Books for Lent to Lead You into Resurrection

Feb6

Lent begins very early this year, on Wednesday, February 6th. Here a few book suggestions and blog links to add to your Lenten journey.

The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy Wright. Wendy is a lay person who writes beautifully about the sacredness of ordinary experience.

Bread And Wine: Readings For Lent And Easter is a collection of 72 essays from a variety of writers like Dorothy Day, Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Frederick Buechner.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. If you’re just now exploring the Christian faith, or if you’re trying to come to a deeper understanding of the faith you already profess, you can’t go wrong with Lewis’s classic exposition of the basics of what Christians believe.

Living Lent: Meditations for These Forty Days by Barbara Cawthorne.

Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner. Semicolon review here.

Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent by Albert Holtz. A Benedictine monk travels through fifteen countries and contmplates the spiritual journey that we all undertake.

Our read aloud books for the Lenten season are Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair all by C.S. Lewis and The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare.

Fro my personal devotional reading, I’m reading the books of Ruth in the Bible for the month of February and the latter eight chapters of Mark in March. I’m also reading Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans.

Blog Links for Lent:
Lenten Links collected by iMonk, Michael Spencer.

An Anglican Family Lent.

And an Anglican Family Lenten Carnival with lots more links.

Lenten Thoughts from 2005 at Semicolon.

Aside from reading, I’m observing Lent by taking a blog break. You might not notice too much difference at first because I’ve pre-posted and scheduled quite a bit of stuff for the next few weeks. Saturday review posts will appear on Saturday as usual. However, I took a Lent break last year and actually enjoyed it quite a bit, and so I’m taking off again this year. I hope to have a couple of guest bloggers come in take up the slack, but however that goes, I’ll see you all back on or about March 23rd, Resurrection Sunday.

May the Lord bless you and keep you, may He cause his face to shine upon you, and give you peace.

More New Books in 2008

Feb5

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about some of the new books I’m looking forward to reading in 2008. Here are a few more:

C.J. Sansom, Winter in Madrid, Viking, January 2008. It’s a spy thriller set in 1940s Spain. I liked Sansom’s mysteries set i the time of Henry VIII, so I think I’d like to give this one a try, too.

Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well: And All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, Pantheon, January 2008. This novel is about the life of a modern medieval re-enactor who moves between time periods, continents, and histories both real and re-enacted. Sounds intriguing. I like the title.

Kate Morton, The House at Riverton, Atria, April 2008. I saw a link to a revew of this book by Wendy at caribousmom at the Saturday Review. And here’s another by The Random Wonderer.

And doesn’t this one sound . . . wild? Nicola Upson, An Expert in Murder, HarperCollins, June 2008. Mystery writer Josephine Tey, on a train journey from Scotland to London in 1934, investigates the death of a young woman.

I gleaned all of these titles from the Historical Novel Society’s Forthcoming Fiction page.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 4th

Feb4

George Lillo, b. 1693, British playwright. He wrote what he called “domestic tragedies” about common people instead of heroes and kings.

Josiah Quincy, b. 1772, Congressman, judge of the Massachusetts municipal court, state representative, mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College.

Mark Hopkins, b. 1802, American educator and Christian apologist. He wrote a very popular nineteenth century text on apologetics called Evidences of Christianity.

William Harrison Ainsworth, b. 1805, English historical novelist. Several of his novels are available at Project Gutenberg.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, b. 1887. English novelist. She wrote many novels, mostly set in the English countryside of Sussex. Her novel, Joanna Godden, is available from Virago Press.

MacKinlay Kantor, b. 1904, American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his novel Andersonville. It was a “grimly realistic” novel about the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville. Has anyone read it?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, b. 1906, German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and member of the resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Here’s a very interesting poem by W.H. Auden, dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled Friday’s Child. I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s worth reading anyway.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 3rd

Feb3

Horace Greeley, b. 1811, American journalist. “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character.”

Walter Bagehot, b. 1826, British essayist and journalist. “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.”

