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Poem #29: A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns (1794)

Jun24

“Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”~Ezra Pound


O, my luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June.
O, my luve’s like the melodie,
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!
O I will luve thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!

Robbie Burns, by all acccounts, had more than one “only luve”, but that doesn’t keep this love poem from being terribly romantic and eternally popular. Burns was mostly homeschooled by his father as a child, and later, self-taught.

Burns referred to “A Red, Red Rose” as a “simple old Scots song which I had picked up in the country.”

When asked for the source of his greatest creative inspiration, singer songwriter Bob Dylan selected Burns’s 1794 song “A Red, Red Rose”, as the lyric that had the biggest effect on his life.

June is, by the way, National Rose Month.

For more poetry on this Friday, check out Poetry Friday, hosted today at The Art of Irreverence.

100 Movies of Summer: Double Indemnity (1944)

Jun24

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

The entire movie is narrated by insurance salesman, Walter Neff, as he confesses into a dictaphone the terrible crime he has been led to commit. His partner in murder is Phyllis Dietrichson, a blonde bombshell who’s unhappily married to a grouchy and jealous oil executive, Mr. Dietrichson (we never learn his first name). Neff and Phyllis deserve each other, but Phyllis comes across as the more ruthless and cruel of the two. (According to IMDB, Barbara Stanwyck was the first choice to play Phyllis, but she was unnerved when seeing the role was of a ruthless killer. When she expressed her concern to Billy Wilder, he asked her, “Are you a mouse or an actress?” ) It was bit disconcerting at first watching the father of My Three Sons play a cad and a murderer, but Fred MacMurray was quite convincing in the role.

This is one of the few 1940’s movies I’ve seen that could give Hitchcock a run for his money. It’s well-plotted, the dialog is snappy and not too hokey, and the ending is good. I highly recommend this one to fans of Hitchcock and of film noir in general. Wilder plays with the lighting and camera angles with a finesse that made me a believer in his directorial skills. Barbara Stanwyck, by the way, is absolutely beautiful, a lot prettier than most of the other actresses of her day.

My urchins learned from this movie the meaning of the term “double indemnity” and the lesson that crime never pays. At least, I think that’s what they learned.

Walter Neff: Who’d you think I was anyway? The guy that walks into a good looking dame’s front parlour and says, “Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands… you got one that’s been around too long? One you’d like to turn into a little hard cash?”

Ummm, yeah, that’s who she thought you were, sucker.

The novella by James Cain was based on a “1927 crime in which a married Queens woman, Ruth Brown Snyder, persuaded her lover to kill her husband Albert after Albert had just recently taken out a large insurance policy with a double indemnity clause.” Ms. Snyder was executed at Sing-Sing on January 12, 1928 for the murder of Albert Snyder. Her accomplice, a corset salesman, also received the death sentence.

Has any one here read the Cain novel? Better or worse than the movie? Or just different?

IMDB link to Double Indemnity.
Buy Double Indemnity at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Red River (1948)

Jun23

Directors: Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson
Writers: Borden Chase and Charles Schnee
Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, and Walter Brennan

Karate Kid says: This movie was about some cowboys on a cattle drive. They live next to the Red River, which is the river that makes up the border between Texas and Oklahoma. They owned the Red River Ranch, and decided to take their cattle to somewhere they could sell it. On their way, they will have a stampede, an ambush, and even a mutiny!

Mom says: I liked this one better than I did The Searchers, but the ending was lame. The writers were drawing on the imagery of herd behavior in which dominant males fight for leadership of the group. There are two young “bucks” on the cattle drive, Matt and Cherry. Then, there’s Dunson, the old but strong leader of the drive, who is also conservative and set in his ways and determined to be obeyed and feared, no matter what the cost. The tension between these three, but mostly between Matt and Dunson, who is Matt’s mentor and father figure, makes the movie go. But then, at the end, although Matt’s love interest, Tess Millay, has a great scene in which she tells them both off for acting like idiots, the tension just sort of drains off into anti-climax.

