2022 - A Productive Year
Dear Substack friends - I’m sorry for not following through on my original project. As the list below illustrates, 2022 did not allow for as much leisure reading as I hoped; instead of a focus on woke SF or classic fantasy, my reading and writing has followed both the practical path of necessity (for reviews and dissertation).
As the year winds down, it seemed like a good day to reflect on what I’ve read and created this year. Below are three sections: new-to-me books I’ve read for the first time in 2022, podcast episodes I’ve published this year, and essays I’ve published.
59 Books I’ve read in 2022:
Andy Weir’s Artemis, Project Hail Mary, and The Martian - interesting but unmemorable.
Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, The Winter of the Witch, and The Girl in the Tower - great series mixing Russian mythology in with the Christianization of Russia.
Christopher Ruocchio’s Demon in White and Kingdoms of Death - Books 3 and 4 of the best epic space opera series under development today!
Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus, Vol. i-iii - these cute webtoons turned into books reimagine the myth of Hades and Persephone.
Andrez Sapkowski’s The Witcher books 4-7 - I watched the show, and wanted to know more. These books delivered.
Gene Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun - Third times the charm for reading Gene Wolfe. These books were a struggle, but the payoff was worth it.
Garth Nix’ Terciel and Elinor - Nix went back to his best world (Abhorsen trilogy) and this prequel sets up the series well.
Genevieve Gornichec’s The Witch’s Heart - I love Norse mythology, and this was a fun reimagining of the stories from a different perspective.
Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddlemaster trilogy - These stories were beautiful in prose and worldbuilding.
Adrian J. Walker’s The Human Son - Interesting exploration of fertility, AI, and the far future.
Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? - This book got me on the Matt Walsh bandwagon; one of the best books on gender ideology to be written in recent years.
David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - Excellent historical fiction following the protagonist’s life a Dutch trader stationed in Japan.
Joseph A Kohm Jr.’s The Unknown Grace of Another Heart: The Surprising Friendship between C.S. Lewis and Arthur Greeves - a beautiful study of Lewis’s friendship with Greeves traced through their letters. Also reveals some parts of Lewis I didn’t previously know about.
Alan Jacobs’ The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis - This was a disappointingly disorganized read; I wanted to like Jacobs, but I kept getting distracted by the book’s lack of structure.
Carolyn Curtis and Mary Pomeroy Key, eds. Women and C.S. Lewis: What his Life and Literature Reveal for Today’s Culture - I expected this volume to be filled with essays accusing Lewis of misogyny; instead, each essay raises an accusation, and then shows how that accusation fails to account for the complexity of Lewis’s life and thought.
Clyde S. Kilby’s The Christian World of C.S. Lewis - Kilby knew Lewis personally, and his love the master shines through this volume.
Gilbert Meilander’s The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C.S. Lewis - Meilander has some of the best Narnia and Ransom trilogy commentary I’ve read this year.
Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis - I wanted to like this volume, but I remain unconvinced by Ward’s thesis. He spots an interesting pattern, but he works very hard to fit various volumes of Narnia into his theory.
Monika B. Hilder’s The Gender Dance: Ironic Subversion in C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy - Hilder reads Lewis correctly, and she both traces an interesting theory about heroism through his writings and provides helpful (quotable) commentary on Lewis’s fiction.
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen’s A Sword between the Sexes: C.S. Lewis and the Gender Debates - Van Leeuwen does not read Lewis charitably; her feminism dominates her analysis, making hers a largely eisegetical work.
Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture - I’ve got a full length review of this one coming out in 2023; here’s the TLDR version. It’s mistitled, and is not worth the time it takes to read 604 pages.
James S.A. Corey’s Expanse, volumes 1-3 - The books are better than the Amazon show.
Josiah Bancroft’s Books of Babel, volumes 1-4 - These are a delightful series of steampunk novels tracing a husband’s quest to find his wife.
Orson Scott Card’s Rebekah - I will not read Genesis the same after having read Card’s biography of Rebekah. He builds on biblical hints to construct a whole world.
