or deliberately choosing the longest checkout line at the grocery store. It's a lot of questions about some really fundamental stuff that's hard to realize are even questions to be asked, right? Like, "Why do we want to do things faster? Why do we want more time in the day?" You don't have to agree with all of his conclusions, I think, to benefit tremendously just from asking yourself some of the questions.
Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering
By Timothy Keller
So I liked Prayer well enough, but this Tim Keller book was phenomenal. Suffering and grief are topics that we don't typically dig into until we're, like, caught in them - or even until after we're clawing our way out. And Tim Keller understands that, and has structured the book so that people who are caught in the midst of suffering can look for support quickly. But he devotes the majority of the book to a more philosophical dissection of suffering and the Christian approach to it in a way that I think is extremely valuable to look at when you're not caught in the midst of it.
I particularly appreciated his review of alternative approaches to suffering and why Christianity has something to offer that each of them don't. It kind of supports an idea that I've been chewing on recently about how Christian outreach is often most effective when, instead of telling people why they need Jesus, you show them how Jesus is the best way to be who they want to be. Like Paul at the Aeropagus; he doesn't go in there like, "Wow, you guys have so many false gods, let me tell you why you're wrong!" He says, "Hey, I can see that you guys are all very religious and are eager to please the gods; let me tell you about this one you're not familiar with." I mean, shoot, he even quotes their scripture at them. Anyway, Tim Keller talks a lot about Stoicism and how and why Christianity flourished among stoics - notably, because early Christians handled suffering so well, which was a trait that Stoicism prized.
I think my favorite part of the book, though, were the several personal accounts of grief and suffering, one after each of the first several chapters. Some of them were people on the other side of suffering, some were from people smack in the middle of it, and all of it together worked very well to paint a portrait of how broad suffering is, how diverse it is, and how there isn't one easy answer to apply to all of it - a point that Tim Keller makes repeatedly throughout the book. This book gets a high recommend.
Oof! Okay that was kind of a lot, I should do these more frequently. We'll see what happens.