Still, it’s a good movie to watch with your kids if you’re learning about the cattle drive/cowboy era of U.S. history or if you just like cowboy movies. Dunson shoots or threatens to shoot a few men in cold blood basically for just getting in his way or challenging his authority, and that part was rather shocking to my youngest (and to me). The stereotype of savage Native Americans was still there, but not as prominent as it was in The Searchers. In Red RIver, the Indians are not characters, and the Indian attack is just a plot device to place another obstacle in the way of the cattle drive and give the hero a chance to be heroic. The one Native American character who is on the cattle drive with the cowboys is a part of the comic relief, not very believable or interesting.

IMDB link to Red River.
Buy Red River on Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Ninotchka (1939)

Jun22

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writers:Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder
Starring: Great Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire

Synopsis: Comrade Ninotchka, a Soviet diplomat, comes to Paris to work out the details of the transfer of some jewels to the “Soviet people.” At first, she is all business, cold ad without human emotion, only interested in being a good apparatchik and serving the people. After she meets Leon, a lawyer representing the Russian princess who also has a claim to the jewels, Ninotchka fals in love and changes into a real woman.

Mom says: According to IMDB, “Greta Garbo did not wear any makeup for her scenes where she is the stern envoy.” She also did not show any emotion or do any acting. Glamorous, yes. But if she can act, I couldn’t tell it from this movie. Then, the script itself was flawed, too. It required her to change from a robotic Communist automaton to a real woman on the strength of one pratfall by her suitor, Leon. I couldn’t see what made Leon show any interest in Ninotchka in the first place, other than physical beauty. Garbo plays the first part of the movie with no feelings whatsoever, and so is completely unbelievable. Then, in the second part where she falls in love the change is so sudden that I couldn’t believe in it either.

All of the urchins found this one boring and somewhat odd.

Just after watching this movie, I read some P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves, a collection of short stories in which Jeeves as usual saves the day. In one of the stories an adolescent boy (who is staying in the same house with Bertie and Jeeves) is infatuated with Greta Garbo:

I clutched the brow.
“Jeeves! Don’t tell me Thos is in love with Greta Garbo!”
“Yes, sir. Unfortunately such is the case. He gave me to understand that it had been coming on for some time, and her last picture settled the issue. His voice shook with an emotion which it was impossible to misread. I gathered from his observations, sir, that he proposes to spend the remainder of his life trying to make himself worthy of her.”

I either need a different introduction to Garbo, or I need to get inside the mind of a thirteen year old boy. Never mind. Strike the latter idea. The mind of a thirteen year old boy is not a place I could ever want to inhabit.

IMDB link to Ninotchka.
Buy Ninotchka at Amazon.

Sunday Salon: 52 Things That Fascinate Me

Jun20

The Sunday Salon.comColleen at Chasing Ray wrote this post about the the places, people, and ideas that fascinate her and infuse her writing. She got the idea, in turn, from this post on writing by author Kelly Link.

What I decided to do was to sit down and, very quickly, make a list of things that I most liked in other people’s fiction — these could be thematic, character driven, very general or very specific. I found that when I started this list, it began to incorporate ideas and items which I was inventing as I went along.

I like this sort of exercise, even though I’m not an author, maybe a writer, but not an author. Anyway, these are the themes and things that fascinate me:

1. Community. Communities. How a subculture develops around a shared interest like bicycling or collecting butterflies or playing Scrabble (Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis) or any other random interest. How those communities work and how they coalesce. What the rules are. How they resolve conflict.

2. Education, particularly homeschooling and education/growing up outside the box. Educational freedom and the limits to that freedom. Unschooling.

3. Insanity, mental illness, and mental differences and disabilities. Everything from schizophrenia to autism to deafness and blindness and how those affect perceptions and ideas. Where do we draw the line between insanity and eccentricity? How does blindness affect the way a person thinks about the world?

4. Religious cults and religions other than Christianity. How do these groups answer the Big Questions of life?

5. Eccentric people, collectors, people who live outside the box. How and why do they do it?

6. Old houses full of old stuff.

7. The Civil War. Not so much the war as the time period and the rationalizations and reasons people gave for their actions. The relationships between masters and slaves. The ambivalence in the North about black people in general and especially enslaved black people.

