Best bookish thing that is not a book

To nobody’s surprise, Emma Approved. Are you watching it yet, or have you been holding off because you were burned by Welcome to Sanditon? If the latter, I’d like to take this opportunity to endorse Emma Approved with a full heart. Emma and Mr. Knightley have excellent chemistry; Sen. Elton is pleasingly personable but you can see how he will turn out to be secretly douchey; and as in most Emma adaptations, Harriet and Mr. Martin steal any scene they’re in together. This creative team is brilliant, and my wish is that they keep on doing video blog adaptations of 19th-century classics forever. The 19th century was a good time for Lit’rature. It’s not like they’d run out of ideas. Mainly I don’t want them to stop before they get around to Jane Eyre.

Best job by me of convincing my mother of an opinion of mine that she disagrees with and I have been trying to talk her around to my position for more than a decade now

This defense of Sirius Black. Mumsy still does not love him, but she conceded that I had a point, and that my point made her like him better than she used to. Hooray for me!

Most deserving of its hype

Eleanor and Park, Rainbow Rowell. The blogosphere could not stop talking about Eleanor and Park this year. Y’all were not lying. This book is damn amazing. I wanted to read it again the minute I finished it. I cannot wait to own my own copy, which I will cherish and put a book plate in with my name in my fanciest handwriting.

Most deserving of how m.f. excited I was about it before it came out

More Than This, by Patrick Ness. I went into A Monster Calls with too-high expectations, and when More Than This started off so slowly, I became terribly anxious that I wouldn’t love it the way Patrick Ness’s books deserve to be loved. But it rallied with the introduction of two new-and-wonderful characters, and I ended up loving it. In particular I love it that Patrick Ness is not in a rut. More Than This is totally different to the Chaos Walking series, which is totally different to The Crane Wife (review forthcoming), which is totally different to A Monster Calls. I love him, and I am excited for whatever he wants to do next.

Lowest expectations for a book that ended up being pretty good actually

Shadows, by Robin McKinley. As I’ve mentioned before, I count a couple of Robin McKinley’s books among my favorite books in the world. But only a couple, and the rest of her books leave me feeling dissatisfied and bored. My expectations of Shadows were rock-bottom, and it turned out to be a really fun read.

Most wanted to be The Secret History and was angry and disappointed when it wasn’t

You thought I was going to say The Goldfinch, didn’t you? Ha, ha, you were wrong. The answer is, The Bellwether Revivals, by Benjamin Wood. I did not like it. Why wasn’t it more like The Secret History? Why aren’t all books more like The Secret History? These are questions I cannot answer.

Loveliest surprise

You’ll be tired of me saying it, but Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye. I didn’t expect not to like it, but I was surprised by how much I ended up liking it. A runner-up, because I did expect not to like it, was Kate Atkinson’s strange and wonderful Life after Life.

Saddest fictional death

Uncle Finn in Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rivka Brunt. That book wrecked me. Although it’s difficult to say in a year so packed with wonderful reads, I am going to go ahead and say that Tell the Wolves I’m Home was my best book of 2013. Eleanor and Park was awfully, awfully good, but I’m giving it to Tell the Wolves I’m Home by dint of the fact that it’s not getting quite as much play and thus needs me to love it extra.

Saddest real-life death

Elizabeth Peters, of course. I am crushed that Elizabeth Peters has died, and I regret that I never wrote her a letter to tell her how much enjoyment I got from her books over the years.

Made me feel the best about myself for enjoying it

HHhH, by Laurent Binet. I often struggle with books in translation, so I’m always thrilled — with the author and myself — to encounter a book in translation that I unreservedly love. HHhH is that kind of book. It is surprisingly lovely and sweet for a book about assassinating a Nazi officer.

Whack-a-doodlest book lent the most gravitas by its author’s serious, Southern-accented radio interviews

Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright – If you haven’t read this book about scientology yet, now’s a good time to read it. I think it would be fun to read over a vacation: lots of crazy parts that you can read out loud to your friends-and-relations, who can’t escape from you because y’all are on vacation.

