“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.†~Dorothy Sayers
Make some good tables today.
The theme for the Semicolon Book Club for March is biography/autobiography, and the particular selelction for this month is David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback, a biography of Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. The subtitle is “the story of an extraordinary family, a vanished way of life, and the unique child who became Theodore Roosevelt.”
I very much enjoyed reading McCullough’s biography of John Adams last March, and I expect to enjoy this book just as much. TR is one of my favorite historical characters.
Come back to Semicolon after Easter (April 5th) for discussion of this most excellent biography.
The February selection for the Semicolon Book club was Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis. Till We Have Faces was Lewis’s last work of fiction, and he considered it his best. The particular “myth retold” is that of Cupid and Psyche. It’s a story Lewis considered retelling over the course of many years.
Lewis’s diary, September 9, 1923: “My head was very full of my old idea of a poem on my own version of the Cupid and Psyche story in which Psyche’s sister would not be jealous, but unable to see anything but moors when Psyche showed her the palace. I have tried it twice before, once in couplet and once in ballad form.”
He actually wrote the book in 1955, and it was published in 1956.
Links to read more about other readers’ responses to Till We Have Faces:
The Well at the World’s End
A Great Gulf Fixed: The Problem of Obsessive Love in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces by Amelia F. Franz.
Till We Have Faces at love2learn.net
Heather’s not a fan.
Kevin Stilley on Till We Have Faces.
A library is the hospital of the mind: Till We Have Faces.
Further Up and Further In: A Way into Till We Have Faces.
Marian Powell at BookLoons.
Peter Kreeft on TIll We Have Faces (audio) Excellent, though long (sermon length), and well worth your time to listen.
A few questions to ponder:
According to Orual, the gods are unknowable, whimsical, cruel, capricous, nasty, mean-spirited, not trustworthy, demanding. Why do the gods appear to her in this way and to Psyche as the opposite? How can a rational, thinking person come to the point of faith? If God is good, why is he so mysterious and hidden?
How does Orual’s love for Psyche become something evil and hateful? Is this transformation true to life? Can our human love for spouse, family, and friends become obsessive and even evil? How and why?
Till We Have Faces ends the same way the Book of Job ends–with questions unanswered. Is this a satisfying ending? Why does God not answer Orual’s complaint? Why does God not answer Job’s complaint?
Applicable Biblical references:
“He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.
If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him.” John 12:25-26
Then Job answered the Lord and said,
2 “I know that You can do all things,
And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.
3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
“Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.â€
4 ‘Hear, now, and I will speak;
I will ask You, and You instruct me.’
5 “I have aheard of You by the hearing of the ear;
But now my eye sees You;
6 Therefore I retract,
And I repent in dust and ashes.†Job 42:1-6
If you read Till We Have Faces, either this month or earlier, please leave your thoughts or a link to your post about the book in the comments. When I get back from my Lent break, I’ll add your links to this post.
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, b. 1807 (only five years after Victor Hugo).
It Is Not Always May:
“Maiden, that read’st this simple rhyme,
Enjoy thy youth, it will not stay ;
Enjoy the fragrance of thy prime,
For O ! it is not always May !”
Paul Revere’s Ride:
“In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.”
Evangeline, A Tale of Arcadie:
“Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the way-side,
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!”
Travels by the Fireside:
“Let others traverse sea and land,
And toil through various climes,
I turn the world round with my hand
Reading these poets’ rhymes.”
The Children’s Hour:
“Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.”
*Why is it that the Children’s Hour lasts all evening at my house?
Excelsior:
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell like a falling star,
Excelsior!
The Wreck of the Hesperus:
He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere:
“So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm, —
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!”
What The Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist:
“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
A little inspiration from from Mr. Longfellow on his 203rd birthday.
Don’t forget to send me yor list of 10 favorite classic poems for the survey in April, National Poetry Month. More details here.
Since I’m on hiatus from Semicolon for Lent, I thought I’d leave you with this list of lists. Anyone can always use a few more good booklists.
Fuse #8’s Top 100 Picture Books.