H. W Taylor’s Unique Miranda trilogy - This series was bad. I kept waiting for the payoff, for the “here’s why I’ve been reading these books” moment, and it never arrived.
Neal Shusterman’s Unwind dystology, volumes 1-3 - Neal Shusterman doses a great job asking philosophical questions in YA fiction; this series asks about parenting, the morality of organ donation, and abortion.
Vic McCracken, ed. Christian Faith and Social Justice: Five Views - This book was disappointing in that four of the five views refused to talk to each other. By the end of this one, I was convinced that liberation theology is a heresy.
Mark Vroegop’s Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament - This book helped me through a rough patch this year; Vroegop does an excellent job recovering the biblical response of “lament,” and articulating its place in the Christian life.
Mark Miller’s Chess not Checkers: Elevate your Leadership Game - This was a great book on leadership; the core is idea is that when businesses are small, checkers is the strategy. Every piece advances the goal in a similar way. As businesses grow, they must shift to a chess-strategy, applying their unique gifts to add value in unique ways.
H.G Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream - The book is far different than the TV show, and is more about economic patterns in post-oil-boom Texas than about football.
Don Lavoie’s Rivalry and Central Planning - This was the central book of the Lavoie Fellowship with George Mason’s Mercatus Center. Lavoie explores the knowledge problem, and socialism’s inability to solve that problem without prices as an index to knowledge.
Christine Emba’ Rethinking Sex: A Provocation - This was an interesting read, in that Emba is inching towards rejecting the bad sexual morality of the sexual revolution. As I noted in my review for Law and Liberty, she does not push her critique far enough.
David MacPherson’s The Virtues of Limits - MacPherson argues that limits are necessary and good, and that we save ourselves much heartache when we accept limits rather than try to transcend them.
Scott Yenor’s The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies - I am a raving fan of this book. Yenor surveys modern feminism, showing it to be an anti-human philosophy. He presents an Aristotelian view of society’s regime, and argues that our society is most healthy we respect the “grooves” nature provides.
Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment - This volume is the OG of the conservative responses to transgender sub-genre; it’s a great introduction to the now standard list of reasons why transgender ideology is terrible.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex - de Beauvoir is the original radical feminist, and this book sets out the goals for the movement: reject biology, transcend reproduction, and achieve full agency through sexual prodigality. De Beauvoir is a mythmaking storyteller, and her narrative has been bought hook, line, and sinker by modernity.
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble - Butler is the end point my dissertation names to radical feminism; she contends that gender is a performance, and radical freedom demands that each person write his or her script on thee gender spectrum. She’s nuts.
Martha Nussbaum’s The Professor of Parody - Martha Nussbaum riffs on Judith Butler. If you slog through Butler, Nussbaum’s take is delightful.
7 Essays published in 2022
“Matt Walsh Counters Transgender Ideology with a Caustic Truth Bomb” - https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/01/matt-walsh-counters-transgender-ideology-with-a-caustic-truth-bomb/
“Western Liberalism is Doomed without an Understanding of Reality” - https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/29/western-liberalism-is-doomed-without-a-shared-understanding-of-reality/
“I was once a National Conservatism Skeptic, but the Ideas are Needed” - https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/i-was-once-a-national-conservatism-skeptic-but-the-ideas-are-needed/
“The Enduring Value of Classical Education” - https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/the-enduring-value-of-classical-education/
“The art of Debate as the Road to Healing” - https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-35-number-3/art-debate-road-healing
“Love in the Ruins of the Sexual Revolution” - https://lawliberty.org/book-review/love-in-the-ruins-of-the-sexual-revolution/
“Literature for the Recovery of Reality: Joshua Hren and Benjamin Myers’ Christian Vision for Literature” - https://voegelinview.com/literature-for-the-recovery-of-reality-joshua-hren-and-benjamin-myers-christian-vision-for-literature/
19 Podcast episodes published
Keven Roberts (Heritage Foundation) and the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/kevin-d-roberts-hubris-and-the-failure-of-biden-s-statemanship-in-the-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/
