I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything —at least what one didn’t know the other did. . . As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

We read this book for my co-op American Literature class. I think the quote speaks for itself.

I was once stuck in a house for two weeks, no library nearby, with only a box full of Harlequin romances to feed my reading habit. I read them all. I’ve never had any desire to read another. A couple of years later I had a friend who was hooked on “bodice-rippers,” the books that have a picture on the cover of a beautiful young woman with a lowcut dress and a sexy tall-dark-and-handsome who looks as if he’s about to rip it off. I read half of one of those and again never had any interest in reading another. If you like either genre, there are plenty of them out there. However, I’m a sucker for real romance, the kind of romantic story that shows both the difficulties and the joy of initiating and sustaining a loving male/female relationship, aka a marriage. Here are a few of my favorite intelligent and multi-faceted romances —just in time for St. Valentine’s Day:

The Love Letters by Madeleine L’Engle. Charlotte is running away from home, running away from her husband Patrick and from their very troubled marriage. She runs from New York City to a Portuguese retreat, and there she discovers a book of love letters written by a seventeenth century Portuguese nun, a nun who pursues a forbidden love to its bitter end. Charlotte struggles with her marriage vows as she reads about Sister Mariana’s struggle with her vows.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Yes, I think Gone With the Wind is an intelligent romance. It’s a tragedy; Scarlett realizes, too late, that she’s given her life to goals that are foolish fantasies and in the meantime she’s missed the love she could have had. Yes, it paints a somewhat sentimental picture of the antebellum South, but actually the book is much less sentimental and shallow than the movie was.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Newland Archer is torn between the expectations of society and his own desire for stability and respectability and the passion and adventure he experiences with the exciting and forbidden Countess Olenska. He must choose between May Welland, the woman whom all New York society expects him to marry, and Ellen Olenska, the woman who needs his love and awakens his passion.

Emma, Pride and Prejudice, or Sense and Sensibility, all by Jane Austen. What can I say about Jane Austen that hasn’t already been said? One of my daughters hates Jane Austen’s novels in which she says “nothing happens.” I think she’s just not grown-up enough to see the action that lies under the surface calm.

The Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger. Adventure and romance in Renaissance Italy. Andrea Orsini poses as an up-and-coming son of the minor nobility trying to make his way admidst the intrigue and danger of Italy’s labyrinthine political situation during the time of the Borgias. Madonna Camilla is the beloved wife of the old and respected gentleman, Lord Antonio Varano. The two of them have nothing in common, but their lives become intertwined and their fates are joined.

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken. This one is a true love story that not only tells the story of the human love of a man and a woman who were determined to have the ideal romantic relationship, but it also tells what happened when God unexpectedly entered the relationship and changed the lives and the marriage of Mr. van Auken and of his wife, Davey, forever.

Christy by Catherine Marshall. Christy is an eighteen year old innocent idealist when she goes to the mountains of Appalachia to teach school in a one-room schoolhouse. By the end of the story she’s a grown-up woman who’s experienced friendship, grief, and love.

Anna Karenina and War and Peace are both very romantic novels. They’re probably not any longer than Gone With the WInd, and people who see you reading one of them will be much more impressed with your reading choices. Kitty and Levin and Natasha and Pierre are both very romantic couples, not without their share of obstacles to a perfect marriage.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. Kristin also begins her story as an innocent, but she makes choices as a teenager that set the course of her life. Again, the choice is between established expectations and passion. Kristin chooses the passion, and the rest of this 1000+ page novel in three parts demonstrates the consequences, good and evil, of that decision.

Christian Science Monitor: What Authors Read on Valentine’s Day.

All moms need a little romance in their lives. I think I’ll buy a copy or two of one of these romances to give to a friend for Valentine’s Day.

I heard on NPR yesterday that there’s a new Indiana Jones movie coming out in 2008; The Geographer’s Library could easily be used and abused for the plot of an Indiana Jones movie, even though there are no archeologists in the book. In fact, one of the historical artifacts mentioned in the book was also the subject of the NPR commentary that followed up the mention of the new Indiana Jones picture.

