Archive | July 2008

Books Read in July, 2008

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. Fantastically disturbing (in a good way) YA fiction. Read it if you like to think about the implications of technology and futuristic scenarios. Semicolon review here.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Semicolon review here.

Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Brown Bear Daughter and I read this book out loud together to get a head start on her literature class for next year.

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. I didn’t review this one, but it was just as good as Jayber Crow, if not better.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Semicolon review here.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Semicolon review here.

Niner by Theresa Martin Golding. I think I picked this one up at the library because the main character, a girl, had nine fingers, one thumb missing, and one of my urchins was born with twelve toes. There’s a connection there somehow. It’s sort of sad YA fiction, where mom’s a runaway, dad’s wonderful and nurturing, the girl’s adopted, and the kids get into trouble while keeping secrets from the adults in their lives.

them by Joyce Carol Oates. Semicolon review here.

The Queen’s Man: A Medieval Mystery by Sharon Kay Penman. I had to go back to the middle ages, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard I, and Prince John, to get some relief from all the modern violence and angst. Still violent, but very little angst, and the violence was logical violence, if you know what I mean, not irrational.

Gleaned from the Saturday Review

Jul30

Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. Recommended by Suzanne at Adventures in Daily Living. I added this one to the list on the strength of the comparison to Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. (Semicolon review here.)

Death Comes As an Epiphany by Sharan Newman. Recommended at What Kate’s Reading. I like historical mysteries, and since we’re studying the Middle Ages this fall, I thought this mystery in particular sounded timely.

Ruth by Mrs. Gaskell. Recommended by Sarah at Library Hospital. I like Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, but I’ve not read this particular book. It sounds like something I would like a lot.

them by Joyce Carol Oates

Jul28

7/26/08: I’m over halfway through this book, “the third and most ambitious of a trilogy of novels exploring the inner lives of representative young Americans from the perspective of a ‘class war’.” “The them of the novel are poor whites, separated by race (and racist) distinctions from their near neighbors, poor blacks and Hispanics.” The words of explanation are Ms. Oates’ commentary on her own novel in an afterword at the end of the book.

I’m finding the novel condescending and full of stereotypes: the spoiled rich girl, the poor but violent young man full of unresolved rage, the eternal victim of that “victimless crime”, prostitution. I’ve been borderline poor, not in the inner city, and I’ve lived among poor people in the city. I don’t believe there is any “class war” in the U.S. Racism, yes. A division of classes, yes. But the poor people I have known mostly don’t think of themselves as poor, resent being classified as poor, intend to become middle class or rich as soon as hard work or a lucky break will enable that to happen. And there are all sorts of poor people. Some are hard working and others are lazy. Some are conscientiously religious, and others are profane and vulgar. Some are happy; others are morbidly depressed. Ms. Oates’ them are all the same: materialistic, violent, and devoid of moral values (probably because moral values are “middle class values” in the jargon and the perspective of the sociologist).

Ms. Oates again: “Few readers of them since its 1969 publication have been them because them as a class doesn’t read, certainly not lengthy novels.” How patronizingly untrue. And yet, Ms. Oates’s main character, Maureen, one of them, reads and enjoys Jane Austen and other novels. Perhaps the author is correct in writing that the poor as a class don’t read novels like them because they generally prefer hope and optimism to a vision that condemns them to generations of poverty and violence and victimhood.

