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defrogWell, I got bogged down with lots of end-of-year stuff, so I didn’t even finish any books in November, and only finished two for December. But hey, at least I beat my Goodreads Reading Challenge. Twice!
(To explain: I originally targeted 23 books this year, then when it was clear I would comfortably sail past that, I bumped it up to 25 books. I finished with 26. Isn’t that interesting?)
Anyway, here’s the last two books for 2025.
Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard ThurmanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a reading assignment for a class, though I admit it comes with a pitch that appeals to me – this 1949 book is based on a series of lectures by Howard Thurman on what Jesus had to offer the “disinherited" (the oppressed), which for Thurman’s purposes means black people in America, though it can also apply to any oppressed group. And as legend has it, Martin Luther King Jr studied this book during the Montgomery bus boycott and would carry a copy around with him.
In essence, Thurman breaks down several key characteristics of oppressed people (fear, hate, and deception as survival tactic), how they’re experienced by black people, and how Jesus’ teachings address each of these to make the point that love is the most powerful response to oppression. To get there, Thurman focuses on the historical, human side of Jesus, which provides crucial context for understanding his teachings on these matters. Put simply, Jesus was a poor Jew living under an oppressive regime, which means his ministry was thus crafted and delivered in the context of living under oppression by the Romans. As such, his teachings can also be interpreted as non-violent survival techniques for resisting oppression as an alternative to armed resistance or giving up and joining the oppressors (or at least staying out of their way).
Despite Thurman’s pedigree as a pastor, he takes a strikingly secular approach to Jesus and his ministry, which seems to annoy many Christian readers who argue you can’t separate the human Jesus from the divine Jesus or his mission of salvation. I would agree in that Thurman is perhaps oversimplifying why Jesus said what he did, and this may have been because he was targeting secular audiences with these talks. Where I think the book really shines is Thurman’s description of the black experience in racist America, how fear, deception and hate manifest in that context, and what’s like to live in that particular state. I also agree that context is essential to understanding both Jesus’ ministry and how people of colour feel about systemic racism – especially now that America’s leaders are busy pushing the idea that DEI is racist against white people.
Candide by VoltaireMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
For whatever reason, despite it being an obvious favourite of a lot of music artists and authors that I like, I never bothered to read this or anything else by Voltaire on the general assumption that philosophical fiction by philosophers is heavy on philosophy and light on everything else. Recently, however, I started hearing people talking about how it’s satire (which I didn’t know) and still funny a couple of centuries later. So I finally decided to try it out. And it just goes to show how much I know about anything.
The book is basically intended as a rebuttal to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism, which insisted on God's benevolence despite all the terrible things that happen in the world. Candide, the illegitimate son of the sister of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lives a happy innocent life in the castle and is taught by his tutor, Professor Pangloss, that they live in the "best of all possible worlds" and that "all is for the best". Then Candide is literally kicked out of the castle after the Baron’s daughter, Lady Cunégonde, flirts with him, and finds himself gangpressed into the Bulgarian army. From there it’s one calamity after another as Candide travels the world and sees that it’s nothing like what Pangloss has described.
Which doesn’t sound very funny. But it’s how you tell it. Voltaire’s storytelling is playful and briskly paced, parodying classic adventure-romance tropes, while Candide maintains an oafish innocence for much of the novel as he tries to see the upside of all the bad things happening to him and his friends while he struggles to reunite with his beloved Cunégonde. As for Voltaire’s take on optimism and the problem of evil and suffering, there’s plenty to argue about, and people still argue about it to this day, so there's no need to assume Candide is the last word on the topic. Anyway, I get why it’s one of the most influential novels in literature.
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