The Geographer’s Library also reminded me of The Eight by Katherine Neville, a book I read and reviewed in 2005. It uses the same alchemy/sacred objects/fountain of youth motifs as The Eight, and there’s a lot of globe-trotting, obscure settings, espionage, murder, and mayhem. An innocent young reporter, Paul Tomm, finds himself caught up in a web of violence, mystery and deceit when he’s only trying to write an obituary for a recently deceased college professor. The narrative moves back and forth from Tomm the Journalist in his backwater town in New England to those afore-mentioned obscure places where someone or some group of people is collecting ancient artifacts that have somethig to do with alchemy and the extension of life.

Is the professor who died old or REALLY old, as in centuries old?

Is the professor a jewel thief or an assassin or an alchemist —or all three?

Is Paul’s new girlfriend, Hannah, an innocent music teacher or a conspirator?

Should Paul back off the story and save his own skin or pursue it and risk his life?

Substitute Indiana Jones for the intrepid reporter; travel around the world to exotic locations to investigate instead of staying in sleepy New England; insert a few cliff-hanger scenes where Indiana almost falls into a trap, but escapes by a hair’s breadth. Voila! you have your 2009 Indiana Jones blockbuster!

(I suppose you’d have to pay Mr. Fasman a moderate sum of money for taking his novel and rewriting it as a totally different story. However, there are precedents galore. Oh, and Mr. Spielberg, you could throw in a few hundred dollars for me since I came up with the idea.)

What I have in my head is light and dark and gravity and space and swords and groceries and colors and numbers and people and patterns so beautiful I get shivers all over. I still do not know why I have those patterns and not others.

The book answers questions other people have thought of. I have thought of questions they have not answered. I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance.

Maybe my questions matter.

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the minds and experiences of those who are “other” —the mentally ill, autistic, obcessive/compulsive, even the merely eccentric. Why and how do different minds work differently? Where is the edge of normality? Is there a useful distinction between those people who are mentally ill and those who are eccentric and/or highly creative? If the symptoms of autism or manic/depressive illness or even hyperactivity are controlled through the use of medication or therapy, does the person lose some useful and good capacity that is associated with the illness in addition to losing the symptoms that are debilitating and undesirable? Do autistic persons in particular need to be cured or understood and accepted? Do all persons have questions that matter, even those whose questions are unusual and even seemingly nonsensical?

The Speed of Dark is a fictional account of a high-functioning autistic adult, Lou Arrendale, who lives in a near-future time in which he is one of the last of his kind. Medical intervention, before or soon after birth, has made autism a thing of the past, and only a few adults, born before the medical advances, are still functioning as autists in his society. Lou has a job, a car, and friends, but he knows he is different, unable to be normal, only able to act somewhat normal most of the time. When he has the opportunity to participate in an experimental treatment that may change the way his brain functions and eliminate his autistic symptoms, Lou must decide whether he wants to be “normal.” Without his autism, will he still be himself, or will he become someone else? If the latter, does he want to be that other person? Will he lose the ability to analyze complex patterns and to pair those patterns of color and shape with music and with fencing, his outlet for self-expression? How much of who Lou is is bound up with his autism and with his past experience of overcoming the difficulties of being autistic in a “normal” world?

The autistic adults in the novel have a joke: “Normal is only a dryer setting.” But they’re not sure they believe it when the chance comes for them to be what others call normal. The novel is told mostly in first person from the point of view of an autistic person; the novel I read a few months ago, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon, was narrated in the same first person voice. Since the point of both novels is to place the reader inside the mind of an autistic person and enable the reader to see life as an autistic person does, this first person narration works very well in spite of its limitations. Elizabeth Moon drops the first person point of view at times over the course of the story when she wants to show us something that Lou could not be expected to know or to understand.

The Speed of Dark, published by Ballantine Books, a mainstream publisher, is what Christian fiction should be. It has none of the bad language, sexually explicit descriptions, or gratuitous violence that Christian publishers are supposed to screen out, but it does deal with the important questions of predestination and healing and self-ness that are a part of the Christian worldview. It doesn’t give easy answers; no one gets converted; and no one preaches. (Well, a priest preaches in one scene, but it’s not didactic.) However, Lou, in particular, struggles with his questions and choices in a Christian context. His thinking about himself and about God is challenged, and he grows spiritually and mentally over the course of the novel.

I’ll repeat that the best works of “Christian fiction” that I’ve read in the past few years have been:

River Rising by Athol Dickson

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Jewel by Brett Lott

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

Only one of those books was published by a CBA publisher.