Sunday Salon: Books Read in July, 2010

Aug8

Nonfiction:
River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard. Semicolon review and thoughts about TR here.

Adult fiction:
The Big Steal by Emyl Jenkins.

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. Recommended by Seth Heasley at Collateral Bloggage. Semicolon review here.

Young adult and children’s fiction:
Princess of Glass by Jessica Day George. This Cinderella story, published in May 2010, is also a sequel/companion to Princess of the Midnight Ball. I liked it, but I found that after reading and enjoying the book, I didn’t really have much to say about it. Here’s a full review from Charlotte’s Library if you’re interested in re-imagined fairy tales.

They Never Came Back by Caroline B. Cooney.

Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy by Ally Carter. Great book in the Gallagher Girls series.

Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins. Semicolon review here.

Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper. Semicolon review here.

Started, but unfinished:
Good Behavior: A Memoir by Nathan L. Henry. Wa-a-a-a-y to much information about the dark recesses of the mind and violent human behavior.

Run With the Horseman by Ferrol Sams. God writing, somewhat tiresome and crude subject matter.

Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home by Kim Sunee. More thoughts on these three unfinished books here.

The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. I actually spent quite a bit of time on this one and read more than half of the book, probably three-fourths. However, I finally realized that I didn’t like anyone in the book, and I didn’t believe that that many unsympathetic and unsavory characters could inhabit one small community. Possession was much better.

I’m also slowly reading through Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex, a biography of the adult Theodore Roosevelt. I will finish it, but it may take a while.

Poetry Friday: Poem #30, Lucy II by William Wordsworth

Aug6

“Poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.'”~William Wordsworth

Sir William WordsWords proved to be quite popular back when I did my poetry survey, with three poems in the Top 100 list. Wordsworth’s Lucy poems are comprised of five poems written between the years of 1798 and 1801. Nobody knows quite who this Lucy person was, or even if she was a real girl or just a figment of Mr. Wordsworth’s imagination. However, she seems to have evoked some powerful feelings in Mr. Wordsworth.

Charles Lamb said that Lucy II was one of his favorite poems from Lyrical Ballads, the famous collection of peoms by Wordsworth and Coleridge that initiated the Romantic movement in poetry and literature. Keats also singled out this particular poem for praise.

Poems founded on the Affections
VIII
Composed 1799, publ 1800

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
– Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

The poem rather reminds me of Engineer Husband’s favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life!

Today’s Poetry Friday Round-up is at Laura Shovan’s blog, Author Amok.

Today, by the way, is Tennyson’s birthday. We’ll get to him soon.

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card

Aug6

Wow! This historical fiction/science fiction novel by a master of both genres was so absorbing that I stayed up late to finish reading it and to find out what would happen to Christopher Columbus in a re-imagined world, changed by time travelers from the future.

The book reminded me of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. THe premise is similar: scientists from the future have found a way to look back, maybe even travel back, into the past by means of a “time machine.” Willis’s books are funnier, especially To Say Nothing of the Dog. However, Card’s Pastwatch delves more deeply into the inherent problems and temptations such an invention would bring to the attention of the scientists using it. Can we change the past to eliminate suffering and punish wrong-doers? Are our cultural mores and expectations really better than those of past cultures? If so, how do we know that? What about cultural imperialism? Is it a valid concern? TO be very specific, if you had the means to rescue a young man who is being sold into slavery, would you have the responsibility to do so? What if one change in the events of the past sets into motion a series of events that totally changes the future that you yourself are a part of, the so-called “butterfly effect”? All of these questions are a part of Pastwatch, but the book doesn’t give terribly satisfying answers to most of the questions. THe ending is somewhat overly optimistic, in my opinion.

Still, as I said, it’s a great story that includes both history (Christopher Columbus, native Central American cultures, and slavery) and futuristic/dystopian/utopian elements. I enjoyed it very much. If you’ve already read Pastwatch and liked it, I would recommend Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. And if you’ve already read Ms. Willis’s time travel books and enjoyed them, I’d recommend Pastwatch.

