Sunday Salon: What Have You Been Reading?

Sarah Palin gets inspiration from C.S. Lewis, and Joy Behar scoffs. This incident took place over a month ago, but I’m a little behind. It just shows that some people are sadly ignorant, the incident, that is, not my tardiness in reporting it.

15 Books To Read Before They’re on the Big Screen. Did you know they’re making a movie of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth? And Maze Runner by James Dashner?

I found another list or two that I want to hang on to, after I closed the January List of Lists at the Saturday Review:
Good Spiritual Reading in 2010 from HouseBlog. I saw several recommendations here that I’d like to check out.

I have a couple of reading problems that I want to air and get advice about:

1. I got a new Kindle for Christmas. I was excited, and I downloaded several books and read a couple on the Kindle. I also started two books on my new device, but I’m finding that I keep making excuses and reading “real” book instead of finishing the ones on the Kindle. I think it doesn’t feel right to me to read on the Kindle, not as satisfying somehow. Did any of you who have an ereader find that there’s a learning curve or a time of getting used to the device and starting to feel comfortable with it? I feel as if I’m not really reading or something.

2. I think my reading has been negatively impacted by the computer. I love blogging and computers and the internet. I’m not an anti-technology person. But I find myself skimming and rushing through books lately because, I think, I am so much more aware of all of the books that I want to read. I have to get through them fast because there are so many good books out there yet to read. Of course, that attitude isn’t conducive to good, relaxed enjoyment of the book I am reading right now. Have any of you experienced the “reading rush”, and how did you begin to slow down and enjoy the moment?

Finally, what have you been reading? And have you taken the time to slow down and enjoy your reading and other activities?

Reading Through Africa

Jan22

Niger portrait femme woman Africa photo Â© 2005 etrenard | more info (via: Wylio)
I am not African American. I have no African heritage or ancestry as far as I know. However, I have been for some time interested in reading books set in the various nations of Africa or books written by African authors. In fact, I’ve been collecting ideas for this reading and links to reviews of African-flavored books for over a year. So today, in honor of Bloggiesta, I decided to pull those lists out my drafts folder, put them onto separate pages of their own, and share them.

Obviously, these lists are not complete. I will be reading and gathering ideas for reading and adding books and links to reviews for . . . as long as I remain interested in the project. If you have any suggestions, blog reviews, or other information to add to my Africa pages, please leave a comment. If you’re looking for a book to read about Africa or about a specific African country, check out my Reading Through Africa pages.

This is going to be fun.

Bloggiesta To-Do List

Jan21

Today is the beginning of Bloggiesta, but I can’t actually start until this (Friday) evening. Still, I can start my list of things to do to the blog:

1. Look at each of the 105 draft posts I have in my drafts folder and decide what to with them: finish and schedule, throw away, or continue to save for later.
2. I want a map like this one at Book Journey.
3. Write and schedule Poetry Friday posts through April.
4. Consider applying to be on the INSPY Advisory Board.
5. Figure out exactly what the schedule is for the Faith N Fiction Roundtable, and what I’m supposed to do when.
6. Clean up and re-sort my category tags.
7. Make a list of Houston-area book bloggers. If you blog about books and live in or near Houston, Texas, please leave a comment so that I can add you to the list. (I’m planning something special. Shhhh, it’s a secret.)

I may, probably will, add to this list later. See you all later Bloggiesta! Ole!

Friday evening: Worked for about three hours. I wrote one book review post, worked on other draft posts, commented on several blogs for the Comment Challenge, and made a reading map (although the map isn’t exactly what I want it to be). See y’all tomorrow.

Poetry Friday: Poem #36, To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant, 1818

Jan21

“The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that it has no attachment to any of the powers that control the modern world, may set it free to do the only thing that in this age it can do —to keep the neglected parts of the human experience alive until the weather changes; as in some unforeseeable way it may do”~Graham Hough

Last year I did a poem survey and began posting the top 100 poems from the survey in chronological order. Then life and laziness and Cybils and Christmas intervened, and I only posted the oldest 35 of the 100 projected poems. But I am determined to use Poetry Friday as an excuse to write about the other 65 poems on list. So, today I’m back with an American poet, William Cullen Bryant.

Unidentified Waterfowl 3 photo Â© 2010 Richard Hawley | more info (via: Wylio)
Whither, ‘midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,–
The desert and illimitable air,–
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fann’d
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere:
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o’er thy sheltered nest.

Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.

