Diversity in Reading Meme

May4

Name the last book by a female author that you’ve read.
I read lots of books by women, probably as many or more than I do by men. The last female authored book I read was To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Semicolon review here. I don’t think women are particularly “marginalized” or left unread because they’re women in today’s world.

Name the last book by an African or African-American author that you’ve read. Ummmm, I would have to look up all the authors of all the books I’ve read lately to see if any of them are African or African-American.
The last one I know for sure was African was Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.
Oh, I read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese in March, and his bio says: “Born of Indian parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there.”

Name one from a Latino/a author.
I haven’t read any Hispanic authors lately.

How about one from an Asian country or Asian-American?
The Secret-Keeper by Mitali Perkins, and before that one, Walking from East to West by Ravi Zacharias.

What about a GLBT writer?
I do not inquire as to the sexual preferences of the authors I read, and if they start writing in detail about sin and perversion, homosexual or heterosexual, I quit reading. I did re-read Oscar Wilde’s delightful play, The Importance of Being Earnest, not too long ago.

Why not name an Israeli/Arab/Turk/Persian writer, if you’re feeling lucky?
Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris. Semicolon review here. Ms. Ferraris isn’t exactly of Middle Eastern extraction, but her book is set in Saudi Arabia and paints a sympathetic, but realistic, picture of that culture ane the people who live in it.
I’m reading a much less sympathetic but no less realistic book now by Lebanese author Kamal Saleem, nonfiction memoir about terrorism and redemption/conversion. The title is The Blood of Lambs.

Any other “marginalized” authors you’ve read lately?
I dunno. Who’s marginalized?

Now, I have a couple of questions to add to this “diversity exercise”.

What have you read lately that takes an opposite political view from your own?
I’m not too good about this attempt at cross-cultural understanding because reading an entire book from a liberal, anti-religious point of view is annoying in the extreme. I get enough of that bias anytime I look at Time or Newsweek or any other major news source.

Have you read any Jewish authors lately?
Again, it’s hard to say. Half the authors on my list could be Jewish for all I know.

How about Muslim writers?
The above-mentioned Mr. Saleem is a former Muslim. The last book I remember reading that was truly from a Muslim perspective was Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Semicolon thoughts here. (I didn’t care for it much.)

If you are Christian or at least monotheistic, have you read any books from an atheistic or agnostic viewpoint lately? Or if you are non-religious, have you read anything written by a Christian or other religous person that specifically form a Christian point of view?
I am a Christian, and I’ve read lots of books that incorporate a non-Christian worldview, but nothing lately that has an anti-Christian theme as its main point.

Do you think a reader should deliberately try to sample other cultures, other worldviews, and other ethical and religious perspectives? Why or why not?

Sunday Salon: Gleaned from the Saturday Review and Other Places

May3

The Sunday Salon.com

These books are the ones I’m adding to my own unmanageable reading list. I can hardly wait to read them all plus the 100+ others on my list. Thanks to everyone for all of the great suggestions.

The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide. Recommended by Dawn at 5 Minutes for Books. I’d like to read this one and compare it with a couple of other books about death and dying that I’ve read lately: Tender Graces by Jackina Stark and Passage by Connie Willis.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. Recommended by Carrie at Books and Movies.

Every Eye by Isobel English. Recommended by Fleurfisher. This “quiet story” from Persephone Books sounds delightful.

The King’s Daughter by Sandra Worth. Recommended by Deanna at Mom Musings.

The English Patient by Michael Odaatje. Recommended by S. Krishna.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Recommended at Civil Thoughts. This one sounds, well, elegant.

The Great Emergence by Phyllis TIckle. Recommended by Raima at Complexity Simplified.

Also Laura reviews Tea TIme for the Traditionally Built, Alexander McCall Smith’s latest No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency saga, and I’m looking forward to it. And I also want to get my hands on a copy of Tuck, the third in the King Raven trilogy by Stephen Lawhead.

The Semicolon Book Club selection for May is a children’s book that I thought should have won the Newbery Award. Instead, it was a Newbery Honor book: The Underneath by Kathi Appelt. Here are my thoughts on the book after I read for the first time last October. I’ll be interested to see what others who read it this month think about it. It provoked pretty strong opinions, both pro and con, among the kidlit bloggers who read it last year. Leave me a comment or email me and I’ll be happy to link to your review of The Underneath anytime in May.

Books Read in April, 2009

May1

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Semicolon review here.

Eat Drink and Be from Mississippi by Nancy Kincaid.

Tender Grace by Jackina Stark. Semicolon review here.

Passage by Connie WIllis.

The Rule of Claw by John Brindley.

Winnie’s War by Jenny Moss.

I Remember the Alamo by D. Ann Love.

Just One Wish by Janette Rallison.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Çhernow.

Best fiction book read in April: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie WIllis.

Best and only nonfiction books read in April: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. (Hey, it’s a long book, and it took a while. But it was good and went right along with my John Adams reading from March.)

Only 9 books in April, but they were mostly good books and some were quite long. I didn’t read Paradise Lost for the Semicolon Book Club as I had intended. It was actually a very difficult month, family-wise, and it’s a wonder I read as much as I did. However, reading is also my preferred form of therapy. It’s a lot cheaper than a psychiatrist.

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.