Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

Apr30

I’d heard of this book; it’s won some awards since its publication in 2000. There’s supposedly a movie version in the works, and Mr. Spinelli published a sequel in 2007, Love, Stargirl. Brown Bear Daughter read Stargirl last year and loved it.

I read it and loved it. Mr. Spinelli may or may not have intended it, may or may not be a Christian, but I think Stargirl is a Christ-figure. She is a bit, (OK, a lot), fantastical, unbelievably ego-free and selfless. (She does lose her focus for a little while in the middle of the book, but only temporarily for the sake of Leo, her boyfriend and the narrator of the story.) Mostly, Stargirl is Jesus, too good to be true, not a saint, but something better, more human and yet more Other. She’s Ann Kiemel, Corrie Ten Boom, and Mother Teresa, without the doubts and without the Holy Spirit to empower her. Everybody loves her, and then they “crucify” her because she won’t fit the mold. Even her best friend deserts her, denies her, and fails to understand and support her mission.

In an interview in the back of my book, Mr. Spinelli says, “What does it say about us if we believe such a person to be impossible? The message of the story is precisely the opposite: such a person is possible, and to the extent that Stargirl is us . . . so are we.”

But Mr. Spinelli is whistling in the dark, and I contend that he knows that he is doing so. Although he says his wife resembles Stargirl, you and I and Mr. Spinelli all know that none of us lives up to Stargirl’s ability to completely live an authentic life and at the same time be so unaware of self as to focus wholly on the needs of others. And if anyone did, They (which is Us) would not follow her in dancing the Bunny Hop. They’d/We’d shun her and slap her and banish her.

Which is finally what happens to Stargirl. But it’s a lovely story and something to aspire to, by God’s grace.

It reminds of one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Go here to read a lovely story at Peter Sieruta’s Collecting Children’s Books about when Jerry Spinelli was a nobody, and how a couple of guys in New York City made him feel like Somebody.

LOST Rehash: The Variable

Apr29

WARNING: Here be spoilers!

So, why would any mother, no matter how dedicated she was to the idea that the past is immutable, send her (ill and dependent) son back to a time when she knows that she is going to shoot him? Does Faraday not die? Maybe not, but he looked awfully close to kicking the proverbial bucket.

Is Faraday himself The Variable? He said that he and Kate and Jack were all variables, that they could change the past and make the future that they’ve already lived change. How? Not happening, if the universe is self-correcting. The Past is the Constant, and the variables don’t change the constant; the variables only change the equation in the future. I don’t think he can change anything that happened.

But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be like Faraday and try. I certainly wouldn’t be Eloise and send my son back to fulfill some version of the past that I remembered as a horrific mistake.

Sawyer called Faraday “H.G. Wells.” Love it. Isn’t Sawyer looking kind of pitiful and out of control these days? He’s been tamed by Juliet, and now he’s lost all of his mojo. I feel sorry for him.

Hurley must have watched some Happy Days re-runs in the mental hospital. He referred to the 50’s as “Fonzie days.” I’m surprised Sawyer never called Hurley Potsie.

Juliet seems withdrawn, like she knows her play-party with James/Sawyer is about over. I don’t know what to think about that.

If Desmond is The Constant, and everybody else is a variable . . . what does that mean? (Last season: Faraday was repeating over and over: “Desmond is my constant.”) Desmond promised Penny again tonight that he would never, never leave her again. Unfortunately, as I told my kids, unless he’s discovered the secret of immortality ala Richard Alpert and John Locke (?), then Desmond, too, will die someday.

Next week’s episode is called Follow the Leader. The question is, as it has been from the beginning of the series, who’s the leader?

Then there’s a two-part episode to end the season: The Incident. I’m assuming that’s when the Island blows, one way or another, with Faraday’s hydrogen bomb or Dr. Chang’s electromagnetic accident or both.