Oh, I was also reminded of LOST with scientists and mathematicians trying to explain concepts of time and time travel with time as a stream and distinguishable from what a scientist in the book calls “causality.”

“Two contradictory sets of events cannot occupy the same moment. You are only confused because you cannot separate causality from time. And that’s perfectly natural, because time is rational. Causality is irrational. . . . What you must understand is that causality is not real. It does not exist in time. Moment A does not really cause Moment B in reality. . . . None of these moments actually touches any other moment. That is what reality is—an infinite array of discrete moments unconnected with any other other moment because each moment in time has no linear dimension.”

And if you understand that, could you please give me an aspirin for my headache?

Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper

Aug5

Melody is eleven years old, and she’s just about the most intelligent kid in her elementary school. However, no one knows how smart Melody really is because she can’t speak. And she can’t walk. And she can’t write or hold a book or feed herself. Melody has CP, cerebral palsy.

The entire story is told in first person from Melody’s point of view, and being trapped inside Melody’s mind is fascinating, but also a bit claustrophobic. Melody, at the beginning of the book, cannot communicate even the most basic needs and messages. In fact, a couple of scenes in the book are hard to understand in that respect. Melody, who is quite intelligent as I’ve indicated, has a lap board with some basic pictures and words for her to point to in order to communicate. I thought the board also had an alphabet. But Melody becomes frustrated with her father one evening because she wants a milkshake and a Big Mac, a desire she cannot communicate to her dad. I didn’t understand why Melody couldn’t spell with her lap board a couple of simple words like “burger” and “shake”.

Melody also says that she’s never told her mother, “I love you.” Why not? Couldn’t she spell it? Or get a picture or something put on her lap board? Push her word cards into a sentence that says, “I love you, Mom”? I don’t know anyone as intelligent as Melody who has CP. I do have a friend, Brandy, who has CP and the maturity of a five year old. And Brandy can communicate lots of feelings—love, excitement, anger, sadness, boredom–even though she can’t talk either. It seems me to that Melody, with all of her intellectual ability, could have done a little better job of communicating with her family than the book indicates her doing.

Still, I would recommend this book to middle school and elementary school age kids who are trying to understand another child with disabilities. The message of the book is that we should never underestimate others and never, never disrespect those who with disabilities or those who are different from ourselves. Good messages embedded in a good story.

Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins

Aug4

I was once a pacifist.

When I was in high school I seriously considered becoming a Quaker or Mennonite because I read that those Christian denominations have a history and tradition of pacifism. One small glitch was that there weren’t too many Quakers or Mennonites in San Angelo (West Texas) to encourage me in my (pacifist) pilgrimage.

When I became an adult, I put away childish things, and yes, I realize how patronizing that statement sounds. I know that Christian pacifism, practiced as a life decision and a way of life, would be incredibly challenging and difficult. And war is certainly not the final answer to much of anything. But in this world I believe that self-defense and even violence are sometimes necessary evils.

All that introduction is to say that Mitali Perkins’ new book, Bamboo People, made me think again about these issues, and I love books that make me think. Bamboo People is set in modern-day Burma where the Burmese government is carrying on a vendetta against the tribal peoples of southern Burma, specifically in this novel, the Karen people, or Karenni. (Actually, according to Wikipedia, it’s a little complicated. The Karenni are a subgroup of the Karen or maybe a distinct but related group.)

In 2004, the BBC, citing aid agencies, estimates that up to 200,000 Karen have been driven from their homes during decades of war, with 160,000 more refugees from Burma, mostly Karen, living in refugee camps on the Thai side of the border. Reports as recently as February, 2010, state that the Burmese army continues to burn Karen villages, displacing thousands of people.
Many, including some Karen, accuse the military government of Burma of ethnic cleansing. The U.S. State Department has also cited the Burmese government for suppression of religious freedom. This is a source of particular trouble to the Karen, as between thirty and forty percent of them are Christians and thus, among the Burmese, a religious minority. ~Wikipedia

Chiko is a Burmese city boy, educated by his doctor father who is now in prison for using his medical skills to help a leader of the resistance movement. Chiko feels as if he is in prison, too, since he cannot read English books in public or even leave the house for fear of being drafted into the military or imprisoned for some imagined or real infraction of the law.

