It feels weird to shove a short book in at the end of the year, but I'm not doing it on purpose. I just ran out of renewals at the library so I figured I'd read it before returning it on Tuesday.
Fairy tales, man. They're WEIRD. 
Women named Kelly telling fairy tales seem to be winners for me this year, although this one was more creeping horror in the Midwestern gothic style.
And I'm old enough that I keep getting stuck between the girl and the woman, the flight and the ground. Who do I identify with and where are my dreams?
This book, for all that it is short, is woven of barbed wire.

It's always fun when you can't decide whether to tag something theory or theology.
I really appreciate Flieger's work as a scholar of Tolkien and what she does here in unpacking the way that Tolkien uses light in particular as many things ranging from enlightenment to brightening the world to the methods by which we see and are seen and how that shapes the Silmarillion. 
It's really good. I'm not sure how it lands if you aren't also reading Silm alongside it or if you aren't constantly thinking about the world through the lens of Tolkien's dualisms.
Anyway, when someone gets bored, write me a paper on Rebbe Nachman, the Rav, and Tolkien because there is definitely some theological *there* there in the use of polarities.

So, first of all, Serkis's narration is fantastic and you absolutely get the sense of a bard or skald reciting the tales by listening to them and also, I don't know this sequence works if you are not the kind of person who read the encyclopedia of greco-roman mythologiy cover to cover as a child...
But I have come to love it and to feel strongly about the characters as something between mythic figures and characters in narrative because the sketches of them are so vivid and it feels like Story.
Also I had to take an almost weeklong break before the  Nirnaeth Arnoediad (which incidentally I still can't spell) because it makes me really sad. There's a lot of fate and doom and also temporary victories but, more than anything else, there's the sense of Story. And I really needed it.

I love this entire book. I love the way she explains the distinction between science and umwelt and how that defines the world and the way that it's actually important to have both and not supplant one with the other and all of these debates from right around when I saw them remodel the Hall of Dinosaurs at the AMNH.
But also I keep thinking about the non/existence of fish and what that means for those of us who work in fields that care deeply about the human experience AND what is actually happening.
Basically "Halakhic Umwelt" is a concept and I need to figure it out.

This is one of those books that makes me sad that there isn't a secret way to give a book six stars.
This is also why I wait until the last possible minute to do my reading retrospectives because I get to read gems like this halfway through December.
Everyone who was talking about this book was right about how brilliant it is and it is ENTIRELY my kind of thing. Fairy tales reimagined by someone with a deep and true sense of how to shape them? Yes, PLEASE.

Link's work is so brilliant because she is perfectly willing to keep the impossibility of fairy tales alive. There's no explanation, no maguffin, no scientific reason why the fairy tales are playing out. The stories follow their own logic as they always do, but the transposition of characters and settings to ask "what kind of person would this story happen to" and " what would they look like" and "What (else) is this story about" is so good.

Also I'm biased because both "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" and "Tam Lin" are in this collection and they are some of my favorites. And Link handles them so well. 

But I can't even pick a favorite. They're all so good and so interesting in their own way and just...crunchy in the ways they become about the fears and demons and stresses and complexities of modern life. And the choice to not let them be 1:1 correspondences but riffs on the original is just so smart.

Levine is basically what happens if you combine 9th grade rebbe energy with scholarship.
It's very fun. And some of us did not exactly have 9th grade rebbeim with the desire or energy to get us excited about Gemara so these books feel a little like a tikkun when I learn them.
The way he thinks about the conversation between halakha and aggadah is fascinating and I enjoyed all his examples.
The downside of having this as my shul book is that I now have no notes on the bits I found most interesting.

I definitely did not give this book its due attention and I really should have read it rather than listened. And it was still a complex and fascinating series of vignettes about the way that people from different locations in Africa have always been back and forth to Europe and part of the European story and we know that and history has a lot to say about it and the way that things are racialized is both perennial and deeply contextual. (Rather like other forms of discrimination...)
Otele's book is just a really good deep dive into the history and also modern state of what it means have ancestry that ties one to Africa and to live in Europe. 

The great thing about this book is that the tagline - Something is rotten in Elsinore Labs" - perfectly sets your expectation for the kind of book that you are going to read. It's a weird scifi retelling of Hamlet that weirdly scifis all of the themes of the original:
Horatio is now a somewhat omniscient AI in his role as observer to the debacle.
The specter of death that haunts the original is now explicit in the specter of immortality.
Hamlet/Hayden is still a dumbass, no technology can fix that.
Ophelia/Felicia is AWESOME which is a great update, no notes.
(Ophelia is basically the Susan Pevensie of Shakespeare's canon. Everyone agrees she deserved better.)
This book was weird, but such a crunchy and interesting weird. It took a while for me to get into and I was always sort of wondering at the author's choices as a did, but Liu did a really good job using the skeleton of Hamlet to do really interesting things.

DAMMIT KINGFISHER!
She is now a repeat epilogue offender.
Also wow am I excited for this series to continue to build. I have so many more questions and I love how intricate the world is growing.
Also, since apparently Kingfisher can't write a romance without some gruesome murder (they are Paladins, after all), I appreciate that her solution to the Midsomer problem is that all of her stories are road trips. 
Also Bishop Beartongue is AMAZING and the Rat's blessing is very...what it ought to be.
There's definitely a lot to unpack her about faith - not just the gods but in one another - but I am always so particularly fascinated by Kingfisher's theologies because her world imagines multiple gods, but they don't demand service except from those who take their oath. Which feels so different from a world like ours where everyone seems to think that if you can just convince people to believe IN god, you're done.
Belief is the start for Kingfisher. Obligation and covenant and faith are what makes the divine-human relationships interes--Oh no wonder I find this compelling. 
Huh.

Well I haven't had to haul out the old uncategorize-able tag in quite a while but here we are.
I still have no idea what that reading experience was. It was amazing and weird and thoughtful and...there was a lot going on there, but this space where both the science and the capacity to follow the narrative stopped making sense around the same time...
I don't know, I wish I could explain why I liked this book, beyond my deep fondness for stories of science and a sense of unmooredness that the narrative reflects very well.
Labatut understands narrative arc and somehow manages to end his stories without giving you closure. But he doesn't do it by just stopping before the ending; the arc itself is complete. It's the meaning-making that is so carefully held back.
I wish I had the courage to write that way more often.