“

Survival Books

Apr29

I just read two books, one old and one new, about a group of survivors trying to create a new life and society after a nuclear holocaust. The old book, new to me, was Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, published originally in 1959. In his foreward, Frank says that he wrote the book to answer a friend’s question: “What do you think would happen if the Russkies hit us when we weren’t looking–you know, like Pearl Harbor?”

I can see that this book, with its doomsday scenarios and talk of survival of the fittest, was and still is a sobering read. It must have scared some people silly when they read it back in the late 50’s/early 60’s at the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Now we’ve gotten used to the idea that a nuclear Armageddon is possible, but most of us still don’t believe it will ever happen. After all, it’s been fiftyplus years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we’re all still here —no nuclear war yet. Still, I guess I tend to think that Alas Babylon is optimistic since it tells the story of a small group of survivors in Central Florida after a massive nuclear strike by the Russians destroys most of the large to medium-sized cities in the United States, including Tampa, Miami, Tallahassee, and Orlando. I doubt very many, if any, people would survive such a strike.

The new book, published in 2008, is The Compound by S.A. Bodeen. In this story, survival takes place at the family level inside a nuclear fall-out shelter, built by the eccentric millionaire Rex Yanakakis to ensure the safety of his family in the event of a nuclear attack. The narrator, Eli, is one of Yanakakis’s twin sons, and as he tells about the six years the family has already spent inside The Compound, the reader can feel the claustrophobic price of the family’s survival.

Both books show the psychological as well as the physical necessities that make it possible to live in a world in which the old has passed away, and all things have become, not so much new, as completely foreign and reduced to the essentials. In both books the laws and social customs that make civilization possible have come into question or been completely destroyed, almost overnight, and the survivors must decide what they are willing to do in order to continue to survive.

As I read these two books, I tried to think of other books about survival when society as we know it has either broken down or been left behind.

Many children’s and young adult books are about survival when a character or group of characters have been stranded away from society, law, and modern technology. Maybe it all started with Peter Pan’s “lost boys” or even with Robinson Crusoe and went downhill from there. Usually, one or two people cut off from the world manage to survive rather well, although not without some harrowing escapes and near misses, but a group of losties tend to discover original sin and groupthink turns to anarchy and survival of the fittest.

Solo (or almost solo) survival:
Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell.
Walkabout by James Vance Marshall.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
Julie of the Wolves by Jean George.
My SIde of the Mountain by Jean George. Semicolon review here.
The Cay by Theodore Taylor

Group survival:
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
Children of Men by P.D. James. Semicolon review here.
Hill’s End by Ivan Southall.
Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Read it last month; review coming soon.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
The Compound by S.A. Bodeen.
The Rule of Claw by John Brindley. I just read a review copy of this relatively new YA title, and I’ll be reviewing it soon. It’s a cautionary tale of evolution on steroids.

True Survival:
Alive by Piers Paul Read.
Adrift: Seventy-SIx Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan.
Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World by Jennifer Armstrong.
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer.
Dove by Robin L. Graham.

Nuclear holocaust survival:
On the Beach by Nevill Shute. Semicolon review here.
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank.
Z Is for Zachariah by Robert O’Brien.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. Semicolon review here.
The Road by Carmac McCarthy.
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.
Down to a Sunless Sea by David Graham.

Any additions to the list? As I think about it, I’m coming up with more and more books that could conceivably be classed as “survival stories”. Perhaps it’s an irresistible plot: put your protagonist in a really hard situation and see what he does to get out. What’s harder than a fight for survival? It makes for riveting fiction.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Apr28

TSNOTD is a comedy in contrast to the tragedy of Doomsday Book by the same author, which I wrote about last week. It’s a delightful romp in which the fate of the universe may or may not be at stake. However, the course of history and the universe is “self-correcting,” shades of LOST, so the universe is never really in danger of imploding or careening off-track. Probably.

