Books and Year

This past year, I read perhaps more pages than during any other year in my life. It's not that I read all that many books; it's that many of the books I read were long. Most of these books, I'm a little ashamed to admit, weren't very intellectual. In fact, the bulk of my reading consisted of fantasy fiction books: long, drawn out tales of men and women involved in epic struggles in a reality that includes magic and fantastic creatures. These accounted for about 7,000 of the roughly 9,000 pages I read this year, and I'm not going to waste any more words on these fantasy books except to say that it was, for the most part, enjoyable and fun to read them. However, they almost never inspired me, awed me, or caused me to contemplate. But a few other books did.

The Backslider, by Levi Peterson
fascinated me. This novel, set in rural southern Utah in the 1950s, is about a sometimes wayward Mormon boy who struggles with faith and sexuality. The novel has wide emotional undulations--often it is hilariously funny, at other times somber, and other times, it is tragic. This book is not for the Mormon faint of heart. It is no Gerald Lund rip-off. The book is quite irreverent. One of the many humorous scenes described in the book is of the main character, Frank, and his brother, Jeremy, wrestling the reluctant family dog into a creek so they can baptize him. The main character often views God as a pleasure-killing, vengeful master, and the Holy Ghost as an entity best avoided (he might tell you not to do something fun; or he might tell you to do something unpleasant). The book also includes a fair amount of swearing, several descriptions of sexual encounters, and frank discussions about masturbation.

The Backslider drags out from the closet some Mormon-specific skeletons--polygamy; blood atonement; and varying interpretations of the Word of Wisdom--but many of the conflicts are more broadly defined within the context of Christianity. For example, Frank's view of God seems mostly informed by the images of an angry, frightening Old Testament God, unreconciled with the much more personable Jesus of the New Testament. When Frank touches fossils in rock, he wonders how old the earth really is, and, if the earth is only a few thousand years old, why God would want to trick us with so many misleading clues, such as dinosaur bones and fossils. Frank vacillates between monastic self-denial and indulgences of the flesh. Guilt, repentance, and sin appear throughout the book.

The thing I found most refreshing about the book was its honesty. It asks aloud many of the questions people are afraid to utter. At times, however, the book tips past honesty into absurdity, as with the times when various characters get themselves so tied up in guilt, self-denial, and asceticism that they do things to themselves that seem implausible. Another thing that slightly disappointed me was the conversion to Mormonism that one of the main characters undergoes at the end of the book (converting to the faith has become a cliche that Mormons seem reluctant to leave out of most stories). However, the conversion is handled so artfully, in such a unique series of events, that I quickly forgave the author for turning the book in that direction. In fact, the most important conversion (not to any religion, per se, but to Jesus/God as a loving, empathetic, easy-going guy) , the one that comes to Frank at a vital moment near the end of the novel, is mildly shocking and not at all what a seminary graduate would expect to encounter in a conversion story.

Overall, The Backslider is a well-constructed novel that caused me to reflect upon the human condition, the nature of God, the place of pleasure in life, the necessity of love, and the struggle to make meaning out of chaos.


I'll save for a future post my thougths of the three other books I've recently read: Straight Man; In Cold Blood; and Anna Karinena.

By the way, I just realized that all of the books I've read this year have been written by male authors. I'd like to make the next book I read one written by a woman. Recommendations?