It sure has been a while since TMTF reviewed a book, hasn’t it? I blame Les Misérables. That novel is roughly the size of Alaska.

Some time ago, I set aside Les Misérables in order to read some books on loan from friends and relatives. (I’ll finish and review Les Mis eventually.) One of these borrowed works is The Book of the Dun Cow. This fantasy novel chronicles an ancient war against Wyrm, a colossal beast imprisoned beneath the earth. All that stands in the way of this unspeakable evil is… a pack of farm animals.

Was it worth putting down the story of Jean Valjean for the tale of some barnyard animals, or should I have continued Lez Mizzy and let the creatures of The Book of the Dun Cow fend for themselves?

Despite a slow start, Walter Wangerin, Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow is an engaging, original, and surprisingly thoughtful fantasy.

Ordinary, Extraordinary Heroes

When the world was new, God imprisoned Wyrm, a creature of absolute evil and unimaginable size, deep inside the earth. God’s creatures, oblivious to the peril beneath their feet, live their precious little lives in peace… until Wyrm begins to break free. As his land is threatened by horrors he can’t understand, Chaunticleer the Rooster prepares his fellow animals for battle. There is only one gleam of hope: the mysterious and angelic Dun Cow.

The Book of the Dun Cow is quite an original work, though some of its elements are familiar. I saw a lot of Aesop’s Fables and a bit of The Chronicles of Narnia in this tale of animals struggling against an ancient evil.

One of the most striking things about the book is its avoidance of the sword-and-sorcery clichés common in fantasy. There are no swords, wizards, princesses, prophecies, or any of the other tired trappings of fantasy fiction. Like Watership Down, which spins an epic around ordinary rabbits, The Book of the Dun Cow tells its story without depending on flashy fantasy tropes. It’s an extraordinary tale of ordinary creatures.

The novel does three things outstandingly well.

First, its characters are simple yet memorable. The author has a Dickensian gift for creating characters that are more like caricatures. Individually, they would quickly become tiresome. All together, alongside a few well-developed protagonists, they make for a colorful cast. The names chosen for characters are inspired—John Wesley Weasel, for example.

The second thing at which The Book of the Dun Cow excels is building up a sense of dread and unrelenting tension. This is not a story in which the heroes are guaranteed to win. Heck, its heroes are farm animals. Their struggle is desperate. Every battle brings tragedy and the risk of failure… and failure means unleashing an unstoppable evil upon the universe.

This brings us to the third thing: the novel has an unexpected theological bent. It doesn’t preach or moralize. It merely depicts the harsh reality of a world in which God seems absent, and the roundabout ways he works his will. (I would add this book to my list of novels that contemplate the silence of God.) This is a book echoing Job and Ecclesiastes, a novel that seems to cry out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Book of the Dun Cow isn’t just a fantasy. In its own understated, roundabout way, it’s a meditation upon the inscrutable workings of God.

Slow and Steady Wins Races, Not Novels

The style of The Book of the Dun Cow is excellent, wasting no words yet conveying vivid impressions. The dialogue is particularly enjoyable. Many of the animals have their unique habits and mannerisms. John Wesley Weasel, bless him, butchers proper grammar. Lord Russel Fox rambles with self-conscious verbosity, the Turkeys gobble with nonsensical extra syllables, and the Dog loses himself in such bitter self-reproach that it’s hard for other characters to get a few plain words out of him.

My chief complaint about the novel is that it takes a long time to get going. As much as I appreciate a slow, steady approach to telling a story, The Book of the Dun Cow hardly begins moving until nearly halfway through. The excitement of the second half is belied by chapters and chapters of meticulous and largely unnecessary buildup in the first. A few early chapters foreshadow the sinister events of later ones, but most of the novel’s first half is forgettable.

The Review of the Done Book

In the end, although it takes a long time to set the stage, The Book of the Dun Cow tells an exciting, original, and oddly contemplative story. After spending so much time in Les Misérables, I felt satisfied to finish a book for a change.

Now that I’ve finished The Book of the Dun Cow, I have just half a dozen or so more books to read before picking up Less Misery where I left off. This is going to take a while.

Thanks for reading! If you have a moment, please check out TMTF’s charity fundraisers this month and make this Christmas awesome for a person in need!

This seems to be a good week for reviewing things, so I think it’s time for a look at Struggle Central: Quarter-Life Confessions of a Messed Up Christian. An alternate subtitle for the book could be The Book Adam Has Been Meaning to Read and Review Since, Like, Last September. What can I say? I forget things.

Thomas Mark Zuniga is a blogger, introvert, Christian, coffee drinker and wordsmith. When he released an e-book some time ago, I snagged a free copy for review purposes. It spent the next few months gathering digital dust in a folder on my laptop. Around the time TMZ agreed to write an excellent guest post for this blog, I remembered his book and resolved to finish it. I bought the paperback version—I will always prefer ink-and-paper books to virtual ones—and walked with TMZ through twenty-five years of struggles.

Appropriately enough, one of the first significant autobiographies in history was titled Confessions. For its author, Augustine, the story of a life is a series of confessions. Whatever our accomplishments, we make mistakes. We all struggle. Struggle Central, a memoir in the tradition of Augustine, testifies to the fact.

Is Struggle Central a good memoir? A good story? A good book?

Despite minor stylistic flaws, Struggle Central: Quarter-Life Confessions of a Messed Up Christian is an honest, vulnerable memoir that never loses sight of its purpose.