Tu Reh lives in a Karenni refugee camp just across the Thai border from his ancestral home. The Burmese soldiers burned his village, and now Tu Reh longs for an opportunity to take revenge.

When these two young men meet, Chiko, an unwilling draftee into the Burmese army, and Tu Reh, accompanying his father on a mission of mercy, their decisions will mean life or death, possibly for many people. Is it possible to defend the helpless and also show mercy to one’s enemies? Although it’s not over-emphasized in the book, Tu Reh’s family are obviously Christians, and a lot of the tension in the story has to do with the application of Christian concepts of justice, mercy, hospitality, and healing in a difficult and complex situation. If not pacifism or revenge, then what? How do we balance and make the right decisions?

The key scene in the novel is at the end of chapter three. Tu Reh has become responsible for a wounded Burmese soldier, Chiko. Tu Reh’s father tells him, “I won’t command you, my son. A Karenni man must decide for himself. Leave him for the animals. End his life now. Or carry him to the healer. It’s your choice.” Then a little later in chapter four, Tu Reh’s father tells him, “One decision leads to another, my son. God will show you the way.”

Profound, good stuff.

You can read more about the Christian (mostly Baptist) history and the persecution of the Karen people in this 2004 article from Christianity Today.

And here is the most recent news article I found about the conflict between the Burmese government and the Karenni. The news is not good.

And you can read more about Karenni refugee resettlement in the U.S. and how you can help here.

Sunday Salon: Shakespeare and Company

Aug1

The Sunday Salon.comWe’re back from our annual pilgrimage to Winedale where we saw the University of Texas summer program students perform two plays: Macbeth and Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night was Friday night, and all of the family who were able to go this year enjoyed the comedy together. Twelfth Night is not my favorite play. Malvolio evokes my sympathy as the victim of a cruel practical joke, and I feel uncomfortable laughing at him. I know he’s vain, but other than that his worst fault is that he wants Sir Toby and his drinking buddies to “amend your drunkenness” and settle down. Anyway, everybody makes a fool of himself or herself in Twelfth Night, and the only one who doesn’t get a happy ending is poor, vain Malvolio, who whimpers an empty threat of revenge as the play limps to a close. The student who played Malvolio, by the way, did an excellent job, and therefore made the character even more the central enigma of the play as he engaged my contradictory emotions of ridicule and sympathy.

What other people have said about Twelfth Night:

“The soliloquy of Malvolio is truly comic; he is betrayed to ridicule merely by his pride. The marriage of Olivia, and the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contrived to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and fails to produce the proper instruction required in the drama, as it exhibits no just picture of life.” ~Samuel Johnson.

“Refined minds today are apt to find the trick put upon him as distasteful, his persecution too cruel. Elizabethans enjoyed that sort of thing; we are no better–though our sympathies may well be with him, endeavouring to do his duty and keep some order in the house among the hangers-on, drunks, and wasters.” ~AL. Rowse, Introduction to Twelfth Night.

“Everyone, except the reluctant jester, Feste, is essentially mad without knowing it. When the wretched Malvolio is confined in the dark room for the insane, he ought to be joined there by Orsino, Olivia, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria, Sebastian, Antonio, and even Viola, for the whole ninefold are at least borderline in their behavior.” ~Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human.

“It is a wildly improbable, hugely entertaining fantasy. And just beneath the surface are life’s darkest, most terrible truths.” ~Ed Friedlander, Enjoying Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare.

“If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” ~Fabian in Twelfth Night.