8. Historical Christianity: Celtic Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, Nestorians, Coptic Christians, other groups that developed their own cultures around the message of Jesus Christ.

9. Idealism. Don Quixote tilting at windmills and dreaming the impossible dream.

10. Broken relationships. Scarlet and Rhett. Arthur and Guinevere. Can broken relationships be mended? How? How well? Will the cracks always show? Do we need to be broken to be rebuilt into something stronger and more lasting?

11. Wordplay. For example, Alice in Wonderland or the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. I wish I could write like Lewis Carroll or like Wodehouse or even Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth).

12. Anorexia, cutting, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, self-destructive tendencies in general. This one may not be a very healthy fascination, but it goes back to #3. How do people go “off track,” and how do they return? Where is the line between healthy and unhealthy, between repression, balance, and dissolution, between normal and abnormal?

13. Secret passageways. Secret rooms. Hidden or isolated cottages. Hermits. Aloneness.

14. Small town communities and cloistered communities. Again back to the community. How does a community form? How does it sustain itself? What happens when there are conflicts and broken relationships within the community?

15. Genius. Intelligence. What is intelligence? What can it do, and what are its limits? The Wise Fool.

16. Con artists and liars. A long, elaborate con. Ethical dilemmas like when is it wrong to tell the truth? Is it OK to lie when the Nazis ask if you have Jews hidden in your house? Isn’t a murder mystery the unravelling of an intricate con game? The Great Imposter.

17. Old photographs.

18. Names and naming. What names mean. The origins of certain names. What naming someone does for that person. Nicknames.

19. Biblical allusions.

20. Shakespeare. Not the man so much because we don’t really know that much about him. Bit I’m fascinated by the plays themselves, what they mean, the characters, the relationships, the words Shakespeare used, the intricate design of the plots.

21. Alternate societies and worlds. (Going back to #1) How a world works, what the rules are, what’s different from our society, how one constructs a Narnia or Lilliput or Middle Earth.

22. Aphorisms. How they contain meaning, how they become cliches, how to restate old cliches and give them new meaning.

23. Sports, particularly baseball but other sports too, used as a metaphor for life.

24. Prodigals and how they return home. What makes them come back? How does a person repent?

25. Medieval and Renaissance British history. This interest could be extended to Europe as a whole, but mostly I’m an Anglophile.

26. King Arthur. Knights. Chivalry.

27. Byzantium. Constantinople. Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

28. Autumn is much more interesting than any other season.

29. Race and racial tension. Not so much white people versus black people, but what causes racial divides in the first place. What makes us decide that some people who look a certain way or have a certain ethnic heritage are so different as to be non-human? How do we reconcile ethnic and racial groups who despise one another? How can we see our own prejudices?

30. Matchmaking. How a couple comes together and how they stay together. Not so much romance, but rather the rules and mechanics of how two people are bound together in marriage. How does this cultural community do wedding? Courtship. Arranged marriage. Polygamy. Monogamy.

31. Behind the scenes at any large organization or business or collective. How did the business get started? How does it work? What are they doing back there where we can’t see? Nonfiction books such as Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder or even The Way Things Work by David Macaulay. Fiction books like Hotel by Arthur Hailey or
Runaway Jury by John Grisham.

32. Communication. How babies and young children learn to talk and communicate. Helen Keller and other children with disabilities that interfere with their ability to communicate. How to overcome those disabilities.

33. Twins and triplets. I used to read a very old series of books from my library when I was a beginning reader about twins from different countries: The Dutch Twins, The French Twins, the Chinese Twins, etc.

34. Utopian communities. Dystopian cultures. How this works. What’s wrong in the dystopian community, and how do the characters in the book know it’s wrong if it’s all they’ve ever known?

35. Inventors and inventions. How do they think of such things as bicycles and butterfly bandages?

36. Obsessions and obsessive people. OCD. Monk.

37. Dreams and sleep. What really happens to us when we sleep? How is sleep different from losing consciousness or passing out? Why do we dream? What do dreams really mean?

38. Homemaking. How homemaking can be artistic and a service to those who live in the home. The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer.