William Cullen Bryant published his first poem at age ten. As an adult, he was a lawyer, and then a journalist and assistant editor of the New York Evening Post, a Federalist, later Republican-leaning, newspaper. Bryant was an ardent abolitionist whose major disagreement with Abraham Lincoln after Lincoln’s election was over the emancipation of the slaves and the abolition of slavery in the entire country. Bryant believed that Lincoln’s delay in freeing the slaves was incomprehensible and dilatory.

About Wm. Cullen Bryant:
Critic Thomas Holley Chivers: [The] “only thing [Bryant] ever wrote that may be called Poetry is ‘Thanatopsis’, which he stole line for line from the Spanish. The fact is, that he never did anything but stealâ€”as nothing he ever wrote is original.”
Edgar Allan Poe on the poem “June”: “The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuousâ€”nothing could be more melodious. The intense melancholy which seems to well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet’s cheerful sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soulâ€”while there is the truest poetic elevation in the thrill… the impression left is one of a pleasurable sadness.”
Mary Mapes Dodge: “You will admire more and more, as you grow older, the noble poems of this great and good man.
Abraham Lincoln: “It is worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York to make the acquaintance of such a man as William Cullen Bryant.”

Poetry Friday is hosted today at A Teaching Life.

You Are What You See: Watching Movies Through a Christian Lens by Scott Nehring

Jan20

The author begins this book about the Christian’s attitude toward movies with his conversion as an adult to the truth of Christianity and his life-changing encounter with near-death as he experienced a heart attack in the lobby of his bank. Mr. Nehring then shares that he is and has always been a film geek. Great introduction.

Then, in what is called “Section 1” of the book, we get almost 100 pages of what’s wrong with Hollywood. This first section of the book felt repetitive to me and can be summarized in this quote taken from chapter 8:

“Though many filmmakers may not recognize this desire for God, they know how to take advantage of it. The creation of figureheads, heroes, and celebrities is central to everything they produce. These products, in turn, attempt to fill our need for the Lord’s guidance. . . . When people remove God from their lives, they must replace Him with something. Just as generations have done for eons, we replaced Him with ourselves. It is not too late for us to learn from those previous generations that this is a bad idea.
We may try to remove God from our lives, but that does not mean we will not miss Him. What distracts us from God can never replace Him.”

True stuff, and Mr. Nehring is repeating a message that our culture needs to hear and that I need to be reminded of. Nevertheless, Section 2 of this book, entitled “The Structure of Film: Seeing What’s Right in Front of You,” was the part that I most enjoyed.

Each story begins with a Central Questionâ€”Will the boy get the girl? Can the hero learn to forgive? Can you fight city hall? The hero struggles through various trials on his way to learning the moral of the storyâ€”and in that ending we see the Answer to the Central Question.

This section continues by giving the reader an introduction to plot development, story arc or structure, heroes, villains, and other archetypes. This exposition of how characters and plot work together to produce a good story, either in print or on film, is the meat of the book. Even though I’ve seen some of this material before in other places (books about writing), Mr. Nehring brings a coherent voice and style to his explanations, and he also includes a wealth of examples from all the movies he has seen and analyzed. The author says that after reading this section of the book you will never watch movies in the same way again; you will see where the story is going and often be able to predict what will happen next and why. You will be intrigued by the choices the screenplay writer and the director made, and a bad movie or story will be seen as bad for a reason: it doesn’t follow the unconscious “rules” that we expect to see in a satisfying work of fiction.

I agree with Mr. Nehring’s prediction. I have been watching movies and reading in a different way since I read this book. I want to go back and review Section 2, though, because I am not as skilled as I would like to be at picking central questions (or themes), following the protagonist’s rise and fall and subsequent “resurrection,” and discerning the other character archetypes and heroic traits in any given narrative. This book is a reference tool that critics and literary and film “geeks” can use to understand the structure and meaning of the stories we are consuming. It would also be a useful source for aspiring writers of fiction, whether they be screenwriters, playwrights, short story writers, or novelists.

Section 3 of the book gives guidelines and suggestions, not rules, for Christians who want to watch movies intelligently and and grow in their discernment about which movies to watch and how to watch those that we do choose to view. Finally, Mr. Nehring’s thesis is that “movies matter. Movies impact your life every day, even if you never watch one.” If this statement is true, and I believe it is, then it behooves us as Christians living in this day and time to learn what we can about the impact of our cultural icons (movies) on us and on those around us. And since we are further commanded to be salt and light in a fallen world, You Are What You See is a good resource for Christians becoming that salt and light in the area of cinematic culture.

Scott Nehring is a film critic whose reviews have been syndicated on Reuters, USAToday, Fox News, and The Chicago Sun-TImes websites. Mr. Nehring’s reviews are available at www.GoodNewsFilmReviews.com.