Sidney Lanier, b. 1842, American poet. “Music is Love in search of a word.”

Gertrude Stein, b. 1874, writer and patron of artists and writers. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation… You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.” Quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.

James Michener, b. 1907, American novelist, author of Hawaii. “The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.”

Joan Lowery Nixon, b. 1927, Houston author of YA and children’s fiction. “My husband and I have four children, and when they were young I had only one day a week in which someone could watch the preschoolers and I could write. I discovered that you never find time to write. You make time.”

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 2nd

Feb2

Hannah More, b. 1745. Evangelical philathropist connected with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. In her youth she was also a friend of actor David Garrick, lexicographer Samuel Johnson, and politician and writer Horace Walpole. After her conversion to evangelical Christianity and her retreat from the high society of London, her friends were clergyman and hymn writer John Newton and anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce. She was active in the anti-slavery movement in England, and her character makes an appearance in the movie, Amazing Grace, a movie I highly recommend, by the way.

Here’s a snippet from her poem, Slavery, published in 1788 to coincide with the first parliamentary debate on the slave trade.

. . . the countless host
I mourn, by rapine dragg’d from Afric’s coast.
Perish th’illiberal thought which wou’d debase
The native genius of the sable race!

Perish the proud philosophy, which sought
To rob them of the pow’rs of equal thought!

James Joyce, b. 1882. “Bayard himself confesses to never having finished Ulysses, by James Joyce. Personally, I have a theory that there is a very good chance that Joyce himself didn’t even finish writing the book, since I have never actually met anyone who has read the thing cover to cover.” —Sarah Vine in a review of Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus (How to Talk About Books that You Haven’t Read) by M. Bayard. Ms. Vine didn’t read Mr. Bayard’s book, either. Has anyone here actually read Ulysses, other than Madame MM-V, that is. I must say I’ve never felt the urge. It’s on my list of “Books That If I Had More Than One Life I Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately My Days Are Numbered.” What’s on your list of that name?

Under the Heaventree, an essay by Frederica Matthews-Green on the Christian life and Christian theology in the style of a chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses. At least Ulysses is good for something.

James Stephens, b. 1882. Irish novelist and poet. He was a friend of James Joyce.

Ayn Rand, b. 1905. The Fountainhead is one of the books on the list for my LOST project, but I’m not about to spend my time on that massive tome either. I think that all I’d get for my time and energy is a very long expostion in fiction of Sawyer’s philosophy, “It’s every man for himself, Freckles.”


Judith Viorst, b. 1931. Author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Atheneum, 1972. We’ve all had them. Reading about Alexander’s bad day somehow helps me to laugh at my own bad days in a misery-loves-company sort of way.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 1st

Feb1

Arthur Henry Hallam, b. 1811, the subject, upon his death in 1833 at the age of 22, of Tennyson’s famous poem In Memoriam. Hallam was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emilia, and he was Tennyson’s close friend. He died suddenly while travelling in Vienna of a brain hemorrhage. The poem wasn’t actually published until 1850; I guess it took Tennyson that long to work through his grief in poetic form over Hallam’s untimely death.

Charles Nordhoff, b. 1887, was the co-author, along with his friend James Norman Hall, of one of my favorite books, Mutiny on the Bounty, the fictionalized story of Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian, and the mutiny that took place on HMAV Bounty (His Majesty’s Armed Vessel) in 1789. It is Nordhoff’s and Hall’s book that is the basis for most of the movie versions of the mutiny story.

Langston Hughes, American poet, b. 1902.

The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.”

Jerry Spinelli, b. 1941, won the Newbery Award for his book, Maniac Magee.

LOST Rehash: The Beginning of the End

Jan31

Lost




Lost

Poster

Buy at AllPosters.com

SPOILERS ————–SPOILERS ————– SPOILERS———– SPOILERS

The Oceanic Six: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Claire, Sun, and Jin (with Baby Aaron as a bonus). Or maybe Sawyer instead of Jin.
Why? Because Desmond saw Claire get on the helicopter and because Sun will die if she doesn’t have the baby off island. And Jin wouldn’t let her go without him. But maybe Jin gets left behind somehow, and Sawyer, who’s always looking out for number one, gets himself rescued.