In the meantime, we, the readers, get to travel around in time, mostly to late Victorian England and enjoy literary references to and actual meetings with notables such as Lewis Carroll, Jerome K. Jerome, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Charles Darwin, Trollope, Dickens, Wodehouse, and who-knows-who-else that I’ve forgotten or missed. This time travel comedy of errors is even better than Doomsday Book, mostly because I needed to smile and even laugh as I hope in the Lord (not the self-correcting properties of the universe) despite the seemingly insane and destructive recent antics of certain government officials and business tycoons and Hollywood exhibitionists.

“God is in the details,” as Lady Schrapnell would say. Or to put it in Professor Peddick’s words: “Rarum facit misturam cum sapiente forma.” (Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination.)

Very highly recommended and my favorite of the three Connie WIllis books I’ve read so far.

Education Week: April 20-24, 2009

Apr27

I’m keeping this loose sort of diary of our homeschool in an effort to convince myself that we really, really are learning and growing and educating around here.

Monday

Karate Kid (12) goes over to help his grandmother do laundry on Monday mornings. While he’s there he’s supposed to do his math lesson and read in some book. Instead, he did laundry and watched cartoons. Then, he dawdled all afternoon, and finally, when it was time to go to our co-op end of the school year Spring Showcase, he still hadn’t started his math lesson. So he stayed home and did math.
Betsy-Bee (10), on the other hand, did her math and her grammar and started a new reader, Joan of Arc (Wishbone version). She and I read an introduction to the reformation in Mindy and Brandon Withrow’s Courage and Conviction.
Z-baby (7) did her math and reading and history and science with her sister, Dancer Daughter (19). I miss doing school with Z-baby, but I don’t miss her stubbornness.

This evening I read aloud a little from Oh Ye Jigs and Juleps by Virginia Cary Hudson. If you’re unfamiliar with this little collection of essays, they were supposedly written by ten year old Virginia around the turn of the century. I found a like-new copy at the library book sale on Saturday, and since my paperback copy is falling apart, I snatched it up. LOL funny, and my younger urchins, who have never heard these compositions covering subjects as varied sacraments and gardening and The Great Wall of China were begging me to read more.

Tuesday
Karate Kid did his math lesson in a timely manner and then went to canoeing. Maybe yesterday’s fiasco made him realize that we meant what we said. Later he finished the last study guide for the last module in his General Science book.

Brown Bear Daughter is re-reading one of the Harry Potter books because she says the movie version is due to come out this summer? She spent a lot of time working on her biology.
Betsy-Bee was the one who had a hard time getting her math lesson done today. She wanted to clean her room instead. (She always wants to clean/rearrange her room.)
Z-baby read half of a book to me: He Bear, She Bear by the Berenstains. Her reading is improving, s-l-o-w-l-y.

Wednesday
Today at lunch time, I caught all three girls, Brown Bear, Betsy-Bee, and Z-Baby, sitting in the living room, reading or at least perusing books. Brown Bear Daughter was still working on Harry Potter; Betsy-Bee was looking at several Amelia Bedelia books; and Z-Baby was looking at this series of books. Her grandfather, who died several years ago, bought this set of books by Joy Berry for the children. I hate them. They’re didactic pop psychology, and they’re boring. But the kids have all at one time or another read them voraciously.
Karate Kid has also jumped on the Harry Potter bandwagon. The thing is they’re rereading the books. I’m so stubborn that I never read any of them even once. Why would they want to read them all again?
Brown Bear Daughter and I worked through some rate times time equals distance problems in her algebra book. Those kind of problems frustrated her, but I thought they were kind of fun.
I found Karate Kid’s history workbook yesterday! He lost The History of Western Civilization: Middle Ages just before he finished the final lesson and the final exam. Now we can complete the middle ages and move on to explorers, reformers, and renaissance thinkers.

Thursday:
Karate Kid‘s assignments for the morning: do a math lesson, mow the yard, take his last science test, and pick up his bedroom.
Betsy-Bee is supposed to be doing her math lesson, and Brown Bear Daughter is reading Harry Potter instead of working on her essay for her English class.

