My Personal Best of 2013 in Books

Some friends and I have a yearly tradition of sharing our favorite media with each other, and since life hasn’t been kind enough to allow me time to think, much less blog, about anything heavier in recent weeks, I thought I would expand upon my favorites here at The Gleaming Sword, beginning with books.

In a year when a new Robert Jordan book comes out, nothing else stands a chance, and that was true in 2013 as well. Each of the last three installments in the Wheel of Time series, completed by Brian Sanderson based on Jordan’s notes, has been excellent, and A Memory of Light, the fourteenth and final book, was among the best in the whole series. Somehow, Sanderson brought the biggest plot spread and largest cast of characters I’ve ever seen to a satisfying conclusion. I remember seeing The Wheel of Time on a list of books adults should grow out of, but I have to disagree. Its stark vision of Good versus Evil is just as satisfying to me as an adult as it was when I began reading almost 20 years ago in college.

 

Instead of jumping from series to series this year, I tried to follow some straight through to the end. One such sustained reading project was Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series--which even got a blog of its own (blog). The true enjoyment of this series lay in the concept of all humanity resurrected along the banks of a massive river and in learning about the historical personages who appear throughout the series, from Sir Richard Francis Burton and Alice Pleasance Liddell to Cyrano de Bergerac, King John and Hermann Goring. Unfortunately, after the phenomenal first book, I found the series frustratingly uneven, with little in the way of prose style and only infrequent glimpses of the engaging characters, gripping events and insightful ponderings with which the series began.

But it was an interesting series, and it led me to learn more about Sir Richard Francis Burton by reading Fawn M. Brodie’s biography The Devil Drives. Burton was a soldier, explorer, poet, linguist and translator, most known for discovering Lake Tanganyika and translating One Thousand and One Nights. In some of that--his penchant for study, travel and translation--I can’t help but feel he was something of a kindred spirit, but if he was, he was certainly a much higher specimen of our type. The Devil Drives was interesting for its insight into Burton, but also for its glimpse into a time when the world was still being discovered rather than simply covered.

 

If Richard Burton was something of a kindred spirit, my next big subject of interest--with his drugs, alcohol, guns and wild pranks--was certainly not. As I read the biography Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, I was fascinated, but disconcerted by a mind both unglued as well as genius. I can sympathize with his political leanings, but his way of living positively frightens me. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine he would have delivered up such classics as Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without continually living on the edge.

The real treat in my exploration of Thompson this year was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. It spends over half its pages on the Democratic primaries, dives deep into the Democratic convention, and, almost as an afterthought, as a shrug, comments upon George McGovern’s loss to Richard Nixon. The book is Thompson in high style, slewing from serious reporting and interview transcripts to colorful anecdotes, invective and surreal fantasy--and it leaves one sad that a man as good as George McGovern should be forgotten to most:

 

Projects for 2014 include continuing a thread of reading in the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory with Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, with lighter reading in the Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson Dune books and Michael Moorcock’s Elric books.

More on those next year, perhaps.

Philip Jose Farmer Makes Nonsense of the Bodily Resurrection by Making It Happen

One of my reading projects the past year has been Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, which begins with every human being who ever lived awaking after death on the banks of a massive river. As it deals with an afterlife of sorts, there is a great deal of religion in Riverworld and a great deal of skepticism about religion, but what struck me most was how Farmer has portrayed a bodily resurrection, and in doing so has highlighted what is ridiculous about the very idea.

Every time I heard about this series prior to reading it, I thought it sounded stupid, especially since book covers and promotional material for the books and related media tend to highlight the jumble of people from different places and times who find themselves together after rebirth: Medieval kings, modern day stockbrokers, African tribesmen, ancient Greeks, and so on. The whole thing sounded random and farcical, but after running across the first book, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, in a used bookstore for only $1.95, I decided to give it a try and found myself engrossed from start to finish.

In the book, every human being who has ever lived from 99,000 B.C. to 1983--that’s approximately 35 billion souls--wakes up along the banks of The River, which is roughly ten million miles long and winds around the entire surface of an alien planet. Everyone wakes up at once, nude, hairless, in perfect health, and with a body about 26 years old and immune to further aging. Grasslands and forests run along the river, bounded on both sides by nearly impenetrable mountains. The resurrected human race--including common folk such as you and me, as well as historical personages such as Richard Francis Burton, Cyrano de Bergerac, Samuel Clemens and Hermann Goering--must first learn to survive. Then, some embark on a journey to the head of the river to confront the mysterious beings known as Ethicals who have resurrected the human race.

As I read the mechanics of this science-fiction account of life after death, I realized that Farmer had to answer a question that religion avoids: What kind of bodies will we have in the afterlife? While Farmer is simply writing an interesting tale, he can fill in the details as he wishes, but the problem for the religious belief in a bodily resurrection--and the idea of Heaven in general, something along the lines of the vision at the end of Terrence Malick's beautiful film The Tree of Life--is that no answer to the question makes sense or satisfies the criteria of Heaven.

 

 

I doubt Malick intended for the above to be a literal representation of Heaven, but it is a lot like what many people think the afterlife will be like.

Consider the common conception of Heaven as a reunion: I can imagine myself reunited with my loved ones in their bodies from life, but does that mean my grandparents, for example, will be the elderly people I have so many fond memories of? They would probably prefer a younger, fitter body as in Farmer’s Riverworld, but then, while they would technically be my grandparents, with so much different about them than I remember, they would hardly be the people I knew. But isn’t that a great deal of the point, being reunited with those we once knew?

It does not solve the problem to say we will have new bodies, because new bodies would also make everyone something different, unrecognizable. That’s no reunion, either. Besides, a body, any body, is still a body, one that needs to eat, drink, sleep, couple and crap. Think about it a little, and you’ll see Heaven as traditionally defined has no place for hunger, thirst, lust and feces. With bodies, Heaven would soon be a lot like Earth, a lot like Riverworld, actually--just another struggle for food, shelter, power, sex.

This is why religion is better off sticking with spiritual resurrection. Then, at least, all the details can remain vague, backed up by assurances that the power of God pulls it off somehow. As an atheist, that doesn’t impress me much either, but that’s a different argument.