7/27/08: I was sitting in church this morning thinking about Loretta, Maureen, and Jules, the central characters in them. Even though I still believe they tend toward stereotype, there are people out there, them, who fit the stereotype. What does the Gospel have to say to the Lorettas, hard as nails, seen it all, loud, brash and poverty enslaved? How can the Church, Jesus’s church, reach and speak to the Maureens of the city, victims of a bad home, bad education, a dearth of values, and their own longing for something better? If Jesus himself could speak to the Samaritan woman who was both of these women in one, can’t the Church somehow act redemptively in the lives of women like these as Christ’s representatives? And Jules. At a point in the story Jules, the smart but criminally destined young man, has a Bible and time and inclination to read it. (He’s in the hospital.) But he says, “My main discovery is that people have always been the same, lonely and worried and hoping for things, and that they have written their thoughts down and when we read them we are the same age as they are.” Jules finds hope and fellow feeling in the Scriptures but no salvation, no change. How could Christians, how could God’s Spirit, reach a man so embedded in sin and degradation and lift him up, not into the middle class, but into heaven itself? I’m not sure. I know it happens for some people, but not for others. I do know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only hope for people like Loretta, Maureen, and Jules . . . and for people like me, good old middle class me, just as sinful and degraded in my own middle class way.

There you have it. I have already this week established myself as a philistine and an anachronism. A family member, who shall remain nameless, accused me of calling her an elitist when I confessed my lack of appreciation for one of her favorite novels, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. And now I fear that the kindred spirit-ness that a certain blogger and I have shared in the past is tinged with a lack of understanding on my part. I will say that them made me think about poverty and racism and class struggle and sin, but I didn’t enjoy reading it and don’t wish to repeat the experience anytime soon. (Maybe some of the other novels of Joyce Carol Oates would suit me better? She’s quite a prolific writer, and this one is the only one I’ve read.)

So be it. Give me Dickens or Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo or just a rousing adventure by Tolkien or Dumas. There’s plenty of poverty and and evil and violence in those authors’ books, but there’s also something else, a lack of inevitabliity, dare I say, a sense of hope? From the twentieth century, I’ll take Alan Paton or P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers or even my newest discovery Wendell Berry (something of an anachronism himself). But saints preserve me from the modern sociological novel.

Joyce Carol Oates fans, we’re still friends, right?

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Jul27

Periodically blogging my determined attempt to finish and appreciate one of Eldest Daughter’s favorite books:

p. 58: My most insistent thought is that this book is one of the most boring tomes I’ve ever read. O.K., maybe The Old Man and the Sea ranks higher on the boring scale, unless you’re interested in deep sea fishing, but it had the advantage of being shorter than The Moviegoer. Moby Dick was much longer, and it was about fishing, but I’d rather be reading it.

p. 67: These people are not real:
An aunt who sends her nephew inspiring quotations from Marcus Aurelius? (Note: I later read that quotations from Marcus Aurelius were exactly the means of communication that Walker Percy’s rather eccentric uncle who raised him after his parents’ death used to inspire and relate to the young Mr. Percy.)

Said nephew, named Binx, who wanders through life with no goals, lots of odd philosophy, and no passion for anything. And he owns only one book, something called Arabia Deserta, surely symbolic of the desert that is modern life.

Kate, whose fiance dies in a car crash in which she is also injured, but she leaves the scene aand takes a bus home? O.K., maybe she’s in shock. But then she says that the bus trip home after the accident was the best afternoon of her entire life, or something like that. Is she crazy? (It turns out that she is.)

Nonsense. Not eccentricity, but nonsense. Eccentric nonsense can be fun, as in Wodehouse, but this stuff is pretentious. I can tell that the author is saying Something Serious about the Modern Malaise of Twentieth Century Man. And he’s communicating his message through the character of a bizarrely immature, self-centered, movie-obsessed, womanizing, bachelor stock broker. I can’t identify. Except maybe with the self-centered part.

p. 78: There are some ideas here, almost. Binx has a concept of a “vertical search” for meaning in which one can understand everything essential about everything except for one’s self, which is still “left over” at the end. Again, nonsense, there is plenty of mystery in this world that scientific analysis has not even begun to explain, but it is true that the self is the most mysterious and inexplicable of all.

p. 86: “For sometime now the impression has been growing on me that everyone is dead.”