The Secret Jack doesn’t want Hurley to tell: The six who were rescued told their rescuers that they were the only survivors left on the island, that there was no one else still living on the island. They did this to protect the others who escaped and/or didn’t want to leave.

New questions:

How do the Six get isolated from the others and rescued with the rest left behind?

What kind of trouble are the people left on the island having, and how can Jack and Crew help if they go back?

Is Penny still looking for Desmond?

Who was the guy who came to see Hurley in the mental hospital, and why does he want to know about survivors left on the island?

WHY does Jack think he should grow a beard?

Did Hurley’s dad spend all of his money while Hurley was gone?

And I’m still wondering, who is the someone Kate has to get back to when she meets Jack at the airport?

I’m looking forward to the episodes that we get for this fourth season, and I hope that we get all sixteen promised episodes before too long a wait.

Shannon’s LOST post.

Bill’s LOST post at Thinklings.

J. Wood’s LOST post for this week. This guy does the best literary analysis of LOST that I’ve seen anywhere.

Books Read: January 2008

Jan31

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings by Stella Tillyard.

A Clearing in the Wild by Jane Kirkpatrick Recommended by Sarah at Reading the Past.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseini.

Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney.

Fatality by Caroline B. Cooney. Rose has a four year old secret recorded in her diary that could tear her family apart. When the police try to take the diary, Rose knows that she must not only destroy it, but also remain silent about its contents for the rest of her life, no matter what the cost. Like The Face on the Milk Carton series, this stand alone thriller is about family secrets, crime, and the way both can fester and infect an entire community.

Both Sides of Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

Out of Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

Prisoner of Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

For All Time by Caroline B. Cooney.

Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Institution by Alex Beam.

A Door Near Here by Heather Quarles.

The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney.

Whatever Happened to Janie? by Caroline B. Cooney.

The Voice on the Radio by Caroline B. Cooney.

What Janie Found by Caroline B. Cooney.

Secret Believers by Brother Andrew and Al Janssen.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 30th

Jan30

Walter Savage Landor, poet, b. 1775.

Ann Taylor, author of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, b. 1782.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, b. 1882.

Barbara Tuchman, author of one my favorite works of historical nonfiction, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, b. 1912.

Lloyd Alexander, b. 1924, author of fantasy based on Celtic and other mythologies. Karate Kid is reading Alexander’s The Arkadians, a novel set in a sort of fantastical ancient Greek world.

Saving Lives

Jan28

When I wrote this post last week about my reasons for supporting Mike Huckabee for the nomination for U.S. president, I cited my support for a constitutional amendment to end abortion as a major reason for my support for Huckabee.

Jenn left this comment:

If saving lives is what you are all about think of all the lives that have been lost in this God forsaken war and the many in the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Not to mention the torture, kidnapping to black sites, etc. All this happened while YOUR guys were in charge.”

Deaths due to Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding: 1836

Iraqui deaths since January, 2005: 46,278

U.S. deaths in Iraq since January 2005: 3931

—From this website.

Deaths due to abortion in the U.S. in 2005 only: 1.2 million

—Estimate from Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher Institute

All of those deaths, both those that took place in Iraq and those that took place in an abortion clinic, are tragedies. However, clearly, the abortion mills are killing many, many more of our citizens than all the Al Qaeda terrorists and hurricanes put together. (I don’t know what “kidnapping to black sites” means.)

I believe in fighting terrorism. I belive in preserving as many lives, American and Iraqi, as possible as we continue to fight terrorists who would kill us and their fellow countrymen. However, I also believe that the moral fabric of this nation is being daily torn to shreds as we tolerate abortions that kill those who are defenseless while we bemoan the deaths of soldiers who have chosen to go into dangerous situations (Iraq) in order to protect us. Did those soldiers die so that we could be “free” to end the lives of the unborn?

I don’t think so.