Rebecca Reid’s Reading Lists. Links to various award lists and lists from books and list of favorites.
U.S. Presidents Project: Planned Reading
If God is Good … Partial Annotated Bibliography, compiled by Randy Alcorn.
Survival Books: A Semicolon List.
Reading Through Texas: A Semicolon List of Texas Children’s Literature.
Jennifer, librarian of the Jean Little Library has a continuing project going on, her own take on 1001 children’s books you must read before you grow up.
Semicolon’s 12 Best Middle Grade Fiction Books of 2009
Semicolon’s Top 12 Young Adult Books Published in 2009
I’m setting these speculations to post on a Tuesday, the day that LOST airs in the U.S., but I am still on blog hiatus for Lent. My Cain and Abel thoughts may be outdated or superseded by events in the TV show by the time this post appears.
Cain and Abel were the first brothers. Cain murdered Abel out of jealousy.
Isaac and Ishmael were the sons of Abraham. Ishmael, the older but also the son of a slave-wife instead of Abraham’s true wife, Sarah, mocked his younger half-brother until things were so dysfunctional that Abraham had to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Some say the rivalry between Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabic nations, and Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, continues to this day.
Jacob and Esau were the twin sons of Isaac and his wife Rebekah. Their rivalry started in the womb and continued into adulthood. Romans 9:10-16:
10 This son was our ancestor Isaac. When he married Rebekah, she gave birth to twins. 11 But before they were born, before they had done anything good or bad, she received a message from God. (This message shows that God chooses people according to his own purposes; 12 he calls people, but not according to their good or bad works.) She was told, “Your older son will serve your younger son.†13 In the words of the Scriptures, “I loved Jacob, but I rejected Esau.â€[h]
14 Are we saying, then, that God was unfair? Of course not! 15 For God said to Moses,
“I will show mercy to anyone I choose,
and I will show compassion to anyone I choose.â€[i]16 So it is God who decides to show mercy. We can neither choose it nor work for it.
Of course, Joseph and his brothers are full of jealousy and rivalry, and as the story goes Joseph, the younger brother, becomes the most powerful man in Egypt and saves his entire family from extinction. Again, God chooses whom He will bless and how.
Then, there was at least some rivalry and bad feeling between Moses and his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam. When Moses went up Mr. Sinai to meet with God and receive the commandments, Aaron was persuaded by his long absence and by the people’s need for guidance to build them a golden calf to worship. Later, Aaron and Miriam began to speak against Moses because he had a foreign wife, and they attempted what sounds like a coup. But God thwarted their rebellion by giving Miriam a temporary case of leprosy.
I noticed something interesting as I was thinking about the Cain/Abel motif in LOST. Not many of the guys on LOST have brothers. Sayid may have had a brother, or maybe it was a cousin? No brother for Jack or Sawyer or Ben or Locke or Miles or Faraday or Richard or Boone or Walt or . . . Hurley had a married brother, I think. Mostly the rest are only children or they have one sister or half-sister.
Mr. Eko had a brother, Yemi, and in their relationship the Cain and Abel motif comes through loud and clear. Yemi is the good and chosen younger brother; Mr. Eko is locked outside of society and the grace of God. Then Yemi dies as a result of Mr. Eko’s actions, and Mr. Eko must take on the role of his Good Brother, become a priest, and later a spiritual leader on the island.
Charlie had a brother, too, and the two of them play out not so much the story of Cain and Abel as Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother. Charlie is the good brother at first, the one who stays off drugs, who goes straight, who goes to confession, and his brother Liam is as wild and prodigal as the prodigal in the parable. But as Liam comes to his senses, Charlie loses his. Then, Charlie wonders why Liam receives grace and a family while Charlie is shut out from everything good by his addiction and his chasing after fame and fortune. It’s not fair. God’s grace and forgiveness are never fair; that’s why we who deserve justice and the wages of sin (death) receive grace with thanksgiving.
Now as last season ended and in this final season we have another set of (maybe) brothers on LOST: Jacob and, let’s call him Esau. There is a definite rivalry between the two who have differing ideas about how the Island should be run. “Cain” has “Abel” killed, but the two come back to fight another day.
