A demon-haunted year of reading
I didn’t set out to spend 2023 reading about demons. I selected books that clustered around authors or ideas I wanted to understand better. Demons were not among them. But as I look back on the last twelve months of reading, I see demons in various guises lurking on nearly every page.
The personal crises of the narrators in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (read in December 2022), are punctuated by a series of progressively uncannier events, beginning with the appearance of the titular star and culminating in the arrival of a flesh and blood demon. The first three novels of Ursula LeGuin’s The Books of Earthsea, which I began reading to my sons, feature shadowy spirits from the realm of the dead. In Neal Stephenson’s Fall; Or, Dodge In Hell, the protagonist is the first person to be resurrected in software. He marshals vast compute resources to create a virtual world for himself and other gods. Conflict arises when a jealous rival ("El") arrives and, with the help of his angels, casts Dodge and his pantheon out of paradise.
Dostoevsky’s Demons are neither supernatural nor digital but human. A generation of radicals turns on their liberal forebears, destroying a town and driving themselves to murder and suicide. In July, while working through several C. S. Lewis books, I read The Screwtape Letters for the first time, an all-too-plausible account of how our frailties and vices would appear to devils eager to exploit them.
During long rowing sessions I started listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast, which explains the “seen and unseen world” in the Orthodox Christian tradition, and when a book of the same name was published in late 2023 I picked it up as a gift to myself for Christmas. John Gray’s The New Leviathans, which arrived as a present from my sister, not only includes a long digression on Dostoevsky’s Demons, but excerpts from Hobbes' Leviathan or Behemoth at every section break. One night last week, I put Gray’s book down and opened up The Lord of Spirits to a chapter on biblical demonic monsters, starting with… Leviathan and Behemoth.
Should I be surprised to find these thematic connections between such a disparate collection of fiction and non-fiction books? Or are references to angels, demons, giants, monsters, and the spiritual world simply ubiquitous, and I only now started paying attention? Did I really keep returning to these themes by chance, or was there some unconscious motive or cultural undercurrent that drove me in this direction?
In the preface to The Screwtape Letters Lewis warns the reader against the twin “errors” of disbelieving in demons and showing “an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” Later in the book, Screwtape writes to Wormwood:
We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]…If once we can produce our perfect work–the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’ then the end of the war will be in sight.
Perhaps we should think of 2023 as the year of the Materialist Magician. This was, after all, the first year in which tens of millions of people (myself included) began routinely “summoning demons” by interacting with generative AI and marveling at the results. Perhaps in 2024 Screwtape would instruct Wormwood to make a custom GPT.
The immaterial or spiritual world did not feature prominently in the Lutheran churches in which I was raised. But it wasn’t always this way. Martin Luther’s hymn “Isaiah in a vision did of old” speaks of “shining seraphim with sixfold wings.” When my eldest son started confirmation classes this year we began praying the evening blessing from the Small Catechism together each night, in which we ask God to “let [His] holy angel be with us, so the wicked foe may have no power over us.” I plan to continue praying it in 2024.
In 2015 I started using Libib to maintain a dataset of my personal library, including physical books I own, Kindle books, and books I’ve borrowed and given away or sold. In 2023 I added something new: a daily reading log. It’s just a spreadsheet in which I record the start and end page for each book I read each day. With these two datasets I’m able to visualize my reading activity in some pleasing ways.
In 2023 I read at least one page of 33 different books, and read every page of 22 of them. Some books I started with no intention of finishing (like David Marr’s Vision, of which I only wanted to re-read the first chapter), while other books I started with the intention of finishing but quickly abandoned (like James Suzman’s Work.) Some books were a very slow burn (Demons), while others I finished in just a couple of days.
This is a line chart, with a series for each book, depicting progress toward completion as a percentage of the book. Overlaid is a stacked bar chart that shows the number of pages read each day across all books. I find this a helpful way of visualizing the investment in time and attention that I made to different books. It also plainly shows the period from September through November when I set my reading habit aside to focus on a family health issue.
Finally this Github contribution-style chart shows the number of pages read each day across all books. It’s evident from this chart that most heavy reading happened on the weekends and during the weeks when I was on vacation in July.
For anyone who’s interested, these scripts are available on Github. I plan to continue to iterate on these in 2024. Happy reading!