Saints, Volume 1: The Standard of Truth, 1815-1846

A big thank you to the Church for putting their new church history book in the LDS Library app for free, and providing free audio to it so I could just listen to it like a regular audiobook. I would have probably never gotten around to reading this if I hadn't had the audio version. But I'm glad I did. This book covers the early period of church history, in a new narrative version of church history. It seems like the Church is being more open about some of the uncomfortable parts of our history, the things that have been stumbling blocks to people before, like plural marriage and seer stones and the negative things that leaders have done. I didn't feel like much of this history was new to me--I'd learned it all in Church History at BYU. But I was surprised by how uncomfortable a lot of it made me, even though I knew it all. I think I was uncomfortable with how unapologetic this account was, with no explanations or reasonings or apologies for anything which we Mormons are used to explaining away. In my head, I agree with this approach and I think the bare-bones, open nature of this book is going about it the right way, but in my heart, I think I'm still not comfortable with all of these things and I want more explanations to make it more palatable. Particularly everything with plural marriage, which we all know is a huge issue for pretty much everyone today. I've never struggled with major aspects of church history, but I can definitely see why people do.

I did love a lot of this book, though. I loved the focus on lots of different people and how regular people sought and received revelation. Throughout the whole story, from the very beginning, each person prayed to Heavenly Father to receive an answer if the church was true or if a specific doctrine was true. The book talked about how these answers came and what the Spirit felt like for each person. I really liked that angle of the book and how it taught those sorts of doctrines. I also loved some of the faith-promoting stories that were new and fresh, like about Wilford Woodruff serving a mission in some far-off islands and about Edward Partridge's family. I learned a lot about the sequences of things in church history as well. This book made it seem like there was a direct connection between the leaders of the church directing the Nauvoo Expositor press to be destroyed and Joseph eventually being murdered. I didn't really realize that those things happened in such quick succession, or that's why Joseph was eventually captured and held prisoner.

I thought a lot about how we choose to write and view history while listening to this book. The very act of rewriting Church history is an acknowledgement of the fact that history can be rewritten and re-framed based on how you choose to write about it and what you choose to include. I think this step in rewriting the Church's history is a really positive, eye-opening step towards acknowledging some of the darker parts of church history, which aren't emphasized as much but still are there. They don't need to be kept a secret, because it makes us stronger when we know about them and talk about them, and learn from them. (I kept thinking about the "Me, Too" movement when the whole John C. Bennett chapter was going on, when the women talked about how he persuaded them to sleep with him by telling them it was sanctioned by Joseph. So horrible that things like that happened back then like they're still happening today--men in positions of power taking advantage of that power to hurt women. From this account, it seemed like the leaders of the church took the women's accusations seriously, and took away Bennett's power. Maybe not as quickly as they should have, but they did.)

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

After reading several of Elizabeth Strout's other works, I'm so glad I finally got around to Olive Kitteridge. It's almost exactly the same as Anything is Possible, with thirteen short stories that are mostly distinct except that they all mention (or are about) the character of Olive Kitteridge, and they all go so deep into the characters in that you feel like you know them and their deepest thoughts, fears, and secrets. It seems like most of the stories are about old married couples and the anxieties and fears and realities of growing old, and the anxieties and fears and realities of just being human.

Olive Kitteridge, the supposed main character, is not a typical sympathetic character. She is prickly and grumpy and mean, but not in a stereotypical way--just in the way that she doesn't understand a lot of other people and sometimes she is afraid. She is human. She has done a lot of things she regrets, like how she raised her son, but she loves him to death and can't understand where they've gone wrong. She loves her husband but takes him for granted. She loses her temper and gets angry without knowing why. It's so real. You can't help liking her even when she's being irrational and terrible. One of the most poignant scenes in the book is when Olive encounters a girl who is almost dying of anorexia. Olive sits down and cries with her, stroking her hair and helping her figuring out a way out of this. Olive shows more humanity and sympathy and love for someone--this girl who is totally unconnected to her--than she often does to her husband and son. And isn't that like all of us sometimes?

I really love Strout's writing. But it's kind of depressing to see so much into a person (even a fictional person) and to see how much sadness and fear and angst there is, even behind a normal facade. It's also a little scary to see how hard it is to get old. So I love it but it's also kind of depressing. But it's worth reading all the same.

On a related note, I'm going to start trying to read all the Pulitzer and Newbery award winners. It will literally take me years to do this, so it's not like it's a huge goal that I'm going to do to the expense of all my other reading, but I'm going to try to do one a month or something. This is the first Pulitzer I've read since deciding on doing this goal.

Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin

I read this book three years ago, right after it came out, and I remembered it being good. Good enough that I decided to use it as our inaugural book club book for the book club I'm starting in our ward here! I am so excited about it and so hopeful that people will want to join. And I think this was a great choice for a book club pick. I have three pages of quotes and notes and questions of things I want to discuss with the group after reading it through again. You definitely don't need to read the whole thing to get a lot of the benefit of it, but I thought it was really motivating. I don't actually have a lot of habits I want to change right now (off the top of my head), but she gives specific techniques and strategies that we can use to make new habits a part of our lives. I love thinking about how we have control over our habits. I wrote this on my document for discussion in our book club, because I think this is the main point I get out of this book: "Sometimes we talk about habits as though they’re things that we can’t stop or control. Especially bad habits. But I love the perspective in this book that we absolutely can control them. We can deliberately look at our values and our goals and what we want to become, and decide what things we need or want to do each day that will reflect those values or future selves. Richard G. Scott said, “We become who we want to be by consistently being who we want to become each day.” At a very basic level, our daily habits are who we are. It doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but there are specific strategies that we can use to incorporate those specific habits we’ve chosen into our everyday routines. This is the main message of hope that I get out of this book: we get to choose who we are and what we do every day."

I can't wait to get our group together to discuss it. I am crossing my fingers we will get a good showing!

Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary

I am so happy that Graham is getting so excited about our chapter books. I think Ribsy is the one that did it for him. The whole last two weeks he has asked me every day, "Can we read where Henry Met Ribsy today?" because that's what I called Henry Huggins the first time I told him about it. We're going to read Henry and Ribsy next because I have to capitalize on this excitement... he's only 3 1/2 so still a little young to be listening but I love it.

This book is a cute story about Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy. Each chapter is a little episode in their lives. However, reading it right after Ribsy made it feel a little less original. Several things seemed to be exactly the same between the two books. They both have a scene where Ribsy is given a bath and needs to be showered off, and then another scene where Ribsy gets his picture in the paper and someone recognizes him from the picture and finds him. I feel like Cleary shouldn't have made them so similar. But my boys loved it and definitely didn't notice it so oh well.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

I read the abridged, illustrated classic version of this many times as a kid, and what really stuck in my mind was the vision of Miss Havisham in her corpse-like bridal outfit with her rotting wedding cake still sitting on the table, and Pip having to visit her when he was a child. But I think since I knew the story so well as a child, I assumed that I had read the whole thing. But I'm pretty sure I never have. I have wanted to get to more of Dickens' works in the last few years, and I finally bought this one and made it a priority enough to make it through it.

It's funny--there are books that I want to read, that I enjoy reading when I'm actually reading it, but that don't grip me enough to make me sit down and power through it in a few short days. It seems like many classics are like that. I wonder if it's because my brain has been trained to expect books that have been thoroughly edited to be as fast-paced and interesting and well-written as possible, so that when I read a classic, no matter how much I truly love it, it's just harder to read and harder to focus on for such a long time. I've read several articles (one I assigned to my class for homework) about how our brains have been changed by the Internet and smartphones and how we are not as able to focus on things that are long and hard any more because we are so used to jumping from thing to thing. I wonder if this difficulty with reading Dickens is part of that, or if it's normal to have a hard time reading Dickens.

All of this is to say--I really like Dickens. I find his characters so original and interesting and sometimes hilarious, and the storylines are great. Tale of Two Cities is one of my very favorite books. But man, this book took me so long to get through. And I think it's probably because I wasn't as drawn into it to forsake all of my other responsibilities and throw caution to the winds and read it all day and night until I finished. I think I need to balance books like this with shorter, quicker reads so that it doesn't always feel like a chore, and I can feel that small sense of accomplishment that I get when I finish a book without having to wait so long in between books.

There were so many things I loved about this book. The beginning of Pip as a child in the creepy graveyard with the convict threatening him for food; the whole story about Pip going to Satis House and meeting Miss Havisham and Estella; his brother-in-law Joe and his disinterested goodness and simplicity; Pip's coming-of-age and realization of how he'd squandered his "great expectations" and his desires to fix his mistakes; the whole character of Wemmick and his totally different personalities and beliefs when he's at home vs. when he's in the office. Everything seems so original, particularly the images of Miss Havisham in her ravaged wedding gown and her obsession with punishing men for what happened to her.

