Normal Rules Don't Apply

 

Normal Rules Don't Apply - Kate Atkinson

Sooooo many things I want to say about this book, and fortunately all of them are good. I’ve read every book by Kate Atkinson and reviewed every one of them as well.  Although THIS review that you’re reading may be the first one by me you’ve read, I nevertheless feel obligated not to repeat myself concerning this particular author.  Let’s just say that she’s my favorite (and I read a LOT).  I’ll also concede that her books aren’t for everyone. They can be quite quirky.  And this book might possibly be the quirkiest of the lot.

First, this is actually a collection of short stories.  She’s done this once before with “Not the End of the World” but I honestly found that book to be a tad TOO quirky. After completing that one I contemplated whether she was on acid when she wrote it.  This one, however, isn’t quite as bizarre.  It’s bizarre all right. Or is that “quirky”?  I loved this book’s quirkiness though, and I have to rate it as one of her best.  Well, when I say “best”, I mean that in a quirky way.  It really is hard to review such a quirky author and her quirky writing style. I’m trying here, but it’s hard.

The problem with quirky short stories is that they end too soon, and whereas full novels by her are also quirky, after a couple hundred pages or so, you can feel a bit more comfortable amidst the quirkiness since a very good story has time to develop that the reader can assimilate.  Short stories that are quirky tend to be too jarring.  You never really have time to “settle” into a story. What makes these short stories mostly palatable, though, is they’re all somewhat related.  I think.  We have main characters in one story make “cameos” in others.  We have stories about bizarre atmospheric abnormalities that seem out of place in an organized universe that are referenced in other stories.  We have “fairy tales” that suddenly become real (and they manage to appear in other stories as well), and I’m willing to bet that if I were to read this collection again (I may, one day) I could find even more little, subtle connections.

I guess you can say that the title of this collection of stories is perfect for the said subject matter.  Although, the previous title of her collections, “Not the End of the World” just might be equally as fitting.  I’ll leave that tidbit to the imagination.

This would be an incredibly fun book to DISCUSS over coffee and crumpets with other diehards who have read this thing as well.  This is really the point of a “book club”, as opposed to some guy just blogging his reviews of the books he’s read (cough-cough).  So, IF, dear reader, you’re looking for a good book club book, this one might be good.  Again, though, you need to make sure the members of your club are all quirky, otherwise you’ll lose some bookworm friends mightily fast.  I would almost make it a requirement, though, to read these stories twice.   The book, fortunately, didn’t seem too large (I read on an e-reader, so don’t really know).  I did finish the whole thing within a 24-hour period. If that isn’t a sign of a great book, I’m not sure what is.  Quirky though.

How the Bible Actually Works

 

 

How the Bible Actually Works – Peter Enns

This was one of the most annoying books that I’ve ever read.  It’s not that it was bad.  No, it wasn’t bad,  but it certainly wasn’t good either.  It was….well….annoying.  This is one of the books where the author tries to be funny as he writes.  Think about the statement “tries to be funny”.  That’s never good.  Either you’re funny or you’re not, and if you’re “trying” to be funny, it means you’re not funny.  In other words, this book was too “Dad Joke-ish”.  After a while you get so sick of the dad jokes, you simply don’t want to read another word; and if you do read anymore, it’s hard to take anything the author says seriously.

That’s a shame too because a book such as this warrants serious discussion.  It’s about the Bible after all. And if there is one book that deserves serious attention, it’s our Bible.  This is a book that is meant to challenge how Protestant Christians should read their Bible.  I’ve read a lot of books like this lately. Many Protestant Evangelical Christians are taught to essentially believe the Bible IS God, and they think that if they somehow misrepresent it, vengeful angels will appear out of it as they did in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and melt everyone’s skin to ashes.

And if you read closely, the author is on to some good things. He’s certainly done his homework.  He dives into some deep mostly uncharted waters of our Old Testament, and he shows us that, yes, this thing DOES have plenty of contradictions, but that is actually ok, and not a bad thing.   The Bible, he ascertains, wasn’t written as a rule book to every generation of Christians, but rather specific stories that were directed towards specific people at very specific times. Yes, the Bible is God’s word.  And, yes, the Bible needs to be read and studied.  Somewhere over the last 2,000 years, though, we’ve gotten a bit lost.

