Archive by Author | Sherry

The Declaration by Gemma Malley

Apr6

If the chance to live forever came with a price, would you opt in or out?

It depends on the price, of course. In this book, the price is “no children.” The world’s resources are stretched to the limit in providing for all of the people who “opt in” to take Longevity, a drug that prolongs life indefinitely. There’s no room and there are no resources for children. Children who are born illegally to parents who have signed The Declaration, agreeing not to reproduce, are called Surpluses, and they have no rights, not even a right to life.

Anna is a Surplus. She doesn’t even have a surname, just Surplus Anna. Her purpose in life, if Surpluses can even have a purpose, is to learn to serve Legals, to become a Valuable Asset doing housework, yardwork, and and any other services that Legals disdain but need to have performed. She must serve in order to pay back society and Mother Nature for the unfortunate accident of her birth, for the drain she is on the Earth and its legal inhabitants.

The story reminded me of both P.D. James’s Children of Men (Semicolon review here) and of Margaret Peterson Haddix’s series that begins with Among the Hidden (Semicolon review here). I think these books constitute a fascinating sub-genre of dystopian novels with the theme of a world without children, or a world where certain children are illegal and unwanted. The fascination, for me, lies partly in the fact that these novels are deeply pro-life. In The Declaration, the “good guys” say things like “every life is valuable” and “there is no such thing as a Surplus.” In Children of Men, a world without any children is a dying world full of desperate people looking for meaning and finding none. In Among the Hidden the Shadow Children are, again, shown to be worthy people with a right to live and with gifts that the world needs. I think it’s encouraging to see a pro-life message like this embedded in popular, well-written fiction.

Do you know of other novels that would fit into this list?

Dystopian Novels With Pro-Life Themes

1. Children of Men by P.D. James

2. Shadow Children series by Margaret Peterson Haddix

3. The Declaration by Gemma Malley

4. Unwind by Neal Shusterman. (I found this one with a google search and added it to my TBR list. The description is intriguing.)

There’s a sequel to The Declaration, called The Resistance, coming out in September, 2008.

Oh, I found this list while googling, too: Gemma Malley’s top10 Dystopian Novels for Teenagers

NPM: Reading Poetry

Apr5

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.”
Arnold Bennett, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1908)

So, the question is: have you read “Paradise Lost”? If not, what would it take to get you to read this epic poem?

True confession: I’ve only read excerpts of Milton’s famous poetic opus.

“What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”
Lines 22-26 of Book 1 of Paradise Lost

Poet of the Day: John Milton
Poetry activity for today: Read Paradise Lost? Read part of Paradise Lost. Read out loud.
Alternatively, you could crawl on your knees in sackcloth through the nearest public space. The mall, perhaps?

Biblically Literate Book Club

Apr4

I’m excited about a new venture, and you’re invited to join in.

I’ve wanted to start a book club for quite a while, and since I’m not getting any younger, I decided to just do it. I had a good idea over Lent as I thought about possibilities. I decided to take a Biblical passage and a book (or a play) for each month and really study them together. I plan to read the Bible passage each day, sometimes in a different translation, sometimes slowly and carefully sometimes sweeping through to get the big picture, and see how the Lord speaks through His word and how I can apply the Biblical truths of the passage to my life. I hope the books will mesh in some way with the Bible readings to illuminate one another, especially the Bible illuminating the works of human authors. We’ll see how that works.

So, I’ve started a blog just for the book club. The blog is a work-in-progress since Computer Guru Son plans to spruce it up a bit, but you’re welcome to visit and comment and join in on the reading. Please, if you plan to read with us, leave a comment.

Winter Haven by Athol Dickson

Apr4

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t think this book, the third novel I’ve read and enjoyed by Mr. Dickson, was as good as either River Rising (Semicolon review here) or The Cure (Semicolon review here). Of course, I put River Rising on my list of the Best Novels of All Time, and I’ve raved about it over and over. So, the pressure to live up to its predecessors was intense. The dialogue in this latest novel felt forced and stilted, and the plot reminded me of a Gothic romance: a dashing older man with a dilapidated mansion and secrets to keep, dark and eerie events and characters, hints of violence and horror in the past, the question of whether Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome can be trusted. Add in an insecure and frightened heroine and a madwoman, and it’s all been done before, better, in Jane Eyre or Rebecca. Your mileage may vary, but if you haven’t read River Rising, by all means, drop everything and hie thee to the nearest bookstore or library and grab a copy.

Still, I did like the setting of Winter Haven on an isolated island off the coast of Maine. What are the advantages of setting a novel (or play) on an island, particularly an island with limited or no access to the outside world. It’s like LOST. (Winter Haven has time issues and a polar bear, too—like LOST. No, I am not obsessed with LOST.)

