Book Ends

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It’s the end of another year of reading. Since Goodreads keeps track of my booklist, I see by their accounting I finished 95 books in 2014. The final day of the year seems an appropriate time to reflect on those that made the greatest impact on me. Starting at the beginning, Jacques Berlinerblau’s The Secular Bible immediately struck me as a book of high importance. In an era when religion is constantly considered irrelevant, Berlinerblau gives this trite brushoff the lie. Likewise Jeff Kripal and Sudhir Kakar’s Seriously Strange opens questions that must be addressed if we ever hope to find the truth. Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist and Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn both raise, in fundamental ways, the question of what it means to be human. Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty is essential to understanding the current crisis in higher education. Edward Ingebretsen’s Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell is a roadmap through the genre of horror and its importance to society. The Miracle Detective by Randall Sullivan again highlights the question of what counts as reality. Nonbeliever Nation by David Niose shows the importance of separating politics from religion. Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe brings science to bear on unanswered questions.

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Books specifically concerning religion also deserve some highlighting. Karen McCarthy Brown’s Moma Lola is crucial for comprehending, in a sympathetic way, voudun in a major city. Patricia Tull’s Inhabiting Eden makes a clarion call for religions to pay attention to the needs of the environment. Going Clear by Lawrence Wright is a good introduction to Scientology, while Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven serves a similar function in regards to Mormonism. Sam Harris’s Waking Up shows the need even atheists have for spirituality, complicating the sharp divide we are offered most of the time. Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton, also demonstrates the continuing usefulness of religion in a secular age. Vincent Bugliosi’s Divinity of Doubt calls both theists and atheists to task. Spirit Unleashed by Anne Benvenuti allows animals to have souls.

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Fiction always makes a part of each year’s reading as well. This year found me reading several ponderous tomes, but I very much enjoyed the lighter fare by Ransom Riggs, in Hollow City. James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus and K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices slaked my steampunk thirst temporarily. John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were both difficult to read as a father, but important literature nevertheless. All of these books and more have individual posts dedicated to them on this blog. I always feel compelled to make clear that I find the books I read, whether highlighted here or not, one of the most rewarding aspects of my year. The long daily commute I normally endure would be torture without my books. Each year, each day I’m thankful for those who write them, and I look forward to an equally stimulating 2015 spent with my face buried in books.

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Infernal Religions

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infernalDevicesThe first steampunk novel I read, although some would dispute the classification, was Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. To be sure, I’d noticed other Victorian-style science fiction, but the idea of prescient technology settled into my head to nest for a while. I read a few other exemplars of the genre, finding each interesting in its own right. Having just finished K. W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices, however, I get a sense that I’ve neared the fount. Jeter is generally credited with coming up with the neologism “steampunk,” and this novel, while not his first, is fascinating for the heavy religious symbolism that is used throughout. In our secular, post-Christian age, we tend to forget that in the nineteenth century (actual, if not alternate reality) religion still played a tremendous role in people’s lives and outlooks. Infernal Devices uses that outlook quite effectively. The remnants of Cromwell’s puritan cause appear as the Godly Army, set against science and technology in a society still imbued with religious belief. When a flying machine appears overhead, the Scots suppose it is the beast of Revelation harbinger of the world’s end.

Like most steampunk offerings, Jeter offers us plenty of mechanical wonders. The hapless Mr. Dower, our protagonist and narrator, is the son of a mechanical genius, now deceased. The story involves Dower trying to unravel the many strands his father wove in a lifetime of invention and innovation. The one device that stood out to me, however, was the automaton priest and choir of Saint Mary Alderhythe, Bankside. Dower’s father had invented a robotic priest to go through the mechanical motions of an Anglican mass. Having sat through hundreds of such masses, I could see the point he was making. There are variables, but the overall draw of ritual is, well, its ritualism. The sameness that assures an assuaged deity and a safe congregation. The Godly Army, however, is more revisionist in intention.

Jeter, I’m sure, did not intend for the novel to be read for religious truths. It is rollicking and fun, with characters that you can’t believe but you want to. The driving force, however, behind much of the story is the religious bias of elements of London society. Dower, blamed for vices he doesn’t really have, is chased from his home by the Lady’s Union for the Suppression of Carnal Vice. The Godly Army, however, steals the show. Perhaps the most profound observation comes from Scape, who quips “That’s what you get.. when you give people Bibles and guns,” about the Godly Army. “It just messes up their brains.” At this point I began to wonder whether the story were really fiction after all. In this case the truth indeed perhaps lies in steampunk’s alternate history.