Archive by Author | Sherry

1900: Books and Literature

Jun7

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold. Available in reprint edition from Vision Forum.
2. Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage Virago reprint available.
3. Robert Grant, Unleavened Bread. Semicolon review and thoughts here.
4. James Lane Allen, The Reign of Law, a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields.
5. Irving Bacheller, Eben Holden, a Tale of the North Country.
6. Paul Leicester Ford, Janice Meredith, a Story of the American Revolution. Semicolon review here.
7. Charles Frederic Goss, The Redemption of David Corson. Available online.
8. Winston Churchill, Richard Carvel
9. Charles Major, When Knighthood Was in Flower, the love story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the king’s sister, and happening in the reign of … Henry VIII..
10. Maurice Thompson, Alice of Old Vincennes.
All ten of these books are available to download and read as ebooks at Project Gutenberg.

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual
Clarence Stedman, An American Anthology
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie Semicolon review here.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published by the George M. Hill Co. in Chicago on May 17, 1900. Download the ebook at Project Gutenberg. An unabridged dramatic audio performance of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz directed and narrated by Karen M. Chan with the Wired for Books Players and featuring Nicoletta Mazzocca as Dorothy.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
John Dewey, The School and Society

It’s interesting that all of the bestsellers, as far as I can tell, were historical fiction. Genres go in and out of style, don’t they? Nowadays the fiction bestseller list would be mostly thrillers and mysteries, I would guess.

Picture Books Set Around 1900, the turn of the century I’ve read a few of these picture books:
The Edwardian wordless books by John Goodall are fun to explore.
Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Bleriot by Alice and Martin Provenson won a Caldecott Award. It’s the story of one of the pioneers of flight, Frenchman Louis Bleriot who flew his plane across the English Channel in 1909.
My Great-Aunt Arizona by Gloria Houston is a lovely depiction of a school teacher in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Children’s and YA Fiction Set in 1900:
Brooklyn Rose by Ann Rinaldi.
Galveston’s Summer of the Storm by Julie Lake.
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. (1899) Semicolon review here.

In this post, Edwardian, Turn of the Century and the Great War I comment on a few books and TV series that depict the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century ambiance and culture, especially in England.

Fairest By Gail Carson Levine

Jun7

Okay, so it’s been a very long time since I have written anything for this blog and I thought it was about time I started doing reviews on some of the books I read. I just recently read this book, about a week and half ago, but I didn’t think about writing a review for it until now.

So rather than reading Fairest I actually listened to it. I like doing that better so that I can do other things while I listen. I usually get more out of this, because the voice of the narrator always helps me to imagine the characters easier.

I thought it was an amazing book! I just realized that I really enjoy fairy-tale books, with princesses and magic and all that. I really enjoyed the whole book and I’m probably boring everyone so I will get to the point!

The book is about a girl named Aza. Her parents own an inn, the Featherbed Inn. They found her at their inn when she was a baby, so they aren’t her real parents but they are very nice to her. They live in Ayortha, where everyone sings. She has an amazing voice, but she is really ugly (or so she says) and hates how she looks. She learns how to do a singing trick she calls illusing where she sort of puts her voice somewhere else and she can make her voice be in that place.

A duchess comes to the Inn and ends up taking Aza to a Royal Wedding, where the King gets married to a commoner named Ivi. Ivi finds out Aza’s illusing trick, and manipulates her. Ivi can’t sing, and she gets Aza to illuse a voice for her. Aza becomes Ivi’s Lady in Waiting, and stays at the palace. Something soon happens to the king and then lots of things happen afterwards. Ivi meets a Prince and falls in love with him; she finds a magic mirror; a spell for beauty goes wrong; and she illuses for the queen, Ivi. I found this book to be really good and I hope other people do too.