Now I get it. This narrator, Binx Bolling, is nuts. But of course, he speaks truths in the midst of his madness. (Whoops, Eldest Daughter says I don’t get it at all. I’m Prufrock: “That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.”)

p. 178: Almost finished. Deep sigh of relief. I can’t decide if Mr. Percy is trying to be profound, trying not to be profound, or trying to pretend he’s not trying to be profound. Whatever the case, the profundity eludes me.

p. 212: The End.
I have some questions:
Who is Rory? Rory Calhoun, the actor, maybe?

And I second Aunt Emily’s questions to Binx: What do you love? What do you live by? What do you think is the purpose of life—to go to the movies and dally with every girl that comes along?

After I finished the book and wrote the above notes, we discussed it at Eldest Daughter’s book club meeting and in the car on the way there. Eldest Daughter insists, and I have no reason to doubt her, that I just don’t understand the book at all. She also says that Walker Percy was a great fan of Kierkegaard, and that the philosophy and modern quandary in the book are based on the writings of Kierkegaard. I’ll have to take her word for it since I’ve never been able to make it through more than a page of Kierkegaard.

I did finish The Moviegoer, though, and I regard that as an accomplishment even if I did end up in a rather Prufrockish position. I didn’t “get” T.S. Eliot for a long time either. Maybe Percy will grow on me.

(Please forgive all the sentence fragment and incomplete phrases. I think they were somehow a response to the book and symbolic of something. Perhaps even profound.)

John Lienhard, Engines of Our Ingenuity, on Walker Percy and his search for a father figure. Interesting analysis.

Sunday Salon: The Plight of Modern Man and Bookshelves Again

Jul27

My reading has been rather grim this week, which befits my mood, unfortunately. I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer for Eldest Daughter’s book club. It won the National Book Award in 1961. Then I started reading them by Joyce Carol Oates. It won the National Book Award in 1970. I can tell you that neither novel wins my book award . . . unless it’s the Semicolon Grim, Disturbed and Neurotic Book Award.

So, to think of brighter things, I turned my thoughts toward bookshelves in which to keep the Grim, the Disturbed, the Neurotic, the Hopeful and the Joyful books, all on shelves touching and informing one another. With the right kind of bookshelf, the books might be able to talk to each other in the night, rub covers, even make friends. Jan Karon’s Father Tim could tell Dostoyevsky to cheer up and pray the prayer that never fails. Or Richard Adams’ Bigwig might give some advice to Alice about rabbit holes. Or maybe Edgar Allan Poe will scare the stuffing out of some pompous old bore from one of Dickens’ novels. Who knows? With the right sort of bookshelf and the proper arrangement of the books, Nonfiction and Fiction and the Memoir-in-Between might even come to some agreement or at least peaceful co-existence. (A new blog/reading meme: Describe a meeting between . . . two disparate book characters. This week: describe a meeting between Winnie the Pooh and Becky Sharp.)

Thanks to Fuse 8 for the link to the Opus Shelving System. My regular bookshelves already look sort of like these with the books on top of books, sideways and every which-a-way. But why not just go with the flow and wedge them in any old way to vary the decor?

30 of the most creative bookshelf designs is a series of pictures and descriptions of bookshelves that a designer has found to be, well, creative. The author didn’t say they were terribly practical, and in fact most of them won’t hold very many books. But they are fun to look at.

Someone named Alex has an entire blog devoted to bookshelves. His entries seem to be more innovative than practical, too.

Maybe you just can’t beat ye old wooden bookshelf stuffed full of books. Small World is looking for book shelving suggestions. Tell her what you think.

Random Movie Blog-a-Thon

Jul25

This sounds like fun. Buy or rent a movie that you wouldn’t normally be interested in watching. Watch and then write a review. From the originator of the idea at Cinexcellence:

This doesnâ€™t mean that it has to be one that you would probably hate. It could be one of those DVDs that you walk by all the time but never took a chance on it. But it could be one that you hate. . . . hey, we might discover some hidden gems along the way.