39. Plagues. Holocausts. The end of the world. How will it end? With a bang or a whimper?

40. Teddy Roosevelt. Not Franklin, just Teddy.

41. Genealogy. Family history, especially my family history, but others, too, if they have stories to tell.

42. Winston Churchill.

43. Historical mysteries. What ever happened to Ambrose Bierce? Why did Agatha Christie disappear for a week while half of England searched for her? Who was Jack the Ripper?

44. People who do weird, uninhibited things like dance in the supermarket or paint their house dark purple with yellow flowers. I want to paint my front door red, and I want fire engine red counter tops in my kitchen.

45. C.S. Lewis.

46. Gender roles. How are men and women different? How are they the same?

47. The time period between World War I and World War II.

48. Secrets and hidden meanings. Puzzles. Word games. Codes and ciphers.

49. Adoption. Adoption across racial and ethnic lines. Cross-cultural adoption.

50. Artifacts from the 1930’s. Ball canning jars. Cigar boxes. Dial telephones. Old radios.

51. Word origins. Languages. Dead languages and how they died out.

52. Lists and list making.

I’m probably forgetting something that interests me very much, but these are some of my own obsessions. What are yours?

100 Movies of Summer: The Searchers (1956)

Jun18

Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank Nugent from a novel by Alan LeMay
Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Natalie Wood

Karate Kid says: The movie was about a girl getting captured by Indians, and some guys go out and try to find her. I don’t generally like westerns, but this one was OK. I do like John Wayne; he’s an awesome actor.

Z-baby says: I fell asleep so I don’t remember much about it.

Mom says: I’m with KK: as Westerns go, it was OK. John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards is a Confederate soldier, returned to Texas after the Civil War, but unreconstructed and bitter. When his brother’s family is massacred by the Comanches, Edwards is consumed with revenge. He and Marty, an adopted son who escaped the massacre, spend years searching for Debbie, the little girl that the Indians captured and took with them instead of killing.

The representation of Native Americans in the movie was appalling. The Comanches in the movie were bloodthirsty, savage, and completely irredeemable. And if a person was captured by the Indians and not rescued quickly, that person also became “infected” with Indian ways and either ended a savage or a gibbering idiot. Throughout the movie Edwards is not really as interested in rescuing Debbie as much as he is out for revenge. He’s fairly sure Debbie is either dead or unsalvageable. We discussed this bigotry about Native Americans after watching the movie, but it was hard to get across the points that yes, Indian massacres did happen, but no, not all Native Americans were brutal inhuman barbarians.

Anthony Esolen says it may the best Western ever made. I must have missed something.

IMDB link to The Searchers.
Buy The Searchers on Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer

Jun16

So the urchins and I have started a project for the summer. I’m big on projects. I’m not always so good at completing projects, but I’m good at thinking them up and good at starting. Committing myself to this project here on the blog might keep us on track. Or the urchins might enjoy the project so much that they clamor for more. Who knows?

The project goes like this: I’ve made a list of 100 classic movies. I compiled the list partly from My List of 107 Best Movies of All TIme, partly from the American Film Institute’s lists, partly from some lists of classic summer movies that I wanted to include. These are the 100 movies that we’re going to try to watch this summer. This is not a list of what I think are the best movies; some of these I haven’t ever seen. And I left out most of the movies that we have all already watched. I also left out a few good movies that I think are still too mature in content for my urchins, ages 18, 15, 13, 11, and 8. (Some of the ones on this list the eleven and eight year old won’t be watching.) We’ve already watched three of the movies on the list this week (reviews coming soon), so I showed them in bold type.