Hopefully I will be doing a lot more book reports this summer and fall, thanks for reading them! 🙂

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir . . . of Sorts by Ian Cron

Jun7

Official release date: June 7, 2011

Thanks to NetGalley, I was able to read this funny, touching sort-of memoir by recovering alcoholic pastor Ian Cron. I laughed out loud several times while I was reading, even though some of the subject matter in the memoir is quite serious and sad. Abuse, anger and an alcoholic father give the young Ian several reasons to lose trust in God and in his own ability to cope with the world.

I’ll give you a taste of the style and wit of the author so that you can see if it would suit your sense of humor and literary bent:

“I practiced in our basement with the bell of my horn stuffed into a pillow so the sound wouldn’t disturb my father. This practice regimen had the same effect marathoners experience when they train at high altitudes and then run a race at sea level. Once that pillow came off, I was like Miles Davis after six cans of Red Bull.”

“I discovered that if I titrated my overdeveloped vocabulary with just the right amount of sarcasm, my peers thought it was funny, not to mention impressive. Teachers call this kind of student a precocious pain in the butt. In Washington I’m told they call them press secretaries.”

“Most seventh graders don’t set out to make trouble. They are like puppies with impulse-control disorders. Opportunities for mischief arise, and they can’t stop themselves. This is why they should be crate-trained.”

“Tyler and I planned to put the convertible top down and drive around the beach in search of girls to impress. I’m told male peacocks do the same thing, but with tail feathers.”

If not one of those excerpts gives you a little giggle, you probably won’t enjoy the book because there’s a lot more of the same as Ian Cron retells the story of his childhood and his alcoholic CIA agent father and his mother who was, according to Ian, some amalgam of “Lucille Ball, Grace Kelly, and Margaret Thatcher.”

The religious part of the story starts out with a traditional Catholic upbringing, veers into agnosticism and anger with God, slowly slides into evangelicalism (Young Life) combined with Episcopalian charismatic revivalism, and then settles into a faith that is grounded in personal experience and study of Scripture and tradition, with a bit of emergent mysticism and love of Christian liturgy thrown in. Now that’s a journey, but Mr. Cron doesn’t make it sound nearly so confusing as I have managed to do, and he’s a lot more humorous. I’m not sure we’re in the same place, theologically speaking, but I think the man definitely has a God-touched story to tell. And I can “honor the story.”

Definitely read this one if you’re interested in an honest, open, spiritual memoir about a man with a dysfunctional family who struggles with forgiveness and with idolatry and with becoming the father that God wants him to be. The story in the penultimate chapter of the book (18) about Mr. Cron and his son and their adventure in diving and courage is worth reading, even if you don’t read anything else.

Thank you, Mr. Cron, for making me think and making me laugh. I need both.

Ian Cron’s blog.

Resources for my Journey Through the 20th Century

Jun6

At our homeschool co-op this next school year, I’ll be teaching a high school class on 20th century world history and literature. These are some of the resources I plan to use as I travel through the 20th century with my students. I want to start this week posting useful resources and links for my (future) students and anyone else who’s interested.

General Print Resources:
DK Millennium Children’s History of the 20th Century. DK Publishing, 1999. Out of print, but available used.
Chronicle of the 20th Century. Chronicle Publications, 1987. Disadvantages: This book is no longer in print, and my edition only goes through 1986; on the other hand, I paid $10 for it at a used book sale. This book is similar to the one that Sonlight curriculum originally recommended for the study of 20th Century history, 20th Century Day by Day, also out of print.
The Visual History of the Modern World. Edited by Terry Burrows. Carleton Books, 2009. This book is the one that Sonlight now recommends as a spine text for 20th Century history. The one reviewer at Amazon blasts the book for bias. I have yet to read the entire book, so I couldn’t say yea or nay.
Our Century in Pictures for Young People. Edited by Richard B. Stolley. Little, Brown, and Company, 2000. Also out of print.
The Decades of Twentieth Century America series. Twenty-First Century Books, a division of Lerner Publishing, 2010. These books, one for each decade of the twentieth century, obviously focus on the United States, but I found the pictures and the text useful and interesting. The titles are America in the 1900’s, America in the 1910’s.
The Common Room: Books and Resources on the Twentieth Century

Food and Recipes
Food Timeline has links to recipes and recipe books from all the years of the century.
Depression Cooking With Clara 90+ year old Clara teaches how to cook like they did during the Great Depression while telling stories about her life.