Favorite term I coined myself like a genius

“Process dystopia” to describe the kind of book that shows the world all going to hell, instead of starting the book after the world has already gone to hell.

Coolest design

Obviously, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film. No contest, because I haven’t finished reading the JJ Abrams / Doug Dorst collaboration S yet.

Best execution of a tricky premise

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler. This book! So good! Karen Joy Fowler does not invent a premise and coast on it. She follows through all the way. She commits. I loved the writing, I loved the jokes, and I loved the sadness. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves gets additional credit for reminding me to care about James Tiptree Jr., an author I now really like.

Jolliest good fun

Lexicon, by Max Barry. This was just fun. It was fun and fun and fun, and there are not enough books in this world that are just pure fun.

Lovablest book that did not appeal to me on paper

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Nothing about the synopsis for this book would have called to me, but fortunately I read part of it in a NetGalley excerpts package and fell in love with the narrative voice. I loved it, and I think it’s something special and particular, and I’m not just saying that because the ending is perfectly geared towards my sensibilities.

Best Harry Potter news

It’s a tie! It’s a tie between the news that JK Rowling is writing a movie about Newt Scamander and his escapades as a wizard naturalist in the early twentieth century, and the news that the UK is releasing beautiful new editions of the Harry Potter books illustrated by Jim Kay of A Monster Calls. Y’all, I miss Harry Potter.

Most merits its long long length

Again, not The Goldfinch! (I think that could have been edited down a bit.) This one goes to Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s great. I didn’t want it to end.

Author least afraid of going balls-to-the-wall crazy with plots

Laini Taylor! I am well excited for the third book in her Nouns of Substances and Atmospheric Nouns trilogy. She just goes all out with her storylines, and that is wonderful to me, as anyone who has ever heard me speak about The Vampire Diaries will know.

Best character

Boris, from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. There aren’t enough good things to say about Boris. If the book only consisted of passages with Boris in them, and had no other plot, it would be worth it just for that. I don’t remember the last time I encountered a character in a book that I enjoyed spending time with as much as Boris from The Goldfinch.

Insanest that I still haven’t finished reading it

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. I know I know I know I know. But here’s what’s up: I’m reading it to Social Sister. I’ll finish reading it when I finish reading it to Social Sister. That’s how we roll.

And that’s 2013, my friends! I’ll be away from blogging over the next couple of weeks to celebrate holidays with the family, and I wish you all happy holidays and a wonderful New Year. See you in January!

The post The superlatives of an outstanding reading year appeared first on Reading the End.

“He wouldn’t [believe you],” Matilda said. “And the reason is obvious. Your story would sound too ridiculous to be believed. And that is the Trunchbull’s great secret.”

“What is?” Lavender asked.

Matilda said, “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.”

This passage from Roald Dahl’s Matilda sums up how I feel about scientology after reading this book. If Lawrence Wright had been less meticulous in citing his sources, or if he had done fewer interviews, or if he hadn’t backed up some of his craziest stories with, like, FBI evidence, I would have disbelieved a lot of the claims he makes about scientology in this book. For instance: L. Ron Hubbard orchestrated a large-scale espionage operation (he called it Operation Snow White) in which scientologists under his direction infiltrated various government and press organizations perceived as being hostile to scientology, then made secret copies of a bunch of their files (!) and brought them back to scientology headquarters for perusal. I guess this is a real thing that people know about, because it has this huge Wikipedia page, but I did not know, and you have to admit it sounds pretend. But no. It is real.

Another thing that sounds false but is true: When the FBI raided Scientology headquarters and found all these Operation Snow White documents, they also found documents indicating that the church had launched a massive crusade against a journalist who wrote unfavorably about them, with the end goal of having her jailed or placed in a mental institution. They phoned in fake bomb threats under her name! Seriously! That’s a thing that happened.

