Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson’s beloved comic strip, once depicted Calvin in a philosophical stance, opining to his stuffed tiger that “today’s TV-reared audience is hip and sophisticated.”
“This stuff doesn’t affect us,” the impish Calvin continues. “We can separate fact from fiction. We understand satire and irony. We’re detached and jaded viewers who aren’t influenced by what we watch.”
In the final frame we see Calvin hunched over his feet, mumbling to Hobbes, “Excuse me while I inflate my basketball shoes.” You can view the strip here. It’s a perfect introduction to my favorite read of 2023.
Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis
We are far more easily influenced than we think, and in Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life professor and entrepreneur Luke Burgis unveils the psychological force behind our desires while taking us on a riveting ride that’s part memoir, part sociological analysis and part invitation to search your own soul.
Whether he’s inviting us into the summer of 2008 as he prepares to meet up with Zappos CEO Tony Heish in hopes of selling his e-commerce company to the trendy retailer, helping us understand French philosopher René Girard’s work on mimetic desire, or illustrating his point with engrossing historical vignettes (the mimetic rivalry between Enzo Ferrari and Tonino Lamborghini, for instance), Burgis is never, ever boring.
This book analyzes advertising tactics, social media contagion and the scapegoating impulse in a way so compelling that although I both read and listened to Wanting last year, I’m beginning the new year reading it for the third time. If I had to recommend only one book right now, Wanting would be it. Every quote, diagram and tactic Burgis offers for becoming anti-mimetic (the name of his Substack, to which I subscribe) is insightful and fresh.
Wanting is a book that has the power to change you, to help you prefer the permanent over the paltry (in Burgis’ phrasing, “thick” desires vs. “thin” ones). You won’t be able to stop thinking about what you discover. Wanting is absolutely worth your time.
Everything Sad is Untrue (a true story) by Daniel Neyeri
I’ve never been a fan of YA fiction, even when I was a young adult.
And yet, here I am admitting to you that my favorite fiction book of last year is a story about a middle school boy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But wait: there’s more. Neyeri is an Iranian immigrant who finds himself transplanted to the white bread American heartland in his early adolescence. Everything Sad is Untrue is a tragic and triumphant account of his experience as a refugee, fictionalized in the voice of the author during those middle school years. (And speaking of the author’s voice, Neyeri ‘s narration on the Audible edition is so engaging I couldn’t stop listening. And then I bought the paperback.)
The narrator’s mother escapes Iran, first because of a marital breakup which is bad enough, but then because she, an educated and devout Muslim doctor, has a religious conversion that could cost her and her children’s lives. She is the story’s hero, though Everything Sad is Untrue is her son Khosrou’s story. Nobody in his Oklahoma middle school can pronounce his name, so he becomes Daniel, whose tales of the wealthy family he left in Persia are (predictably) received by his peers with smirks and eyerolls.
Yet Daniel’s family stories (and The Lord of the Rings, which he reads with abandon in the evening) are the threads of a magic carpet on which Khosrou’s life is sustained (along with the saffron-laced dishes his mother cooks after working cleaning shifts to make ends meet). This is a storyteller’s tale, an ode to culture, food and mother love. It reveals the ugly truth about the immigrant’s pain, the ostracizing ignorance of American adolescents, the grace of having understanding teachers, the awkward friendships of middle school boys, the harsh reality of abusive stepfathers.
I just want everyone to read this book. And I want Neyeri to please write a follow up volume. I’ll hop on a magic carpet with him as guide any day.
Parched: A Memoir by Heather King
I don’t always succeed, but ever since I read Redeemed, Heather Kings’s charming memoir in which A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding I’ve tried to read at least one of her books a year. It’s the writer herself–awkward, self-deprecating, hilarious, contemplative, and viscerally descriptive of each nook and cranny along the way that make her work a rich reading pleasure every time.
Parched is a memoir about King’s teenage slide into alcoholism and the decade that followed it. It is about longing and losing, frustration and friendship, despair and denial. And, in the end, redemption through the love of a very imperfect family. Through the raw retelling of her story, through the quirky revelations of her inner world (“I claimed to be afire with the sixties ideals of peace and love, but what I really liked about the sixties was that they were already lulling me into thinking that my over-the-top drinking was normal”) and her laugh-out-loud observations of everyone around her (“Doris, the cashier, possessed the black under-eye circles of a person who stays up nights scheming new ways to be endlessly difficult, unpleasant and unaccommodating”), King gently helps me discover the depths of my own prideful heart.
“Books were the closest thing I had to God,” King, who rose to become a lawyer, NPR commentator and essayist in addition to a memoirist par excellence, writes. Flannery O’Connor. Emily Dickinson. Kafka. Dostoyevsky. Transcendent whispers in the dark, cracks of light in the doorway out. King reminds me that there is always hope.
“I just know,” she concludes as we glimpse the beginning of her recovery, “that only a God of inexhaustible love, infinite creativity, and a burning desire to count every last one of us in could have taken a broken-down wreck like me and made something useful out of her.” Parched leaves me thirsty for another sip of Heather King’s wonderful work.
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again by Justin Brierly
This is such a refreshing book, truly hopeful. It is smart, succinct and, as the title suggests, surprising. I had not heard of British broadcaster Justin Brierly before hearing his book discussed on this episode of the Word on Fire Show, but I’ve since learned that he’s had the fascinating opportunity to host debates between Christians and atheists for over 17 years on the Premier podcast Unbelievable? and is now continuing that work on his own interview show, Surprising Rebirth.
The debates Brierly moderated not only strengthened his Christian faith, but they’ve enabled him to discern a possible turning of the tides in the sea of faith (a reference to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which had noted its “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” after the Enlightenment).
First chronicling the “rise and fall of the New Atheism,” the book then turns our attention to the “new conversation on God” opened up by psychology professor Jordan Peterson, historian Tom Holland, and a wide variety of well known personalities, pundits, philosophers, feminists, historians and scientists who demonstrate a new openness to acknowledging the benefits the Christian worldview has produced in society, and critical of the anti-intellectualism of cancel culture.
As a Christian who has engaged the grounds for faith for decades, what I found most exciting about Brierly’s book is its middle chapters, which are dedicated to new arguments supporting the ancient faith. These chapters are studded with names of serious contemporary historians, writers, scientists and philosophers actively engaging the evidence. Christianity’s contribution to social justice and culture is examined in Chapter 3. The case for the reliability of the biblical text is laid out in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 details why many young scientists find Christianity to be credible.
But Chapter 6, “Mind, Meaning and the Materialists,” was for me the most exciting of them all, crushing the determinist view of reality and revealing how an overemphasis on left brain, materialist-only logic is impoverishing human flourshing, depriving us of meaningful narratives, art and morality.
Whether or not the sea of faith’s tide is turning, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God will encourage believers to keep engaging the grounds for faith, and perhaps allow new seekers to take a fresh look at the invitation in. “The water’s lovely,” Brierly says with a smile.
Let’s hope many will take him up on the offer and find the unfathomable riches offered those who find a door to enter.
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You might also enjoy Galileo’s Daughter Meets God and the Astronomers: When Faith and Science Confront Infinite Mystery and Lesser Known Lightfoot: Glimpses into the Singer’s Spiritual Side.
Did your family love Calvin and Hobbes back in the day? Who didn’t? One of our favorite series featured Calvin’s time travel machine in which he attempted to avoid doing his homework. Revisit the fun here. But it seems Watterson paid quite a price for the strip’s fame. Why Bill Watterson Vanished tells the rest of the story.
What were your favorite books of last year? I’d love to hear from you!
Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash.