Is one of these brothers or rivals the son of blessing and the other the cursed one? Whose sons are they?
SInce I’m on blog break for Lent, I thought a few posts from the past might be in order. Enjoy.
Schuyler’s Monster by Rober Rummel-Hudson.
Biographies of the U.S. Presidents. One of my project post about the U.S. Presidents Reading Project. I managed to read biographies of three presidents this year: George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison. I also read a biogrpahy of Alexander Hamilton and bailed out on Thomas Jefferson because my admiration for Mr. Adams prejudiced me against him.
Education Week: April 11-17, 2009. The continuing trials and second-guessings of a homeschool mom.
Favorite Poets: Ogden Nash. “I love Ogden Nash. He had a common-sense sort of view of the world, and then he wrote about it —in verse.”
John Adams’ Advice to HIs Children. “Perhaps John Adams’ children, in light of their sometimes poor decisions in adult life, should have taken his advice more to heart. At any rate, here is some of what Mr. Adams wrote to his children, in case you want to take advantage.”
The End of the Alphabet, Wit, and John Donne.
Kids, Drugs and Depression “Kids, and some who should be past childhood, still think that illegal drugs are harmless, that maybe taking a few pills or a shot of something will make them feel better, will medicate the depression and the pain out of existence.” NOT. TRUE.
52. Having spent fifty-two years on this planet, mostly in Texas, I could be expected to say something profound upon the anniversary of my birth. However, all I can think of are lists.
Adventures in (Homeschool) Education.
Graceling by Kristin Cashore. An essay on commitment and marriage and social mores disguised as a book review.
25 Best Boarding School books by Sara Ebner at The London Times. This list is very British, as might be expected given the source, although Ms. Ebner does include the Americans, Catcher in the Rye and Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve read neither of the American selections, nor have I read many of the other books on the list. However, I do have a few ideas of my own about good boarding school books:
The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom. As far as I know this story of friends at a boarding school who make up their own secret language is the only novel written by the famed children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom. If so, it’s a one hit wonder. This picture of the insular world of boarding schools made me want to attend one just so I could make up my own secret language. MIddle grade fiction.
The Small Rain by Madeleine L’Engle. Young Katherine Forrester, daughter of two famous musicians, discovers in herself her own musical talent and deals with misunderstanding and prejudice in her Swiss boarding school. And Both Were Young is another of L’Engle’s early novels set in a boarding school. Young adult/adult.
Old School by Tobias Wolff. I read this one last year but never got around to reviewing it. This subtitle/blurb should suffice:” A scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity in this lucid, deceptively sedate novel, set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood.” Young adult/adult.
Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. This one is the grandaddy of all boarding school books; the setting is Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School in Victorian England. Tom Brown is a typical English boy who grows up to epitomize the virtues of a British public school education and the essence of British manhood.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. Semicolon review here. “This novel is a FInding Yourself story, a Coming of Age tale, a Boarding School genre entry, and an all-round good time book. Frankie is typically insecure and desirous of acceptance by her peers, and yet she finds the inner resources to break out of the mold and become someone that no one would expect her to be. The story is comedic, but it has serious undertones and themes.” Young adult.
Additions?
Forest Born is the fourth in Shannon Hale’s Books of Bayern series, a series that began with The Goose Girl, Ms. Hale’s debut novel and the one that made a name for her, winning all kinds of awards and accolades. The Goose Girl tells the story of crown princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee of Kildenree, aka Isi, who has the gift of being able to hear and speak to animals and to birds.
The next book in the series is about Isi’s friend Enna who has the more perilous gift of fire-speaking, hence the title Enna Burning. And the third book called River Secrets is about Razo and Dasha, two more Bayern characters whose lives become intertwined with that of Isis and Enna and the kingdom of Bayern and its neighboring kingdoms.
Forest Born tells the story of Razo’s little sister, Rin, who harbors deep within herself a gift and a secret. It’s a coming-of-age tale with elements of adventure and even a bit of romance. Rin is an intriguing character with depth, and she’s different enough from Isi, Enna, and Dasha that she seems real and provides a new slant on the culture and mythical world of Bayern.