Those two things? Are by far not the craziest things that Lawrence Wright reports in this book. Like, by far. There were all the different categories of crazy things. There were crazy paranoid things, like L. Ron Hubbard being convinced the Swiss government was after him. There were crazy scary things, like the allegations by former church members of physical abuse and incarceration (including of children). There were crazy grudgey things, like L. Ron Hubbard turning against psychology forever because the APA said Dianetics was silly. There were even crazy things in the category of “Wait, huh?” like this:

The detainees [in the totally prisony part of this one scientology compound] developed a particular expression whenever Miscavige came in, which he took note of. He called them “Pie Faces.” To illustrate what he meant, Miscavige drew a circle with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. He had T-shirts made up with the pie face on it. Rinder was “the Father of Pie Faces.” People didn’t know how to react. They didn’t want to call attention to themselves, but they also didn’t want to be a Pie Face.

I just…what? Pie Face? What?

I talked recently about trusting nonfiction authors, and Eva said in a comment that she much prefers reading nonfiction by researchers rather than journalists. I mostly agree with this. I like that journalists place a premium on making their subject accessible to readers, and I like that researchers cite their sources. For a book like Going Clear, which deals with subject matter that is insane and hotly disputed as well as poorly researched over the past years (due to the secretiveness and litigiousness of the church, among other things), it becomes even more important to me to know that the writer took pains about his sources. By all accounts, Lawrence Wright is just the right person to write this book, a Pulitzer Prize winner who is known for his meticulous sourcing and fact-checking.

On top of that, his book takes care to note the sources for all of his quotations and claims. Some of these are better sources than others (scientology is, of course, imperfectly documented), but Wright provides the reader with that information for just about everything he says throughout the book. He’s also clearly aware of the areas where his sources are slightly weaker, and he takes pains to note the ways in which he tried to fact-check and find confirmation of what he was told, especially when it was crazy. I also listened to and read some interviews with Wright and with representatives from the church, and I came away feeling that the church really lacked credibility on these issues.

To give one example, Wright calls L. Ron Hubbard’s war record into doubt. It is central to scientology’s belief system (evidently) that Hubbard was wounded in World War II and healed himself using the techniques described in Dianetics. Wright has been able to find no evidence that Hubbard was ever injured in the war, and the response of the church has been to say that they have an expert, whom they won’t produce but who (they say) can assure them Hubbard was injured in the war. That’s just not a viable alternate narrative. If they could produce the person and I could inspect his credentials, then that would be another issue. But, Lawrence Wright gives you the church’s argument as well as yours, so you know what the choices are.

I thought Going Clear was an admirably well-sourced, engagingly-written history of scientology, and if you have a spare minute, you should listen to some radio interviews with Lawrence Wright. It made me think how cool he would be as a grandfather.

(He’s not old enough to be my grandfather. But you can have loads of grandfathers and you can only have one father, and my father is already the coolest and best one there is or has ever been.)

Near the very end of the book, Wright includes the following statement, which I thought was just — when you set it against how maddening it must have been to be perpetually denied access to key figures in the book you’re working on — about as restrained and gracious a reproof as there could be:

I was never allowed to talk to David Miscavige or any of the upper-tier executives I requested. (As I would learn, many of them were sequestered and not available in any case.) A reporter can only talk to people who are willing to talk to him; whatever complaints the church may have about my reporting, many limitations can be attributed to its decision to restrict my interactions with people who might have provided more favorable testimony.

Please imagine me doing a slow clap right now. That is what is happening inside my head. Lawrence Wright, you are a cool and classy fellow.

So now I am off to read Janet Reitman’s book about scientology! Apparently she had a lot of good access to practicing scientologists in the course of her researchings, and perhaps that will provide another, less insanely abusive view of the church and its history. But I rather suspect not. Oh how I love reading about religions.

The post Review: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright appeared first on Reading the End.