What We’re Reading: Mid-January Report

Jan18

Z-Baby (9):
Clementine, Friend of the Week by Sara Pennypacker. Semicolon review here.
Also various picture books, such as Corduroy by Don Freeman, Gregory, the Terrible Eater by Mitchell Sharmat and others.
Listening to: The Calder Game by Blue Balliett.
Read aloud book: The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis.

Betsy-Bee (11):
For school: The Great Railroad Race by Kristiana Gregory, Make Way for Sam Houston by Jean Fritz.

Karate Kid (13):
For school: Dragon’s Gate by Laurence Yep.
Garfield cartoon books for fun.

Brown Bear Daughter (16):
For school: Dante’s Inferno, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. (No, ther’s no relationship between the two selections as far as I know. She just has to read them both.)
Leisure reading: Heist Society by Ally Carter. She also dips into various Harry Potter books that she’s already read several times while she eats supper or lunch or snack or . . .

Drama Daughter (19): Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Artiste Dughter (21): Neither Five Nor Three by Helen MacInnes, A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle.

Computer Guru Son (23): Consider Phlebas by Ian M. Banks.

Eldest Daughter (25): God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life by Pope Benedict XVI.

Engineer Husband and Father: The God Who Is There by D.A. Carson, Desiring God by John Piper.

Me: The books I’ve recently finished are mostly already reviewed here. My books-in-progress include The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness by Delia and Mark Owens, The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, Churchill’s Secret Agent by Max and Linda Ciampoli, and Island of the World by Michael D. O’Brien. Yes, I am reading all of those books at the same time.

We’re a fairly eclectic family, wouldn’t you say?

The Identity Man by Andrew Klavan

Jan18

I went back and forth about reviewing this one. It really has more sexual content and general nastiness than I’m usually comfortable with reading or recommending. The entire world of this novel is corrupt and festering with only a few islands of goodness or even normality, and those are under siege. This story gives “mean streets” a whole new level of meaning. On the other hand, Mr. Klavan has written a book that examines assumptions about redemption and getting a “new start” while at the same time entertaining and intriguing readers who just want to read to see what will happen next and find a solution to the mystery/suspense plotlines.

John Shannon is a petty thief who’s gotten in way over his head. He’s being accused of a heinous murder he didn’t commit, and he already has two strikes (convictions) against him; he’s headed for three strikes and you’re out for life in prison. Then, an anonymous phone caller throws him a lifeline: he can get a new identity. Are there strings attached? Can Shannon really become a new person? Is the mantra that his Identity Man, the man who provides the cosmetic surgery and the papers to give Shannon a second chance, repeats true? “Identity is like stain. You are not changed. You cannot change.”

It’s a basic question. Can a person really change? Can the stains of our sins and mistakes and even crimes really be washed away by positive thinking or a move to a new city or even by the blood of the Lamb? Some people say, “No way.” Nothing ever changes. Everything remains the same. You are what you are till the day that you die. The Identity Man demonstrates an avenue toward change, but it’s the same one our culture has been depending on for the past seventy years of Hollywood happy endings: a man can change by finding and claiming the love of a good woman. In fact, the idea that this particular change agent idea comes from Hollywood is implicit in the book. Shannon finds himself near the beginning of the story watching day after day of old black and white movies in which he finds a meta-narrative that he wishes he were able to emulate. The woman-saves-man solution, however, begs the question: how does the woman become a good woman? Are women innately good? And, if so, do those good women really have the power to drag the men into the realm of goodness and light?

The love of a good woman can’t ultimately save a man anymore than a heroic man can protect his woman from all harm, although both of those scenarios are played out in The Identity Man. Still, those myths have some powerful truth contained within them. True, selfless love can enable the beloved to turn toward change. And heroes, by the grace of God, do protect and defend those they love, even at the cost of their own lives. Nevertheless, real, lasting change in the life of a poor and needy sinner comes only by means of the miraculous. Change happens when God steps in.

We’re all desperate for change, for a new identity. “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, all things are become new.”

It’s a Story, Folks, Not a How-to Manual

Jan17

In the front of my paperback copy of Snipp, Snapp, Snurr Learn to Swim by Maj Lindman, Brown Bear Daughter found the following disclaimer:

“A note to grownups: In this story, the characters are not wearing personal flotation devices or practicing some of the other water safety measures we now consider essential. While reading this book with children, you may want to use the story as a springboard to discuss safety around water and boats.”

O.K. Or you could just read the story, first published in the U.S. in 1954, and enjoy the old-fashioned Scandinavian setting and the self-reliant triplets and the lovely illustrations. Nanny does try to ensure the boys’ safety in the water —by having them learn to swim!