I read Brer Rabbit in the Briar Patch (Disney version) to Z-Baby after she had finished her regular schoolwork with her sister. They’re reading Ramona the Pest, and in today’s episode Ramona freaked out about having a substitute teacher and hid behind the trash cans. I can picture Z-Baby doing things just like Ramona does in the books.
Karate Kid did his math and science, and mowed the front yard, and cleaned his room so that he could go to drama class. They’re working on musical drama techniques so that they can do a full-fledged musical next school year. When he came home after nine p.m., he watched a math video, this time about trigonometry. Now he says he knows more about trig than I do since I told him that I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about it.

Friday
This Friday was our last day of homeschool co-op for the school year. We do fourteen weeks in the fall and fourteen weeks in the spring. The kids finished up their classes in style, although two of them still have a little more science to do to finish the textbook for the year.
This afternoon Karate Kid is studying lock-picking. He’s trying to get his sister into her house after she locked the keys inside.

The Amazing Potato by Milton Meltzer

Apr26

You can skip pages 13-16 which give a brief account of the standard evolutionary story of the progress of mankind from hunter-gatherer to farmer in only a few million years.

The rest of the book is a praise-evoking tale of a wonderful and useful creation: the potato. Did you know that the potato “provides nearly perfect nutrition?” That Thomas Jefferson, with his love for all things Frenchified, popularized the potato in the U.S. by serving various and sundry French-derived potato dishes at the White House?

Potatoes lyonaise, by the way, are potatoes fried with onions. Yum! Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and the Swiss all have special beloved national dishes made of
potatoes.

“The potato was the most precious gift Peru gave to the world–more valuable than all the golden treasure of the Incan kings.”

This book demonstrates for children and for adults a different way to look at history. Unit study history, if you will. Meltzer asserts that “something ordinary we hardly ever notice, like this lowly vegetable, can be just as important in the life of people everywhere as wars and revolutions, or kings and presidents.”

I agree. So, hip, hip, hooray for the potato! (The book itself is out of print, but I didn’t have any trouble finding a copy at my library.)

Prolific Potato Post from the Past.

Birthday Watch: April 26th

Apr26

St. Augustine of Hippo entered the church on Easter day, April 26, 387. His mother Monica prayed for his conversion for 33 years.

Scots philosopher Thomas Reid, b.1710. “Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind.”

Scots philosopher David Hume, b.1711. An atheist, or at least a skeptic, Hume had very little faith in religion or in the reason of man.
“The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct, being at least a general attendant of human nature, may be considered as a kind of mark or stamp, which the divine workman has set upon his work; and nothing surely can more dignify mankind, than to be thus selected from all other parts of the creation, and to bear the image or impression of the universal Creator.”

“A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.”

The name of Desmond David Hume, of LOST fame, is probably a reference to philosopher David Hume. Unfortunately, I don’t know what the naming of Desmond is supposed to tell us about his character or about the plot and themes of LOST.

Birthday Watch: April 25th

Apr25

Roger Boyle, Baron Broghill, Lord Orrery, b. 1621. Pepys, the famous seventeenth century diarist, wrote of one of Lord Orrery’s plays:

. . . to the new play, at the Duke’s house, of ‘Henry the Fifth;’ a most noble play, writ by my Lord Orrery; wherein Betterton, Harris, and Ianthe’s parts are most incomparably wrote and done, and the whole play the most full of height and raptures of wit and sense, that ever I heard; having but one incongruity, or what did, not please me in it, that is, that King Harry promises to plead for Tudor to their Mistresse, Princesse Katherine of France, more than when it comes to it he seems to do; and Tudor refused by her with some kind of indignity, not with a difficulty and honour that it ought to have been done in to him.

I wonder how this play compares to Shakespeare’s Henry V, one of my favorite Shakespearean history plays?

John Keble, poet and churchman, b.1792.

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. St. John xvi. 21.