Macbeth I found the more congenial of the two plays, even though “congenial” is an odd word to use about a play filled with murder, betrayal, and evil witchery. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are thorough-going villains and deserve the end they get. Malvolio’s pride only leads him to be foolish and absurd and pathetically vengeful. Macbeth and his lady screw their (malevolent) courage to the sticking place, literally, and commit bloody, violent murder and then they both go really, truly insane, not just pretend-mad like Malvolio and his tormentors.

I guess I can imagine myself in Malvolio’s place, being made ridiculous by a bunch of practical jokers and by my own stupidity, but the evil deeds of the Macbeth duo are beyond me. So Twelfth Night makes me more uncomfortable than Macbeth, and I can watch Macbeth with a more detached feeling.

The students who played Macbeth and Lady Macbeth gave a chilling and superb performance. I did feel sorry for poor, tormented Macbeth, somewhat against my will, and I was glad to think that I know no Lady Macbeth who would goad her husband to such vile murderous deeds. At least, I don’t think I know anyone quite that far gone.

All in all, our weekend in the country was an enjoyable success. In addition to the plays, I finished two books, Out of my Mind by Sharon M. Draper and Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card, and started a third, Shanghai Girls by Lisa See. I’ll write more about the three books soon, I hope.

If you get a chance to see some Shakespeare this month, or anytime, I highly recommend it.

Unleavened Bread by Robert Grant

Jul30

According to this list of bestselling books of the first decade of the twentieth century, Unleavened Bread by Robert Grant was one of the bestselling books of 1900. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, also published in 1900, was not a best seller. Still, the books have much in common. Unleavened Bread is “the story of a woman who abandons her moral standards in her search for prestige and dominance.” Sister Carrie is the story of a girl who abandons her moral standards in her search for money and a life of ease. I suppose Sister Carrie is the darker of the two novels, but both stories dealt with the pressures of getting and maintaining one’s societal status, and both stories implied that money, ease, and acceptance into high society were common, if unworthy, goals for many young women coming of age around the turn of the century.

I don’t think the “getting into society” goal is quite so common or tempting nowadays. But wealth and power and luxury are all still quite alluring. The ending of Unleavened Bread was quite unsatisfactory. Our heroine, or anti-heroine, Selma, connives her way from poverty and obscurity to power and fame, and at the end she enjoys the beatific vision of her husband as he makes his acceptance speech after being elected to the U.S. senate.

Selma heard the words of this peroration with a sense of ecstasy. She felt that he was speaking for them both, and that he was expressing the yearning intention of her soul to attempt and perform great things. She stood gazing straight before her with her far away, seraph look, as though she were penetrating the future even into Paradise.

The End. Oh, by the way, the senator sold his vote and cheated, with his wife’s encouragement, to get the office. But, all’s well that ends well–or not.

A couple of other quotes from the novel:

“A seven mile drive is apt to promote or kill the germs of intimacy.” That’s a drive in a horse drawn carriage or wagon. I would say the same of a five day road trip through West Texas.

“He had chosen as a philosophy of life the smart paradox, which he enjoyed uttering, that he spent what he needed first and supplied the means later; and the the same time he let it be understood that the system worked wonderfully.”
I doubt that system would work for long for anyone who wasn’t already supplied with at least some of the “means.”

Unleavened Bread reminded me of Sister Carrie, of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. It’s about the thirst for power and popularity, about the Midwest rubes meeting the Eastern establishment, and about the slow but steady dissolution of a woman’s ethical standards in her quest to become rich and fashionable.

You can read Unleavened Bread online at Project Gutenberg.

Mr. Emerson’s Wife by Amy Belding Brown

Jul29

A few months ago, I first read Best Intentions by Emily Listfield about the disintegration of trust in a marriage and the slippery slope to infidelity. Then I read The Other Side of the Lake by Mary Lawson about adultery and sibling rivalry. To complete the unplanned trilogy, I read Mr. Emerson’s Wife, in which said wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, is torn between her duty to her husband, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her love for young Henry David Thoreau. As insightful and psychologically truthful as all three books were, I was ready for something different by the time I finished the third book. Enough adultery, how about some murder, mayhem or injustice? (Just kidding!)