But these are the movies for the Great Movie Project 2010:


12 Angry Men
Adam’s Rib
All the King’s Men
Anatomy of a Murder
Apollo 13
The Apple Dumpling Gang
Back to the Future
Beach Party
The Best Years of our Lives
Big
The Big Sleep
The Black Stallion
Bladerunner
Bonnie and Clyde
Breaking Away
Caine Mutiny
Castaway
Cat Ballou
Charade
Citizen Kane

City Lights
Double Indemnity
Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
Father Goose
Father of the Bride
Field of Dreams
Fly Away Home
From Here to Eternity
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
The Godfather
The Gold Rush
Gone With the Wind
Good-bye Mr. Chips
The Graduate
Grease
Guns of Navarone
Harvey
High Noon
Hoosiers

How Green Was My Valley
It Happened One Night
The King and I
Kramer vs. Kramer
Laura
Lawrence of Arabia
A League of Their Own
Lillies of the Field
The Longest Day
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Magnificent Seven
The Maltese Falcon
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Meet Me in St. Louis
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
The Moon-Spinners
Night of the Hunter
Ninotchka
North By Northwest

Notorious
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ordinary People
Out of the Past
Parent Trap
Paths of Glory
A Place in the Sun
Pride of the Yankees
Psycho
The Quiet Man
Red River
Rocky
The Searchers
The Secret of Roan Irish
Shane
Singin’ in the Rain
Sixth Sense
Sleepless in Seattle
Stand and Deliver
Stand By Me
A Star is Born

Strangers on a Train
Sullivan’s Travels
Sunset Blvd.
Swing Time
The Ten Commandments
Tender Mercies
The Third Man
The Three Musketeers
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Unforgiven
The Verdict
The Winslow Boy
Witness for the Prosecution
Wuthering Heights

That’s 96. I can add four more. (Why 100? Because it’s a nice, round, even number?) Does anyone have a suggestion for numbers 97-100? It may be something we didn’t put on the list because we’ve all already seen it, but nevertheless suggest away.

Additions, informed by your comments and by this list at Mere Comments:
Desk Set
Penny Serenade
Rope
Come Back, Little Sheba

Sunday Salon: Gleaned from the Saturday Review

Jun13

The Sunday Salon.comStrength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. Recommended by Ruth at There Is No Such Place as a God-forsaken Town. I like Tracy Kidder. I read Soul of a New Machine a long time ago and thought it was some of the best nonfiction I’d ever read. I can also recommend House, the story of a couple who supervise the building of their own house, and Among Schoolchildren, a chronicle of a school year in a fifth grade classroom. Last year I read Mountains Beyond Mountains, a look at the work of American philanthropist Paul Farmer in Haiti and other places, fighting tuberculosis and poverty.

Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean by Richard Logan, PhD, and Tere Duperrault Fassbender. Recommended by Heather at Age 30+ . . . A Lifetime of Books. A true survival story with some kind of mysterious twist (Heather didn’t give it away). I wanted to read this one as soon as I read Heather’s review.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier. Also recommended by Heather. Watch the book trailer featuring author Tracy Chevalier. The book sounds fascinating.

Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart. Recommended by Carrie at 5 MInutes for Books. Carrie is a trusted source, and if she gives it such a high commendation . . . this memoir must be good.

The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens. Recommended at Whimpulsive. I like the premise here: a massively overweight woman manages to leave home and find herself beneath the layers of physical weight and emotional pain.

Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther. Recommended by Sarah at Library Hospital. Sarah says the book is nothing like the movie, although both are good. I’m intrigued.

Mrs. Tim Carries On (Leaves from the Diary of an Officer’s Wife in the Year 1940) by D. E. (Dorothy Emily) Stevenson. Sarah also mentions this book in her review of Mrs. Miniver. I want to read more books by D.E. Stevenson.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

Jun7

Book #3 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge
Reading TIme: 5 hours
Pages: 475

Workers of the World Unite! Let the Games Begin! It’s The Sting (Robert Redford, Paul Newman) on steroids and inside/outside a computer game!

Mr. Doctorow knows a lot about economics and about computers and computer games. I don’t know much about either.

Mr. Doctorow also has a gift for telling a good story. And he ties up the loose ends a lot better than the writers on LOST did.

I enjoyed this techno-thriller by author of Little Brother even though unions and computer games are not my thing. I learned a lot about economics and banking and derivatives and hedge funds currency and inflation and deflation, but I still don’t understand any of them.

The characters made the book:

Mala is a brilliant fifteen year old gameplayer from the Mumbai slum of Dharavi. Her nickname is General Robotwallah, and she leads an army of gamers in battle over the internet each day.