Well may I guess and feel
Why Autumn should be sad;
But vernal airs should sorrow heal,
Spring should be gay and glad:
Yet as along this violet bank I rove,
The languid sweetness seems to choke my breath,
I sit me down beside the hazel grove,
And sigh, and half could wish my weariness were death.

Like a bright veering cloud
Grey blossoms twinkle there,
Warbles around a busy crowd
Of larks in purest air.
Shame on the heart that dreams of blessings gone,
Or wakes the spectral forms of woe and crime,
When nature sings of joy and hope alone,
Reading her cheerful lesson in her own sweet time.

Nor let the proud heart say,
In her self-torturing hour,
The travail pangs must have their way,
The aching brow must lower.
To us long since the glorious Child is born
Our throes should be forgot, or only seem
Like a sad vision told for joy at morn,
For joy that we have waked and found it but a dream.

Walter de la Mare, b.1873. See Favorite Poets: Walter de la Mare. Also here, here, and here.

Maud Hart Lovelace, b.1892.
Sarah’s Library Hospital on Betsy-Tacy.

Birthday Watch: April 24

Apr24

Anthony Trollope, b. 1815.
Bonnie at I Dwell in Possibility reviews Trollope’s Barchester Towers.
Trollope and Jane Austen.
Men and Marriage in Trollope’s Framley Parsonage.
Magistramater is trilling about Trollope.

Novelist Elizabeth Goudge, b. 1900.

Poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, b. 1905. Semicolon review of All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren.

Cajun chef Justin Wilson, b.1914. I remember watching Justin Wilson on TV’s Cajun Cooking before cooking shows were cool. I found this recipe for hush puppies on WIlson’s website:

Dis is a delightful dish. It is so easy to fix, I garontee!

1 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp soda
1 egg, beaten
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3/4 to 1 cup mild or buttermilk

Combine all dry ingredients. Add egg, milk, and onions mix well. Drop in deep hot fat by spoonfuls and brown on all sides.

Mystery writer Sue Grafton, b. 1940. You know, she writes those alphabetical mysteries about female detective Kinsey Milhone. I’ve never actually read any of them.
Framed and Booked reviews S Is for Silence.
BookGal on T is for Trespass.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Apr23

I have a new author to add to my list of favorites: Connie Willis. And I’m delighted because she’s written and published lots of books, and I’m planning to read all of them (except for the short story collections; I don’t like short stories.) I’ve already read three of her books, and although each of them was very different from the other two, I loved them all.

First I read Doomsday Book. It’s historical fiction and science fiction at the same and entertaining for fans of either or both genres. This book would make a wonderful movie; however Hollywood wouldn’t be able to resist tweaking it to add a bit of romance to a central relationship in the book that is a professor/student, father/daughter relationship and works quite well that way. So no movie. Even though a movie could be a great thing.

Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels through “the net” back in time to the fourteenth century. In the meantime, a virulent influenza virus puts Oxford and its environs under quarantine, and Badre, the tech who set up the program to send Kivrin back in time, is too ill to tell anyone exactly what’s gone wrong with the plan to send Kivrin back to medieval England and retrieve her in two weeks. But something has gone horribly wrong, and Kivrin’s professor, Dr. Dunworthy, is the only one who’s trying to get her back. The others involved in the study are either too sick or too busy trying to deal with the epidemic to help Dunworthy. Kivrin is stranded in an English village in the early 1300’s, and all of her vaccinations and preparations won’t keep her from experiencing the most harrowing and nightmarish time of her young life.

I would assign this book to a class studying the Middle Ages in a heartbeat. However, it’s long, maybe too long for a class assignment. I do think they’d get more information on medieval life and remember more of it by reading this book than by studying a history text. In fact, Doomsday Book made me want to do some research on certain aspects of medieval life. It’s not an exciting adventure novel, and as I said the romance quotient wouldn’t meet Hollywood standards. However, if you love history and good characterization, give it a try.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by the same author uses the same plot device of “the net” to enable the author to tell a much different, more comedic, time-traveling tale. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Suffice it to say I liked it even better than I did Doomsday Book.