I think I’ll try this out. Something rated PG or G that nevertheless sounds stupid.

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: Edmund Spenser

Jul24

Spenser is most famous for his famously l-o-n-g poem, The Faerie Queen, which I, like 99% of the world, have never read. He lived in Elizabethan England, a contemporary of Shakespeare and a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Spenser wrote the following poem, and my question to you is: what is the poem about? A hunting expedition? A woman? Both? Something else?

The Tamed Deer

Like as a huntsman after weary chase
Seeing the game from him escaped away,
Sits down to rest him in some shady place,
With panting hounds beguiled of their prey:
So, after long pursuit and vain assay,
When I all weary had the chase forsook,
The gentle deer returned the self-same way,
Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook.
There she beholding me with milder look,
Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide;
Till I in hand her yet half trembling took,
And with her own good-will her firmly tied.
Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild
So goodly won, with her own will beguiled.

The Hunted Roe-Deer on the Alert, Spring, 1867

Giclee Print

Courbet, Gustave

Buy at AllPosters.com

More Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading: Two Teachers Who Read. A Lot.

Author Celebration: Alexandre Dumas, pere

Jul24

I missed last week’s celebration on the July 17th, the birthday of Isaac Watts, because of my blog issues. (Nasty old spammers!) However, I am just barely here in time to celebrate with you all the birthday today, July 24th, of Alexandre Dumas, French playwright and novelist who was born in 1802 and died December 5, 1870 at the age of 68. His grandmother on his father’s side was an Afro-Carribbean former slave, and his father was a general in Napoleon’s army who fell into disfavor and poverty. Alexandre’s father the general died when Alexandre was three years old, and his widowed mother tried to give him an education. He loved books and read everything he could.

Tous pour un, un pour tous, c’est notre devise.
Translation: All for one, one for all, that is our motto.
The Three Musketeers, Ch. 9: D’Artagnan Shows Himself

Dumas moved to Paris when he was twenty (similar to D’Artagnon), and he began to write plays and magazine articles. His first plays were quite successful, and he soon began writing novels in serieal form for the newspapers. He eventually became so popular that “Dumas became known as the King of Paris and a saying held that, ‘when Dumas snores, Paris turns in its sleep.'”

He hired a stable of writers and assistants who helped him turn out novel after novel in addition to a prolific number or journal articles and nonfiction books on crime and French history and politics. His most famous novels are The Three Musketeers and its sequel Twenty Years After, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask.

How can we celebrate the birthday of this very popular author, perhaps the most widely read French author of all time?

1. Start reading one of his novels. I’m planning to check out Dumas’s Le Reine Margot, which purports to tell the story of Marguerite de Valois, the daughter of the infamous Catherine de’ Medici and King Henry II of France.

2. Listen to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. The story of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King was written by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation of the story was set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

3. Teacher notes for The Three Musketeers.

4. Enjoy a Three Musketeers bar.

5. Watch a movie based on one of Alexandre Dumas’ books. Dumas’ works have inspired more than 200 films. I recommend:

The Three Musketeers (1973) with Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Michael York. The newer one (1993) with Kiefer Sutherland and Chris O’Donnell is OK, but I like the old one better. Oliver Reed will always be my image of Athos.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). The story’s better than the movie, but the movie’s not bad. Rated PG-13.

6. Play Three Musketeers. Have an adventure. All for one and one for all. Do kids pretend such things anymore?

7. Make a musketeer costume.

8. Teacher activities for The Count of Monte Cristo.

Do you have anything to say about Alexandre Dumas or his books? Share a link here for his birthday celebration.

1. Nick Pelling (The Dumas Club)
2. Barbara H. (The Count of Monte Cristo)

3. Becky (The Three Musketeers)
4. SuziQoregon (The Three Musketeers)

Meta-Blogging Blog Recovery

Jul24

I’m back. If you didn’t notice I was gone for the last week and a half, please know that I did. Notice, that is.