And there are just so many spots where Dickens encapsulates some essence of humanity, or touches on something so universally human and emotional, which always rings so true, particularly when it comes out of a story that seems so quintessentially Victorian and almost foreign to our modern ears. I think that is the true reason for his genius--he really understands people and how we think and feel. Here were some of my favorite quotes that I underlined as I was writing:

"Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise" (218).

"Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together" (224).

"All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself" (225).

"There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. In the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one" (274).

"I did really cry in earnest when I went to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good to somebody" (299).

"I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death" (301).

"You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since--on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil." (364).

"Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better shape" (484).


There are always parts of Dickens' books that could be cut out or cut down, in order to focus on the main point of the plot. But then I bet the whole Wemmick storyline would be cut out, and I would never want to lose that story of him and his Aged Parent and his hilariously surprising wedding. So I guess we just need to decide where to skim and where to savor in his books and enjoy it all.

Good Poems for Hard Times, selected by Garrison Keillor

I want to read more poetry--or actually, ANY poetry. In the six years that I have been keeping track of my reading on this blog, I have read exactly zero books of poems. I think that's because I just don't know where to start when it comes to poetry. I know the stuff that I read in high school and college, but I don't know what's good poetry now or how to find it. And I am still on a mission to do that. But I went to our library and looked at the poetry shelf--which was pitifully small with only one tiny shelf of books--and checked out a few of them. The nice thing about poems is that you can just read a few here or there and it's not like you need to have a big chunk of time to devote to reading it. And I really enjoyed reading this book. It seemed like a great collection of poems to me, in my supremely inexperienced opinion, and there were a couple that struck me so strongly. One even made me tear up. I'm going to include the ones I loved here.

"A Poem for Emily," by Miller Williams (this is the one that made me cry. It was the last line. Parenting feelings.)

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand’s width and two generations away,
in this still present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and God and politics
with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child, whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago

a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

"The Summer Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb," by Sharon Olds (another exquisite parenting one. Perfect timing to read the week that Dane started kindergarten.)

Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have,
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a heavy wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that’s been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that’s been placed in him
will come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

"To A Daughter Leaving Home," by Linda Paslan (apparently my favorites were all the parenting ones. This one seemed perfect since we also just taught Dane to ride a bike this summer too.)

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

"Nothing is Lost,"  by Noel Coward

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

"Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord," by Emily Dickinson

Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord,
Then, I am ready to go!
Just a look at the Horses --
Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest side --
So I shall never fall --
For we must ride to the Judgment --
And it's partly, down Hill --

But never I mind the steepest --
And never I mind the Sea --
Held fast in Everlasting Race --
By my own Choice, and Thee --

Goodbye to the Life I used to live --
And the World I used to know --
And kiss the Hills, for me, just once --
Then -- I am ready to go!

"Crossing the Bar," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
      When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
      The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
      When I have crost the bar.

Educated by Tara Westover

This book was insane. INSANE. I know everyone and their mom has read this lately, and it is really big. And that is for a reason--it is really, really well written, and a really, really compelling story about the author's childhood living in a rural Idaho town and being raised without going to school or having any sort of education at all, then going to college and learning about what the world was like outside of her home. She was raised by some survivalist, almost fundamentalist Mormons who were extremely anti-government, anti-doctor, and believed in the literal end of the world, and spent all their time canning food for the end of the world. Besides that, Tara was taught extreme and terrible things about women and their place in the home and the reasons for modesty (her dad and brother regularly called her a whore) and her brother eventually started being abusive and violent towards her as she got older. She eventually got into college after teaching herself enough math to be able to pass the ACT, and went to BYU and eventually began to realize how much she'd learned as a child was wrong--or nonexistent. She raised her hand in her first week of class and asked what the Holocaust was. She'd never heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the civil rights movement, and she didn't know that she had textbooks to buy or read for each class. Her adjustment to college was very difficult, but she eventually went on and earned a PhD from Harvard and Cambridge.

This book was incredibly difficult to listen to and just mind-blowing in its effects. It wasn't depressing by any means--she wrote very evenly about all of these very difficult and sometimes dangerous experiences of her childhood, and you can tell that she is being as honest as possible about what happened to her by examining what she really experienced and what she believes. It is just so eye-opening about how warped and twisted people's minds can be by what they are taught--that's one of the main things she says she realized and what she tries to study as she became a historian: how do we know what is really history when all we really know is what others tell us? I thought that was such a fascinating thought. She is one of seven children, and some of her siblings have totally followed the ways of their parents with no education and no desire to know anything about the outside world, while three of them have escaped and gone to college and moved farther out from their tiny world that their father tried to enclose around them in their childhood.