Books and Journalism
Pulitzer Prize Winners
Biography/Autobiography starting in 1917.
Drama starting in 1917.
Fiction starting in 1948.
Novel from 1917 to 1947, when the prize was renamed “Fiction.”
History starting in 1917.
Music starting in 1943. (Did you know there was a Pulitzer Prize for music? Me neither.)
Poetry starting in 1918.
Editorial Writing starting in 1917.
Reporting and National Reporting from 1917.
Editorial Cartooning starting in 1922.
There are many, many other categories of journalism Pulitzers, but these are the ones I thought would be most helpful in studying the century year by year. Unfortunately, there are NOT copies of the Pulitzer Prize winning news articles, editorials, or cartoons at the Pulitzer website until the year 1995.

Bestseller Lists, 1900-1923.
Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels and nonfiction (starting in 1918) in the United States in the 1900s
Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century–Composite List.
Newbery Medal and Honor Books, 1922-Present.
Carnegie Medal WInners, 1937-present.

Music
NPR 100: The 100 most important musical works of the twentieth century, according to NPR and its listeners.
Music of the 20th Century, Part 1 at About.com
Music of the 20th Century, Part 2 at About.com

Art and Artists
WebMuseum: 20th Century Art

Fashion and Clothing
Vintagevixen: 20th Century Female Fashion Facts by Decade.
Costume History Silhouettes: 1900-1940.

News and Events
Timeline of the Twentieth Century
Fact Index (searchable by year with information about mathematics, natural science, applied arts and sciences, social science, philosophy, culture and fine arts)
Year by Year at Infoplease with quizzes for each decade.
Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century
The Top 100 This-and-Thats of the 20th Century

Movies and Television
Academy Awards: Best Picture, 1927-present

Can I See Your I.D.? True Stories of False Identities by Chris Barton

Jun6

I was really looking forward to reading this new YA nonfiction title. I think there ought to be more action in the nonfiction category for young adults, and the topic is intriguing. Who doesn’t wonder about imposters and con men?

For this book, Mr. Barton chose ten famous pretenders who managed to fool a lot of the people for a long time by claiming to be someone they were not. The chapters focus on both men and women, people such as The Great Imposter, Ferdinand Waldo Demara and Mary Baker, who convinced Victorian England for a while that she was really Princess Caraboo from the island of Javasu. I liked the variety of people, settings, and circumstances that made each of the ten stories a good read.

However, and here’s my big issue with this book, I absolutely hated the choice that was made to tell the stories in second person. I felt as if I were being kidnapped and dragged forcibly into the tricksters’ lives and minds, one after the other, instead of being invited to think about who these people were and what impelled them to present a false identity to the world. I didn’t like it. Here’s an example; you see what you think:

“You weren’t hurting anybody. In fact, really, you’ve always been out to help, to share your impressive talents and energy and intellect with the world. But clashing with abbots, downing barrels of beer, going AWOL from the U.S. Army, and faking suicide to get out of the U.S. Navy made it a bit difficult to bestow those gifts as Fred Demara. So you took to borrowing birth certificates and academic credentials and writing letters of recommendation for yourself on official stationery you’d swiped.”

If you can handle a entire book in which you are invited to participate in multiple personality disorder, taking on ten different identities in 121 pages, this book is for you. The revolving I.D. turnstile gave me a headache. The second person point of view felt gimmicky and annoying. FYI, I didn’t like the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were so very popular back when I was a children’s librarian either, but my students loved them.