Right from the beginning, TMZ makes one thing clear: Although Struggle Central is his story, it isn’t really about him. The book is meant neither to shock nor impress its readers with his mistakes and triumphs. Its purpose is to encourage. It tells its readers, “You’re not alone!”

In Struggle Central, TMZ is remarkably honest, seeming to hold back nothing, making some heavy confessions. This is a book about loneliness, insecurity, fear and isolation. It deals with pornography, homosexuality, shame and doubt. If I wrote a memoir, I doubt I could be so vulnerable.

In all its confessions, Struggle Central tempers honesty with its strong sense of purpose. The book could easily have been a pleading, self-conscious cry for attention. It could have been a halfhearted attempt at openness, gilding its mistakes with excuses and rationalizations. Struggle Central is neither of those things. Its confessions are made as evidence of the book’s fundamental message: “You are not alone; there is hope.”

A number of the confessions in the book resonated with me. As an introvert, I relate to TMZ’s failed attempts to connect with people in churches. As a sinner, I understand the rationalization, shame and self-loathing in TMZ’s struggles to overcome pornography. As an insecure person, I know TMZ’s discouragement at how everyone else seems to be talented, successful or perfect. Struggle Central may not touch all of its readers, but it sure touched me.

On a literary level, Struggle Central has a surprisingly strong narrative. It recounts not a random string of events, but a structured story. TMZ doesn’t merely spit out facts. He highlights certain experiences, adding digressions and flashbacks wherever necessary to keep his story flowing smoothly. In the book’s story and structure, nothing is wasted.

The style of Struggle Central is a different matter: the book is packed with modifiers. If I had a penny for every qualifier, adjective and adverb, I would probably have enough cash to buy coffee at Starbucks.

Despite its many modifiers, the writing in Struggle Central isn’t bad. It’s engaging, readable, informal and crammed with sentence fragments and one-sentence paragraphs for emphasis. All the same, my nitpicky sensibilities were rubbed the wrong way by the constant use of modifiers and dramatic sentence fragments. The more they were used, the less impact they made. There were also a few puns and pop culture references that made me roll my eyes.

In the end, though, the writing takes secondary consideration to the book’s message and purpose—and these are excellent. Struggle Central has a clear and positive purpose, and it does a fine job of sticking to it. It could use a little polish, yet Struggle Central is a touching read for anyone who struggles—that is, for any human being on Earth.

When I read a book, it’s generally for one of three reasons.

1. The book has literary significance or has impacted society in some way.

2. The book was written by an author whose other books I enjoy or appreciate.

3. The book was shoved in my face by a friend or relative who commanded me to read it.

For the most part, the books in the third category prove to be good reads. I discovered classics like Beau Geste and Peace Like a River only because my relatives quite literally pushed them into my hands.

My grandfather, a kindly gentleman of tremendous intelligence, gave me a book last month titled The Inspired Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. As far as I understand, the book impressed him so much that he purchased a brand-new copy for every one of his grandchildren—that’s roughly a dozen books.

If a book is good enough to buy nearly a dozen copies, I decided, it’s probably worth a look.

The Inspired Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln is a biography of the man who held the United States of America together when its dissolution seemed inevitable. More specifically, the book traces the development of Lincoln’s religious thought throughout his life by examining his speeches, letters and memorandums.

Was Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the greatest leader in American history, a believer or a skeptic? Did the fiery trial (as he put it) of devastating battles and political infighting destroy or strengthen a faith in a living God?

I won’t spoil the book’s answers to those questions—you’ve probably guessed them already—but I will say this: The Inspired Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln is an excellent read. The book mostly refrains from using second sources; the author writes, “I make my case stronger if the reader can be certain that he or she is reading the words of Lincoln.” Every major inference about Lincoln’s religious thought is drawn directly from his recorded statements.

These statements—contained in excerpts from memorandums, letters and speeches by Lincoln—are woven into a basic outline of his life. The author provides commentaries upon Lincoln’s statements, clarifying allusions to Scripture and giving historical and biographical context.

I knew about Abraham Lincoln. Don’t we all? He led the United States through the American Civil War! He saved the Union! He freed the slaves! Some of us are familiar with the images of the young man splitting rails in the Illinois frontier or the top-hatted politician pacing the halls of the White House. Beyond these vague ideas, however, I knew very little.

In the end, Abraham Lincoln turns out to be someone to whom I strongly relate. For much of his life, he suffered from intense depression. He loved literature. He wrestled with doubts about Christianity and religion in general. In many ways, he reminds me of myself. Lincoln and I even share a thing for hats.

The thing that impressed me most when I read The Inspired Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln is the way he kept calm and carried on. The country was falling apart—no, it was being actively pulled apart—and he held it together. His depression never left him. Lincoln and his wife lost a son during the Civil War; somehow, he pushed through his grief and kept making the shrewd decisions that saved his country. Lincoln’s sufferings would have broken an ordinary man. They would certainly have broken me.

In the end, Lincoln expressed a principle that may have carried him, and the Union, through the Civil War: “Without the assistance of the Divine Being . . . I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.”

The Inspired Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln is a fine work of scholarship. It’s hardly a gripping read, but its conclusions are well-written and meticulously backed up with clear, unambiguous statements from Lincoln himself. Amid these statements and the biographical details surrounding them, the book includes occasional anecdotes that give a vivid picture of a fascinating man.

Inspired? Yes, I rather think so.