It’s also kind of fascinating that central to the plot of Forest Born is something called “people-speaking,” the ability to hear whether or not others are telling the truth and the ability to influence others with words. Kristin Cashore’s Fire and her previous book Graceling also play with this idea, the possibility that some people have a gift of being able to speak to other people and make them believe what they’re hearing and act upon it. In both Fire and in Forest Born this skill of being able to practically control others’ thoughts and actions through the use of words is a perilous gift, possibly helpful in defeating evil but also possibly soul-destroying to the gifted one. Perhaps each author is trying to say something about the power of words even in our world and the care with which we need to choose our words. There’s also a shared Spiderman-type message: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Forest Born is a worthy sequel to the other Bayern books and worth your reading, especially if you’re a Goose Girl fan.
Miles’s twin brother Hayden has been missing for ten years. Every year or two Miles receives a letter or an email or a phone call that sends him off on another wild goose chase to locate and perhaps rescue his mentally disturbed, possibly criminal, brother.
A few days after graduation Lucy Lattimore leaves her hometown in Ohio in a Maserati with her high school history teacher. He takes her to Nebraska to a deserted motel on the edge of a dried-up lake, and there she begins to notice that Mr. George Orson may not be exactly the man she thought he was.
Ryan Schuyler drops out of college and goes on the road with his long-lost con man dad, Jay. Ryan’s OK with using stolen identities and using computers to move money from one bank account to another, but he’s puzzled about unreadable email he’s getting written in Cyrillic script. What’s that all about?
What do these three stories, these several lives, have in common? Author Dan Chaon has woven an intricate web of lies, deceit, multiple identites and personalities, and stories told, believed and rejected to make up this novel about a Great Imposter. I was, of course, reminded of the original Great Imposter, Ferdinand Waldo Demara.
I was also reminded of an old friend who admired Demara and took him as something of a role model. My friend, “Bill,” was something of an imaginative storyteller himself, always looking for ways to aggrandize himself and his own history. He used multiple names and told people that he was a colonel in the Air Force or a rabbi or private detective. He was a member of several churches, and he loved to talk about the Bible and about Jesus Christ. I truly think Bill believed his own stories, at least while he was telling them. As far as I know Bill never did anything criminal, but he did have a few close calls in which people to whom he had told different stories met up with one another and compared notes. It was a sad thing to watch from the outside, and yet Bill truly loved people. And people loved him, usually even when they found out that he was not completely trustworthy. Bill died a few years ago, and his funeral was attended by many, many people who knew at least parts of him and loved the man they knew.
The identity chameleon in Chaon’s novel, Hayden Cheshire, is similarly charismatic and even more enmeshed in his own lies. The novel is a convoluted walk through Hayden’s convoluted life from the points of view of his victims, those who fall for his lies and fall for Hayden’s charm. If you’ve never met anyone like Bill or Hayden, you might find aspects of the novel unbelievable, but let me assure you, it could happen. Hayden is believed by his brother to be schizophrenic or to have a personality disorder, but he is also quite capable of shedding personalities and identities and taking on new ones and juggling schemes and bank accounts and destroying lives as he passes through them.
I found this novel to be both fascinating and disturbing, and although the ending was a bit abrupt and unresolved, I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the themes of deceit and imposture and identity theft. You’ll find a lot to ponder in this near-attack on very idea of fixed identity.
I thought this paragraph in Chaon’s acknowledgements at the back of the book was interesting since I’m always interested in literary influences. Mr. Chaon writes:
“This book pays homage, and owes a great deal, to many fantastic and better writers who inspired me, both in childhood and beyond, including Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Ira Leven, C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Straub, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Tryon, and a number of others. One of the fun things about writing this book was making gestures and winks toward those writers I’ve adored, and I hope that they —living and dead—will forgive my incursions.”
I did notice some of those gestures and winks, but reading that statement made me want to re-read the book and look for the ones I missed.