But, hey, you decide if you want to inhabit the minds of ten different imposters for a few pages each. If so, go for it.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in May 2011

Jun5

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
Boyfriends, Burritos, and an Ocean of Trouble by Nancy Rue. (Real Life series) I’m intereseted enough in this series that I went to the library and got the first one, and I’d like to get my hands on the third book in the series, which has been nominated for the INSPY’s in the Young Adult Literature category.
Taking Off by Jenny Moss. Semicolon review here.

Adult Fiction:
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Semicolon review here.
The Belfry by May Sinclair.
The Informationist by Taylor Stevens.
The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon. Semicolon review here.

Nonfiction:
Glimmers of Hope: Memoir of a VSO in Zambia by Mark Burke. Semicolon review here.
Manic by Terri Cheney.
Evening in the Palace of Reason: J.S. Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment by James R. Gaines. Semicolon review here.
The Narnian by Alan Jacobs.
We Die Alone by David Howarth. Semicolon review here.
Can I See Your I.D.? True Stories of False Identities by Chris Barton.
Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me by Ian Cron.

Love Wins by Rob Bell

Jun4

Rob Bell is slick. I use that word to describe him and his book, Love Wins, because I believe it’s applicable, even charitable. (Charitable, because I’m trying not to say that he’s only interested in selling lots of books.) Immediately after I read the book, my first thought was, “What’s the big fuss?” I don’t agree with everything in Mr. Bell’s book, but I can certainly agree with much of it. Then, I began to go back and try to find the things I agreed with, those points that were supported by Scripture. First I found that even when I agreed with Bell’s exegesis of Scripture or his explanation of Christian doctrine, he often contradicted his own words in the next paragraph or on the next page. Then, I found that much of what I could support was phrased in the form of a question, and it was not a good kind of questioning. In fact, Mr. Bell seems to question in the same way that the serpent in the garden of Eden questioned: “Hath God truly said . . . ?”

Then, I saw, in the book and especially in the debate with Adrian Warnock linked below, that Mr. Bell likes to play games with words and with communication. When he is asked a question, he likes to not answer, but rather ask another question or turn the question back toward the interviewer, maybe with a slightly different emphasis or meaning. He reminds me of Humpty Dumpty who famously said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Only with Mr. Bell it’s usually more; words mean lots of things; stories mean lots of things, and Rob Bell chooses the story he likes the best and the meaning he wants to fit his chosen story.

“It’s important that we be honest about the fact that some stories are better than others. Telling a story in which billions of people spend forever somewhere in the universe trapped in a black hole of endless torment and misery with no way out isn’t a very good story. Telling a story about a God who inflicts unrelenting punishment on people because they didn’t do or say or believe the orrect thngs in a brief window of time called life isn’t a very good story.
In contrast, everybody enjoying God’s good world together with no disgrace or shame, justice being served, and all the wrongs being made right is a better story.” Love Wins, p.110-111.

Love Wins is supposed to be “a book about heaven, hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived.” However, don’t ask Rob Bell to tell you what the Bible says will happen to you after you die or whether you need to consciously choose to follow Christ in this life, or even whether or not God desires our obedient love for Himself so much that He gave His only begotten Son to secure our salvation from the ravages of sin and hell. Mr. Bell is likely to respond to those questions with a question of his own: “What do you think?” or even “What story do you want to be true about heaven and hell and your own fate?”

My answer to that bit of sophistry is: what I want to be true doesn’t change reality. I would dearly love to rewrite history and say that there never was any fall into sin. I would like for the Story to be all about God’s love and our obedience and love for Him with nothing to mar that perfect fellowship. But I live in a world of sin and suffering, some of that sin and suffering caused by me and the choices I have made, and the good news is that I can have hope and redemption and eternal life through the marvelous sacrifice of Jesus on my behalf. And because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, I can live an abundant eternal life with Him. That’s a good story and a true story, and it’s available to anyone who chooses to follow Jesus.