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Jan17

Ship Breaker is on the shortlist for the Cybils YA Fantasy/Science Fiction Award.

Ship Breaker was a finalist for 2010 National Book Award in the category of Young People’s Literature. (The winner was Mockingbird by Katherine Erskine.)

Ship Breaker won the 2011 Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.

And, having just finished reading this award-winning piece of dystopian fiction, I would say it deserves the nominations and awards and accolades it’s recieved. I would also say that the PC setting and themes in the book didn’t hurt its chances in the running for awards. The world in Ship Breaker is a world destroyed and reconfigured by climate change and the greed of oil hungry corporations and industries. By the time the story opens, oil is an extremely scarce commodity, and the world’s transportation systems run on other forms of energy, for the most part. Our hero, Nailer, is one of the lowest of the low in the New World Order, a scavenger who works the light crew on wrecked oil tankers and other useless hulks washed up on the beach where Nailer lives. The best Nailer can hope for is a place on another crew when he outgrows his ability to crawl into the small spaces where copper wiring and other “scavenge” can be found on the wrecked ships. Nailer’s mother is dead, and his father is mean, violent and drug-addicted.

Ship Breaker becomes a story about loyalty and heredity and the limits of trust when Nailer finds a “lucky strike,” something that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. Will he take advantage of his luck and run with it, or will he choose to save the life of a worthless and dangerous captive at the risk of his own? This story was exciting and spell-binding. It will appeal to Hunger Games fans and other readers of dystopian science fiction and technofiction.

I had only one problem with the book, not a problem that made me consider quitting the book, but a problem, nevertheless. Why does Nailer make the choices he makes? Nailer is a classic hero. He chooses right, no matter that he stands to gain riches and save his own life by making other decisions than the ones he makes. Why? He’s loyal to his friend, Pima, and her mother, Sadna, because they have taken care of him in the past, given him a place to stay, food, and a job. Tit for tat. Pima is Nailer’s crew leader, and Nailer has sworn a blood oath to “have her back”. Then, other people enter the equation, and although Nailer has no rational reason, and no real sense of morality, to give his loyalty to anyone else, he does. Why? Nailer himself doesn’t know, and the reader is never given any good insight into Nailer’s core allegiance either. He’s realistic about the cruelty of the world he lives, somewhat superstitious, and highly intelligent inspite of his lack of education and opportunity. So why does he turn quixotic without Quixote’s code of knightly honor to sustain him?

“The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies.”

If that’s so, then why does Nailer sacrifice himself for someone who has done nothing for him and very likely never will?

Still, it’s a good book, and you may find answers to my questions that I didn’t see. Warning: Lots of violence, very little or no language or sexual situations.

Split by Swati Avasthi

Jan14

See below the review of Andrew Klavan’s The Identity Man. Split is another book about change and whether it is possible for a young man to become a new person, leave behind his old patterns of thinking and his past crimes, and as Jace, the protagonist in this book, puts it, “take the bastard-no-longer pledge.”

When sixteen year old Jace shows up on his older brother Christian’s front step with a split lip, a few dollars, and a reluctance to answer questions, it’s touch and go as to whether or not Christian will let Jace stay–even overnight. Both young men are running from their abusive father, and together they endanger each other. However, Jace has nowhere else to go, and maybe, even though he’s possibly a broken kid, unfixable and dangerous, perhaps he’s not hopeless yet. At least Jace would like to convince himself and Christian that it’s not too late, that he can leave his dad and the anger that is his dad’s bequest to him, all behind.

Again, the question is “can a person really change, become new, leave the past behind?” If so, how? Jace tries sheer will power, and that works for him to some extent. He also finds a “good woman,” but he’s afraid to take advantage of the benefits of a loving relationship with a girl he is attracted to because he’s afraid he can’t be the good man she needs and deserves. Finally, the answers in this book are honesty, brotherly loyalty and love, exercise for the purpose of anger management, and taking it one day, one hour, one minute at a time. Those are pretty good answers, perhaps inadequate in the long run, but perhaps not as far as leaving an abusive past behind.

Split was one of the books on the shortlist for the Cybils in the category of Young Adult Fiction, and I’m definitely understanding why it’s one of the top books that the panel chose. The relationship cues and under-currents are subtle and spot on, and Jace is an intelligent and astute judge of character, even of his own. His insights into what is going on beneath the surface of his family’s dynamics, plus the references to Shakespeare and other literary lights, were what made the book for me.

Warning: some language, (domestic) violence, and sexual references make this a book for mature young adults with a tolerance for that sort of material.