As far as we can tell, someone hacked into my blog and caused it to use a lot more CPU on the server than it should, which in turn shut the whole thing down. I could get the front page to load, sometimes, but couldn’t get to the pages where you post or any other pages for that matter. When it looked as if my blogging days were coming to an abrupt halt since the webhost people couldn’t fix the problem and Computer Guru Son didn’t know what to do, I was rather unhappy and sad.

At first, I wondered if I was too attached to blogging. Maybe the crash of my blog was a sign that I should step back, reevaluate, and give up blogging gracefully. However, as I thought and prayed (yes, prayed) about it some more, I realized that my blog is an aspect of my work. I feel called to blog about books, and ideas, and faith and the intersection of those areas of life. I’m under no illusions that what I say here is going to “change the world”, but I am called to be faithful in small things. And this blog is one of my small things.

So, I am very thankful todayto Mr. Bill of Thinklings and Out of the Bloo who helped me to figure out what was wrong and then fix it. He deserves a medal, but for now all I have to give him is a great big THANK YOU.

Hooray! Later today we celebrate Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and other great adventure stories. And on Saturday, the Saturday Review is back and running . . . the Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Jul14

Where have I been, and why haven’t I read any novels by Wendell Berry before? Why hasn’t this man, Wendell Berry, won a Pulitzer Prize or something? He writes about real people, the kind of people I knew growing up in West Texas, even though his people are in a fictional place called Port William, Kentucky. His people say things and talk about things that I heard growing up, like:

filling stations
the jumping-off place
finicky
I reckon
sick as a dog
minnnow buckets
toe the mark

And Mr. Jayber Crow is one of the most thoughtful characters I’ve read about in any book. He’s a homespun philosopher, and better yet, a loving man.

And this is what is was like—the words were just right there in my mind, and I knew they were true: ‘the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God move upon the face of the waters.’ I’m not even sure that I can tell you what was happening to me then, or that I know even now. At the time I surely wasn’t trying to tell myself. But after all my years of reading in that book and hearing it read and believing and disbelieving it, I seemed to have wandered my way back to the beginning—not just of the book, but of the world—and all the rest was yet to come. I felt knowledge crawl over my skin.”

That last sentence, can’t you just feel it, too? I really had an experience somewhat like Jayber’s myself when I was about thirteen years old. I wondered if all I had been taught and all the Bible knowledge I had memorized was really true. I thought and prayed for an entire Sunday afternoon, by myself in the churchyard, and at a point I just knew. No audible voice, but I knew that God was there, that He was the Christ, that the Holy Spirit spoke to me.

“And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly. I had almost no sooner broke my leash than I had hit the wall.”

I have come to the age now where I can see how short a time we have to be here. And when I think about it, it can seem strange beyond telling that this particular bunch of us should be here on this little patch of ground in this little patch of time, and I can think of other times and places I might have lived, other kinds of man I might have been. But there is something else. There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, with one another and with the place and all the living things.

Jayber Crow is a book about community and about the secret life of a Kentucky bachelor and about love that is love even when it’s unconsummated. Mr. Berry has an axe to grind in his antipathy for modern farming and agri-business, but he also has a story to tell about the goodness of country life back in the 1930’s and 40’s. And there’s another, deeper theme to this book, about the surprising twists and turns of a life lived for an audience of One, lived before God, even in the times when God seems to be far away.

“Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?”

An eternal story that is happening partly in time. What a great description of the sense that we have that we are somehow trapped in time but not meant to be there, mortal but meant to be immortal.

I also read Hannah Coulter a couple of weeks ago, and I’ll just say that I’m hooked. I think you might be, too, if you try either of the two books I’ve just finished. Port William, Kentucky is a place I want to visit again and yet again; I might even like to settle down there, even if I am a city girl at heart. Mr. Berry makes country life sound awfully enticing.