However, it’s also true that if any one of us chooses to go our own way, make up our own story, hold on to our sin, and worship some idolatrous figment of our own imagination, God will allow us our tragic freedom. And He will someday say, “Depart from me. I never knew you. (Because you never chose to know Me.)” And that, too, is eternal, and it will be an irrevocable decision. So, in a sense, each of us does get to choose his own story; either we believe the truth or we choose the lie.

I found the book Love Wins ultimately to be slick and slippery, and in the interviews and discussions I saw with Mr. Bell, he comes across as evasive and flippant. Although I think it’s O.K. to smile and even laugh as we discuss important things, Mr. Bell doesn’t seem to seriously care about truth. In fact, I’m not sure he believes that truth is knowable. If not, then we might as well eat, drink and be merry, right?

Adrian Warnock, a Christian blogger from the U.K., debated Rob Bell when Bell was doing a book tour in the UK, and then Warnock wrote a series of posts, engaging key points on which he disagrees with Mr. Bell.

Pastor Kevin DeYoung writes an excellent critique of the book from a Reformed perspective.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 5: Riddles in the Dark

Jun4

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.
Chapter 3, A Short Rest.
Chapter 4, Over Hill and Under Hill.

What’s your favorite riddle? Do you ever tell riddles in your family? Can you answer the riddles in this post?

In chapter five of The Hobbit, we are introduced to the creature Gollum, a sort of ancient and seedy hobbit-like character who has come down in the world, both figuratively and literally speaking. Gollum lives deep under the Misty Mountains, in the dark and the damp, wandering tunnels, talking to himself, and eating raw fish and other unsavory foods.

Bilbo and Gollum play The Riddle Game, a game of who can stump whom with a riddle. The stakes are high: Bilbo’s life and freedom. Unfortunately for Gollum, he, too, is risking something that is more precious to him than life: a very special ring. There’s more about that ring in The Lord of the Rings.

For now, let’s stick with the riddles.

1. What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
Yet never grows?

2. Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.

3. It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first, and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.

4. This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

5. What has every person seen and will never see again?

6. An architect had a brother and the brother died; the man who died had no brother. Who was the architect?

7. What is put on the table and cut, but never eaten?

8. Unable to think, unable to speak, yet it presents a true picture to every person. What is it?

And, finally, what did Bilbo have in his pocketeses, eh, precious?

Poem #40: Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel by Walter Savage Landor, 1829

Jun2

Linked to Poetry Friday at The Writer’s Armchair.

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
O, if you felt the pain I feel!
But O, who ever felt as I?

No longer could I doubt him true –
All other men may use deceit;
He always said my eyes were blue,
And often swore my lips were sweet.

OK, commenters and poets, ‘splain.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 4: Over Hill and Under Hill

Jun1

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.
Chapter 3, A Short Rest.

We were surprised to start out chapter four with a “thunder-battle” and “stone-giants”, both of which are entities not encountered in LOTR. Z-baby asked what stone giants were, to which I replied that my annotations indicate that “it seems probable that they can be interpreted as a type of troll.” Tolkien himself said that the thunder-battle and the stone-giants throwing their boulders about carelessly were “based on a bad night during his 1911 walking tour in the mountains of Switzerland.”

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. So it proved on this occasion.”

What the dwarves are looking for is safety from the storm and the stones, but what they find, of course, are goblins. They are all captured by goblins, their poor ponies most likely eaten by goblins, and then Gandalf comes to the rescue again with a bit of fireworks and blue smoke and then later, the sword Orcrist, Goblin-cleaver, or simply, Biter.

In the course of the action, the company more or less escape from the goblins, and Gandalf kills the Great Goblin king. However, the chapter ends with Bilbo being knocked off of Dori’s shoulders by a sneaky goblin into the darkness with a head bump that renders him unconscious.

Z-baby begged me to continue reading, but my voice was tired, and Bilbo “remembered nothing more” for the moment. So it was a place to leave him, if not exactly safe, at least not knowing his predicament. Resolution and rescue would have to wait for another day and chapter five.

I’m so excited: we’re about to meet Gollum.