In an island setting, you, the author, can limit your cast of characters, and you can make The Island a metaphor for the Earth itself or for a community. Or you can further isolate your protagonist by making him a castaway on a deserted island as in Robinson Crusoe or the Tom Hanks movie Castaway. What does solitude and the lack of relationship and human companionship do to a man, or a woman? How does he survive alone? Or you can have a group of castaways forced to associate and build a new society, for better or for worse: The Swiss Famiy Robinson (utopian) or Lord of the Flies (very dystopian).

Let’s build a list of island stories:

Books:

The Odyssey by Homer. (Odysseus travels from one island to another and gets trapped on Calypso’s island home.)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss.
The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Hawaii by James Michener.
Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie.
A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhyss.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. (island-hopping)
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells.
Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell.
The Cay by Theodore Taylor.
Island by Aldous Huxley.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Pitcairn’s Island by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. ( A sequel to Mutiny on the Bounty)

Film
Gilligan’s Island (TV series from my misspent youth)
Fantasy Island (ditto)
Key Largo
South Pacific
Cast Away
LOST (TV series from my misspent middle age)

Romesh Geneskera’s Top Ten Island Books

Anyone have additional suggestions in the category of Good Stories with Island Settings?

The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

Apr3

Organizer Daughter and a friend and I watched the movie version of this book by Jane Yolen this afternoon in conjunction with the urchins’ study of World War II. I read the book a long time ago and didn’t remember much about it. Hence, the ending quite shocked me, as I vaguely remember it shocking me when I read it.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s a tale of sixteen year old “typical teenager” Hanna Stern who, when she is forced to attend the annual family Seder, tries to avoid hearing the interminably long stories that her elderly relatives tell about their WW II experiences. However, during the Seder, a mystery intervenes (or is it a dream?), and Hanna is somehow transported back to Poland in the year 1940. She attends a Jewish wedding with some of her relatives who think she is a cousin who has been ill with a fever, and at the wedding, tragedy strikes. The Nazis come to take the Jews to “work camps”, and because Hanna has ben completely inattentive to her family’s history and heritage, she has very little idea of what will happen next to her and to her Polish, Jewish family.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie for any children younger than 13 or 14. Even my high schoolers were, I think, shocked by some of the scenes of brutality and horror that took place in the concentration camp. And that’s despite the fact that I think the movie sort of understates and even misrepresents the reality in some ways. The inmates of the camp are a lot more free to interact and a lot more warmly dressed than I would think was the true state of affairs. Anyway, this movie is for mature teen and adults, and I think it did my teens some good to see enacted some historical facts that they had only read about until now.

The movie stars Kirsten Dunst as Hanna and Brittany Murphy as her friend Rifka.

NPM: It Is What It Is

Apr3

You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

So here’s a poem by one of my favorite poets, no explanation:

Home Thoughts, From Abroad by Robert Browning

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Poet of the Day: Robert Browning
Poetry activity for today: Write a list poem.

NPM: Write a Poem, or Thirty

Apr3

The English Room presents 30 Days of Poetry, a series of lessons on writing poetry for students in the middle grades. Students learn to write all sorts of poetry from cinquains to sestinas to concrete poems.

This poem by George Herbert, written in the 17th century, is a sort of a concrete poem, probably one of the earliest examples:

Easter Wings
Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:

With Thee
O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.

With Thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day Thy victorie;
For, if I imp my wing on Thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Poetry activity for today: Try writing a concrete poem.
Poet of the day: George Herbert, who was born on this date in 1593.

I’m becoming more and more fond of Mr. Herbert, as evidenced by these Herbert posts from the archives.

The Dawning by George Herbert.

The Sonne by George Herbert.

A Wreath by George Herbert.

More April 3 Birthdays.

Bringing Back Kate, or What’s Up, Professor Grant?

Apr2

Brown Bear Daughter and I watched the 1938 Katherine Hepburn/Cary Grant movie Bringing Up Baby the other night, and I realized about halfway through the movie that one of my other favorite movies, What’s Up Doc?, made in 1972 with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, was just a take-off on Bringing Up Baby, practically a remake. Absent-minded professor meets lunatic girl who brings his ordered life crashing down around him—and coincidentally ends his engagement to the wrong, boring girl. Screwball comedy. Innocent mayhem. Lots of laughs in both movies.

I like Katharine and Cary better than Barbra and Ryan, but for some reason I think What’s Up Doc? is the funnier movie. Madeleine Kahn, as Ryan O’Neal’s boringly hilarious fiance, adds a new layer of comedy to the second movie and almost steals the show. Hepburn would never have let herself get upstaged by anyone. Don’t you wish The Great Kate were still around to make more memorable movies? I’d love to see What’s Up Doc?, revised and updated, but starring magically young again Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

NPM: Compressed Poetry

Apr2

“Poetry is the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning.” —Tom Stoppard.

Some poets have made it their goal to compress as much meaning as possible into the fewest possible words.

The Eclipse by Richard Eberhart

I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.

I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

By Emily Dickinson

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

What is your favorite short poem?
Poetry Activity for today: Find a short poem and memorize it. Share it with the family at the dinner table.
Poet of the Day: Emily Dickinson