Jiandi is the host of The Factory Girl Show, broadcast over the net to twelve million Chinese factory workers every evening.She listens to their questions, give answers, and encourages the factory girl to fight for justice.

Leonard, aka Wei-Dong, is a seventeen year old game-obsessed high school student from Los Angeles who somehow ends up helping the Webblies, a new union of workers from all over the world, who are uniting to fight for better pay and conditions for illegal gameplayers and for other oppressed workers.

Connor Prikkel works in Coca Cola Games Command Central, hunting down illegal gold farmers and monitoring and adjusting the games to work as perfectly balanced economies. Connor is a gamerunner, and he hates “third-world rip-off artists” who cheat and mine the games for virtual gold and other assets.

Matthew Fong lives in Shenzhen in Southern China, and he’s determined to build his own successful gold-farming operation despite threats from the bosses and harassment from the police.

Big Sister Nor is the mastermind behind the Webblies, a union struggling to organize gamers from all over the world and get them just rewards for their labor and safe workplaces.

It’s a good book, even if I’m not so sure about the politics involved. By the way, you can download and read Doctorow’s book for free. Mr. Doctorow believes that he’ll make more money and everyone will be happier if he makes a name for himself by giving away his his books on the internet. My copy came from the library.

The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan

Jun5

Book #2 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge
Reading TIme: 2.25 hours
Pages: 345

Andrew Klavan takes a subtle dig at his own book in a paragraph near the middle of The Long Way Home, the second book in the Homelanders series of YA thrillers.

“I missed Rick and Miler and Josh. I missed having someone to kid around with and talk to. I missed long conversations about girls and sports and arguments about whether Medal of Honor was cooler than Prince of Persia and why part 2 of any trilogy was never as good as parts 1 and 3. I missed being with the guys who knew me best and liked me just the way I was. I missed my friends.”

Yeah. What he said. This book was fun, but not quite as suspenseful as Book 1 of the series, The Last Thing I Remember*, and probably not as satisfying as the last book in the trilogy that comes out in November 2010, to be titled The Truth of the Matter. In fact, I would suggest waiting until November and then grabbing the the set of three books for any pre-teen/teen guys on your Christmas list —and another set for yourself.

Here’s why:
1. The books are suspenseful. Maybe I’m just dumb, but I haven’t figured out yet why Charlie has amnesia and is missing a whole year of his life or why the bad guys in the story think he was on their side and has betrayed them. Nor have I figured out how Charlie West is going to get out of the mess he’s in.

2. The bad guys are bad, and the good guys are good. Not a lot of nuance here. I think that’s a good thing. I think all of us, teenage guys especially, need heroes and a way of seeing the world as a place where they can tell the difference between good and evil and align themselves/ourselves with the good.

3. Lots of action. Several scenes are really violent, bad guys get beat up, and karate is used freely. Also there are car chases and motorcycle chases and on-foot chases, lots of movement. KarateKid, age 13, would like this aspect of the books.

4. In this series, boys are boys, and girls are girls. The protagonist, Charlie, is a boy, and he and his friends tease and mock each other mercilessly. Charlie’s girlfriend, observing all this male bonding, says (more than once), “You guys are so mean.” Also, the girlfriend, Beth, is a girl. When she’s in danger she doesn’t wimp out, but she also doesn’t take over and become the heroine of the story. Charlie is the hero, and Beth is his helper and inspiration.

5. No sex and no foul language. There is some chaste romance; Charlie and Beth eventually kiss. But these are good kids with their priorities in place, and they respect each other. Not all teen guys are thinking of one thing only all the time, and they don’t need to be told endlessly that every other teen guy is thinking of that one thing all the time.

6. Author Andrew Klavan also has his priorities in place, and I can trust him to deliver a good, fast-paced, satisfying ending to this series. That’s why I feel comfortable recommending the third book in the series before having read it. Thirteen or fourteen is about the median age for this series, and guys will like it better than girls, mostly because of Reason #3.

*I read The Last Thing I Remember during my Lenten blog break, and I wrote in my journal at that time: “Yeah! A middle school boy book! A book that celebrates faith, karate, self-defense, and American values without being didactic or cheesy!”