Mr. Emerson’s Wife is the fictionalized history of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife, Lidian. I don’t know how much of the story is true, but I assume the basic timeline of events is factual. For instance, Thoreau actually did live with the Emersons for over two years, including during nine months that RWE was away on an extended tour of Europe. Another friend, Margaret Fuller, also lived with/visited the Emersons for extended periods of time and may or may not have become romantically involved with Mr. Emerson. The Emerson household was unusual to say the least.

Both Emerson and Thoreau are presented in the novel as apostate Christians, having rejected the Christian faith in the name of intellectual honesty. Their “honesty” doesn’t seem to have given either of them much comfort or courage in the face of suffering. Then again, as the novel tells it, Lidian’s faith doesn’t really comfort her much either when the Emersons’ oldest son, Wallie, dies of scarlet fever.

Thoreau is an interesting character in this novel. He seems to able to experience the most horrendous events–the death of his beloved brother, the fire that burned down acres of woods near Concord, and adulterous assignation with Lidian—mourn and grieve deeply, and then block those same events from his memory almost as if they had never occurred. Can a person do that?

I already had an image of Emerson as something of a cold fish. The language he uses in his essays is so formal, almost pretentious, or at least it sounds that way to modern ears. Now, after reading Mr. Emerson’s Wife, I’m not sure I’ll be able to read the essays without probing them for references to Emerson’s personal life. I can’t imagine that I would have survived emotionally or spiritually in the rarified atmosphere of nineteenth century Concord and its transcendentalists, no matter how intellectually stimulating the conversation or how high the moral aspirations. From the perspective of this novel at least, the foundation looks a little too sandy.

In Which I Am Born

Jul28

In 1957, the year I was born, Ed Sullivan had Elvis on his show for the third time, showed him only from the waist up, and said: “This is a real decent, fine boy. We’ve never had a pleasanter experience on our show with a big name than we’ve had with you. You’re thoroughly all right.”

Published in 1957:
The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.
On the Beach by Nevil Shute.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
If Death Ever Slept by Rex Stout.
Through Gates of Splendor by Elisabeth Elliot

Movies released in 1957:
Loving You with Elvis Presley.
Jailhouse Rock with Elvis Presley.
The Bridge on the River Kwai with Alec Guinness, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

On the actual day of my birth an earthquake shook Mexico City and Acapulco. But I doubt if my mom noticed it way out in West Texas.

Also born on July 28th (not 1957): Beatrix Potter, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Last year I wrote a list of lists and a bit of a meditation on the number 52. 52 is an interesting number with lots of associations. It’s a good number for lists, and I used it this year a few times to confine and order my thoughts in certain areas:

52 Ways to Celebrate Independence Day
52 Things That Fascinate Me
Summer Reading: 52 Picks for the Hols

I have several other lists of 52 in the works. I think I’ll stick with 52 (and 12) for lists; it just feels right.

53 is more solitary. It’s prime. In fact, it’s an Eisenstein prime. Whatever that means. And 53 is a self number. 53 is obviously not a number for links and lists and affiliations and organization. 53 is independent and somewhat isolated. It’s unique.

For this year, I’ll enjoy being 53, somewhat solitary, odd, and eccentric. Perhaps I’ll even be reclusive at times, as much as one can be reclusive in a family of ten people. I enjoy alone and different and distinctive and slightly idiosyncratic. 53 is the number of countries in Africa, so I’ll continue to work on my African reading project. But 53 isn’t the number for much else. It stands alone.

But at the same time, I still get to be 52. I still get to make lists and connections and relationships. Life, like numbers, has a rhythm. Pull back and enjoy your individual times of 53-ness, and then be 52 or 12 or whatever age the Lord has given you to be and fill the year with people and books and written words and encouragement and the messiness and joy of relationships.

That’s how I plan to celebrate this next year of becoming what God has for me.

And I might memorize Isaiah 53, a very 53-ish passage of scripture:

1 Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken.

9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

11 After the suffering of his soul,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.