The problem though is that this author and book are too unfocused.  If Peter Enns were to read this review, he would disagree.  I should clarify that by “unfocused” I don’t mean that he doesn’t connect the dots or transition well from chapter to chapter.  No, the problem, again, is his snippets of humor and comical personal stories that are supposed to illustrate his points don’t actually do so. They diverge too far from the topic at hand.  This is a book that if I were the editor, I would wear out a few red pens with corrections, yet encourage the author to keep his main points.

And, yes, for those who do revere the Bible as God himself, you will have a lot of problems with many of the illustrations he gives.  Why is it that we now (mostly) conclude that chattel slavery is wrong, yet we continue to subjugate women and practice complementarianism?   Beliefs that are set in stone die hard, and if this author serious wants to change how we look at scripture, he should have been a lot less flippant.  No, he doesn’t have to come down as a wicked English Boarding School teacher, but he really should have worked harder to find a middle ground with his overall attitude.  I really can’t recommend this author nor this book.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History

 

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History – Orlando Figes

Since the vast majority of people never manage to live 100 years, it can and does seem like an awfully long time. When looking through the backward lens of history, however, it can sometimes seem more like a blip. Sadly, there are an awful lot of “blips” throughout thousands of years of history that haven’t been pleasant nor memorable.  Don’t ever let an evangelical preacher feed you BS about how “good things used to be”.  This period of history for Russia highlighted in this book was anything but pleasant, and being that it hasn’t been that long ago, it’s quite depressing to hear about so much recent lifelong suffering of so many due to an incredibly misguided ideology.

Communism.  An incredibly dirty word.  This book shows you exactly why and, more importantly, how it came to be.  1891 is as good a year to start this story as any, but the seeds were there much longer. Likewise, sunshine and roses never bloomed in 1991 after the iron curtain finally came down.  Still, though, this 100-year period is covered well by Orlando Figes, and you could argue that this work can almost be looked at as a “Cliffs Notes” of the time period.  There’s so much more to tell than what is here, but Figes hits the highlights.  “Highlights” seems like an awful word; but you get the picture.

The story begins around the time when serfdom was finally ended in 19^th century Russia.  A good thing, but with such an abrupt U-turn in any country’s history, it must be handled carefully.  In Russia’s case, it was not, and the blood started boiling over which culminated in the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917. As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform…”

Although 100 years of Russian history is covered, the vast majority of this book deals with the fractured Romanov dynasty, Lenin, and eventually Joseph Stalin.  Once Stalin dies, the “story” here becomes less segmented and there really isn’t that much to tell. So starting around 1953, we move rather quickly to the 1990s.  This is perhaps justified, but I confess I wanted more.  One really can’t fault the author, though, as his intention isn’t necessarily to tell the “entire story” of the USSR and its place in World History, but rather to focus on the cancer within and how it eventually putrefied the soul out of the country.

It's also important to note that there’s absolutely nothing in this book about Korea, Joe McCarthy, or Reykjavik.  I seem to recall only one sentence when the author talked about the U2 spy plane, Sputnik, and the Bay of Pigs.  All of these events are extremely important when discussing 20^th century USSR, and gobs of books have been written about all of them, but this isn’t the author’s focus. We read instead about the inner turmoil, the starving peasants due to collectivization, and the highly reputable military leaders that were all executed during the 1930s mainly because Joseph Stalin had a few loose screws.

Even though much of the focus is on the actual citizens of Russia, I still wish there could have been a bit more.  Orlando Figes has, though, written many books about Russia that go into such detail if the reader wants more (“A People’s Tragedy” would get my highest recommendation).  So the intention of this book is for it to be somewhat brief, and this book is excellent for the novice, or for one wanting to refresh themselves on Russia during the particular time period.

Sadly, contrary to what a lot of Westerners thought in 1991, Russia is still Russia, and although Communism can be looked at as dead-in-the-water, it still has enough recent history that allows despotic authoritarian dictators prevail; which is what we can plainly see 30 years later.   For a detailed account of how Russia never got better (although it possibly could have), I would recommend Peter Conradi’s “Who Lost Russia”; which has a recent edition detailing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

History is never pretty.  It needs attention and study, however.   Sometimes I wish that there is a parallel universe somewhere where people actually read more, instead of letting cable networks like Fox News rot their brain out.   We can all do oh so much better, but we need to learn from our past.  There’s a lot of “past” here that needs to be studied.  One can hope.  One can only hope.