by Alison Bechdel

This was fun, and the goats were cute.

by Ben Brooks

Possible spoilers. There were times I thought this book was going to devolve into chick lit territory — intelligent young woman in abusive relationship! bambina ex macchina! precocious little kid! uncompelling characters, bad choices… but it really didn’t end up there. The abusive relationship is abruptly ended in a glorious bit of turn-around. The bambina ex macchina isn’t so precocious you want to wring her little neck. The bad choices are shown to be for not-always-bad reasons in the end.

I honestly did love these characters, starting with Yara, the wife. I loved that she was deeply flawed. I loved her dimwitted second husband who proved himself to be “more than” what everyone saw, as Yara put it. I loved drughead Emil. Arthur, the driver of the plot, with his blow-on-the-head epiphany, was harder to love; because we got no picture of who he really was before the accident, and no sense of how his life change was really due to ‘brain damage’, literally or not. Evangeline, the daughter, is maybe last on my list of appreciation, due to her choices, but she was not a character I disliked overall, and I think she made good in the end. But one quibble with the writing was that it was hard to reconcile college-age Evangeline with the high school girl of just pages earlier. I’d say she’s the character I really had the most trouble with.

by Charles Murray

What it sounds like. But not just about taking religion seriously, but about taking the Christian gospels seriously. Everything very carefully hedged and presented from the perspective of a scientific mind. Recommended.

by J. Stone

The impact of the entrance of women in droves into the workforce, tipping the 50/50 balance of men-to-women in many industries starting in the 1980s, is hard to overstate. The viral video by Helen Andrews, “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture”, was brief, and the subject deserves a full and fair treatment. The treatment we are given here is neither.

by Philip Shenon

Papal biography through the lens of Vatican II. John XXIII is the hero it’s impossible not to love. His anti-hero is Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who reminded me of the Bad Cardinal in CONCLAVE. That movie floated through my mind frequently during this book.

I was occasionally zoning out over a lot of the details over 500 pages – the Vatican fights, the bios of minor players, all the sex abuse scandals and all the Latin American drama.

I had no idea how close we were to having the Church approving the use of birth control! And I had no idea what a wimpy and fearful and anti-reform personality Paul VI was – the first pope of my lifetime, from 1963-1978.

One thing I appreciated about the structure of the book was how every pope’s life story was jumbled together chronologically – you learned all about Ratzinger and Wojtyla through the years of Vatican II while it was happening, for example; instead of just taking each pope in a vacuum getting his own section. I liked instead how this showed the flow of history and provided a lot of background of the popes before they were popes, situated within their times.

And boy, Paul VI was bad, but John Paul II was a real horror show in this book. I kept flashing back to something a girl said in one of my high school religion classes – this was the 80s – “He wants to take the church BACKWARD instead of forward; he won’t even HEAR about women in the priesthood – I think he’s one of the worst popes we’ve ever had!” You didn’t come out and say this in religion class at my school… but the more I read about him, the more I thought, “Damn, you were right, Kerry!”

Unfortunately, John XXIII and the forward-looking hopes of Vatican II end up feeling like the aberration over recent history, rather than the other way around. The author has an agenda – this is not simply a book of papal biography, but a narrative about our loss when we lost John XXIII and what the Church could have been. He never makes this parallel, but I was certain thinking about JFK, who died within months of John XXIII, and also took with him the possibility of a much different course of history that we will never know the extent of.

Bergoglio (Francis I) was interesting. His humility was irresistible. Ratzinger (Benedict) was also interesting in how his reform-mindedness in youth turned to fear and shutting down of dissent during his papacy – interesting, but not likeable. There was a LOT about Ratzinger here. I was much more interested whenever we turned to Bergoglio. Guess I put Francis I as my ‘favorite’ pope since John XXIII. But the book ended during his reign and didn’t cover our Leo. Who knows what his papacy may hold? We may get birth control yet?