I was very moved by this book and by everything I learned from it. And I am so grateful that I was not born into a family that is remotely like that. I kept thinking that I hoped that people reading this would know that this family is the extreme of the extreme--not at all like the values that our Church teaches. The worst of the worst. I would love to read this one and talk about it for book club.

Ribsy by Beverly Cleary

This is the first read-aloud book that Graham has really been interested in! He definitely is not wanting to sit down and listen for super long, but he really likes Ribsy and kept asking me to read it. Yesterday, after we finished it, I told him there were some other books with Henry Huggins and Ribsy, and he begged and begged and begged me to read more of them. So we are already started on Henry Huggins. This book is super cute, about Ribsy accidentally getting lost and not being able to find his way home to Henry, and the things he gets up to while on his way home. I just love everything Beverly Cleary--she understands kids and she understands reality. I hate when I read books about kids and think, Does this person actually know any five-year-olds? They aren't precious little fireflies that just flitter around and say cute things on demand. But Cleary really gets inside their heads (and in this book, into Ribsy's head) and it feels like things that could really and truly happen. I'd never read this before as a kid (I stuck to the Ramona books instead of the Henry Huggins books) so I enjoyed reading it too.

My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

I've listened to Julia Whelan narrating several audiobooks (and she is fantastic), and then I heard some rave reviews about her novel. So I decided to listen to it. And it was good--well-written, interesting, quick-paced romance. But I was kind of expecting more to it instead of literally just a meet-cute then a I hate you then a "we're in love" sequence. I don't know if the title was misleading--since it's set in Oxford and about a girl achieving her lifelong dream of going to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar--but I thought there would be more about, I don't know, being at Oxford? Ella, the main character, is a literal Rhodes scholar, plus is apparently the best person ever at education policy because she's working on a presidential campaign and they're willing to let her work from England because she's just that good--but her schooling and her job play literally 0% of the storyline other than her mentioning she had to take a call from Gavin once every chapter. I thought this book would be not just about falling in love with your professor after two weeks of being at school and sleeping with him a million times and [SPOILERS] then finding out he has a terminal illness and becoming his actual girlfriend and taking care of him? It seemed wayyyyy too obvious and it annoyed me that there wasn't more to it. I was kind of done with it halfway through but I didn't want to give up once I was already that far, so I finished it. It was good, but not as good as I thought it might be, so my opinion of it is influenced by my unfair expectations, I guess.

Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis

I feel conflicted about this book. I really enjoyed most of it while I was listening, and I loved hearing the author reading it and feeling like I was getting to know her personality. She seems like she is super funny and awesome and like someone who I'd want to be friends with (but I'd never be able to keep up with, honestly). And I loved how she wasn't so coddling with her advice and opinions like so many articles and things are that we read these days. I feel like most things that are written for moms say things just like, "Mama, you're doing amazing. Just remember how amazing you are," but it's kind of disingenuous because yeah, we are amazing, but everyone can be better, and some people just flat out AREN'T doing amazing so reading stuff like that isn't that helpful. Hollis had much more of a "tough love" approach, like "Sure, you're amazing--so do better. Don't just sit there and watch Netflix in your free time--do something more useful that can help you achieve your dreams that you keep giving up on." etc. I feel like this is pretty awesome and she got me thinking a little bit about what some of my goals and dreams are--which I still haven't really identified, but she at least got me thinking about how to make concrete steps towards my goals.

But, on the other hand, I kind of disagreed with some of the things she was saying. She liked to go on and on and on about how awesome and hardworking and amazingly successful and confident she was in herself--which is really great, but it ended up getting old throughout the book. (I'd never heard of her or her blog or her amazingly successful company that she kept talking about and which she made it sound like she was everywhere.) She said over and over again that she was the hardest working person EVER, and the toughest and strongest and best at XY and Z. I am sure that I was just being influenced by our culture that says that women have to be humble and unassuming and that's why it was bothering me, but it did. One of her chapters was all about how she had the goal to buy a $1000 Louis Vuitton bag, and how she was able to visualize that goal and how that goal motivated her to work as hard as she could until she could achieve it. I liked the message behind it, but I can't get behind that specific example, and I can't help think how different her life must be from mine (or most people's) if that's something she really can buy.

However, it was definitely worth a listen. These issues that I have with it were definitely not as important as I'm making them, because I enjoyed it while I was listening to it. I feel like I'd even buy this book to come back to it later, because there were some really great parts. I just don't want to feel like I have to take advice from someone who's pretty much my own age but who is making her career based off of a lifestyle blog.