Nick Higgins (North Greenville University) on Laws and When we must Obey Them - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/nick-higgins-what-is-a-law-and-do-we-have-to-obey-it/
Carissa Mulder (UN Commission on Human Rights) on how Race Based Admissions Harms College Students - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/carissa-mulder-race-based-admissions-harms-students-and-the-academy/
Daniel Garner on Hannah Arendt, Putin, and Totalitarian regimes - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/daniel-garner-totalitarian-regimes-the-west-and-hannah-arendt-2x4/
Shane Trotter on how to fix Public Education - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/shane-trotter-setting-the-bar-to-fix-public-education-2x5/
Mike Munger (Duke University) - Incentives, Public Choice Theory, and Virtue - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/mike-munger-incentives-public-choice-economics-and-virtue-2x6/
Bob Luddy (Captiveaire + Thales Academy) on Inflation and the Housing Market - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/bob-luddy-inflation-economic-reality-business-housing-market-2x7/
Allen Mendenhall (Troy University) on Richard Weaver and the South - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/allen-mendenhall-richard-weaver-southern-culture-and-the-south-today-2x8/
Nathanael Blake (Ethics and Public Policy Center) on the Florida Parental Rights in Education bill, LGBTQ activists grooming children, and identity politics - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/nathanael-blake-parental-rights-in-education-groomers-rainbow-identities-and-the-failures-of-radical-feminism/
Josh Herring on the future of the Optimistic Curmudgeon - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/josh-herring-optimistic-curmudgeon-past-and-future-2x10/
Scott Yenor (Boise State University) on Feminism and Modernity - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/josh-herring-optimistic-curmudgeon-past-and-future-2x10/
Jenna Robinson (Martin Center for Academic Excellence) on the problems in and potential solutions for higher education - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/jenna-robinson-on-education-university-3x2/
Matt Slaboch (Arizona State University) on the idea of progress - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/matt-slaboch-on-progress-3x3/
George Leef (Martin Center for Academic Excellence) on his Novel, The Awakening of Jennifer van Arsdale - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/george-leef/
Mike Young (Faulkner University) on Gadamer and the Problem of Hermeneutics - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/mike-young/
Ryan Ryckman (The Real Estate Group) on his Business Journey, and what it takes to Build a Successful Real Estate Business - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/ryan-ryckman-on-real-estate-3x6/
Mark Bauerlin (First Things) on why the Present Generation is Still the Dumbest Generation, Despite all the Technological Possibilities at their Disposal - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/mark-bauerlein-on-classical-education-3x7/
Suzanne Hartl (Nyack College) on Business, Vision, and Leadership - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/susanne-hartl-on-management-leadership-virtue-4x1/
Katy Faust (Them Before Us) on Children’s Rights and what they mean for Adult Sexual Practices - https://optimisticcurmudgeon2021.podbean.com/e/katy-faust-on-them-before-us-3x9/
In other news, I started a new position (Dean of Classical Education) for Thales Academy Apex in July, am making good progress on writing a history textbook, and am writing Ch. 3 and researching Ch. 4 of my dissertation. It looks possible that two book projects I’ve contributed chapters to will both come out in 2023 (Disney and Theology, with a chapter on the Kierekegaardian transformation of Simba, and Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination, with a chapter on Mormon theology as a fertile source for imaginative literature).
I’m not sure exactly what to do with this Substack; life does not currently support my original goal for this newsletter. I started it out of frustration with mainstream science fiction and fantasy, but I think it may evolve into a personal newsletter. At least, on 12/31/22, that’s what it is.
2023 promises to be an exciting year - more books, more writing, and an epic season 4 of The OptimisticCurmudgeon are in the works. I hope to graduate, finish writing this history book, and begin the process of converting my dissertation into both an academic book and a popular book. Carl Trueman has done that effectively with The Making of the Modern Self, and I hope to follow his example.
May 2023 be filled with God’s grace, the joy of friendship, and the nourishment of ideas!