Barbara Ehrenreich

1 Comment December 31, 2020 Steve Wiggins

As has become traditional on this blog, I like to revisit my reading for the year before the next one begins. No matter what else goes wrong, we have books. As I noted yesterday, I’ll be devising my own reading challenge for the coming year and if nothing else, it’ll be diverse. For 2020, according to Goodreads, I finished 78 books. Since I was in the final stages of getting Nightmares with the Bible to the publisher, several books early on were about demons, and many of them were quite good. The nonfiction that really stick out in my mind, however, includes D. W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, Richard King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea, Gary D. Rhodes’ The Birth of the American Horror Film, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Secret Body, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God, and Ernestine Hayes’ The Tao of Raven. If anything ties these books together it is likely their honesty when it comes to the spiritual quest. It can legitimately take many directions.

Fiction has, at least for much of the year, been driven by a few factors: books I have on hand during a pandemic, The Modern Mrs. Darcy’s reading challenge, and books on my reading wishlist. That list is constantly growing and the books that stand out particularly are again diverse. Especially memorable were Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Scott Shibuya Brown’s The Traders, Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Apart from their diversity these books have little in common. I suppose that’s a testament to the importance of reading widely. On that list there are only two “white” men but a lot of great books.

Another couple of categories might apply: big books and short story collections. Big books intimidate me, but I read five of over 500 pages: Ellison’s Invisible Man again, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (my longest book for the year), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. These books are all in the “classics” category, I see. Short story collections are more edible, and I read nine of them, including four “by” Rod Serling. The first was an edited collection of his works, and the other three were his own Twilight Zone adaptations. I read a few plague books because of the pandemic, but they weren’t really among my favorites. Perhaps they were a little too close to reality. Nevertheless 2020 was a good year of reading, overall. I’m looking ahead to what gems 2021 might hold.

1 Comment October 30, 2020 Steve Wiggins

Living with a Wild God, by Barbara Ehrenreich, is one of those books I wanted to put down gently after reading it, for fear that it might explode. Or maybe it was my head I feared might combust. Describing it is difficult because it is so wide-ranging. On the one hand it is an atheist’s view of religion. On the other hand it is a spiritual biography. On a third hand it is coming to terms with having had a profound mystical experience. It is one of those books where, knowing my life has been so very different, yet I feel that Ehrenreich and I have had so much in common that we’d be friends if we ever met. It is also the work of a woman who is scary smart and whose teenage thoughts were so intense that my own seem puerile by comparison.

But that mystical experience! I’ve had many of them in my life, but I don’t know you well enough to share them here. They’ve been recorded in an unfinished book that I may or may not try to publish some day. (Ehrenreich was smart and took a job as a journalist, which means others assume you know how to write. Even those of us in publishing have trouble convincing agents and others who hold the keys to non-academic pricing that we understand the craft.) Mysticism quickly becomes a staid discipline, not at all like the life-directing experiences such encounters themselves actually are. It’s difficult to explain without sitting down and talking to you. It’s something academics tend to avoid like Covid-19.

The books that mean most to me are like conversations with an absent author. Drawn in by an openness, or perhaps by the fact that we’ve lived in a few of the same places over the years, perhaps passed one another unknowingly on the street, you feel that they’ve invited you into their very head. What you find there has a strange similarity to what is in your own head, while being completely different at the same time. We should all strive for such honesty in our writing. In the end Ehrenreich, with a doctorate in science, suggests we need to be open. That kind of validation is important for those of us who’ve poured our lives into the study of religion. She was drawn in from atheism, and I have been trying to escape from literalism all my adult life. We have ended up in places not dissimilar from each other and I’m glad to have met her through this profound book.