Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Dec19

Characters:
Ishmael, the narrator.
Queequeg
Father Mapple
Captain Peleg
Captain Bildad
Captain Ahab
Starbuck, First Mate
Stubb, Second mate
Flask, Third Mate

“And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,–what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”

“Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” (Really???)

“It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”
Ah, well, as long as the sober cannibal looks like George Washington!

“One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.”
The Whale as God.

“Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
But David wrote, “Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”

Recurring themes:
Cannibalism, barbarism versus civilization. The Nantucketers are “fighting Quakers, Quakers with a vengeance.”
Life and death, whiteness, darkness.
Religion, idolatry, Christianity.
Revenge, insanity.

We read Moby Dick, or The Whale for my American Literature class, and I must admit that once again just as I did in high school, I only made it about three-fourths of the way through the book. So who’s actually read Moby Dick all the way through, whiteness of the whale and all?

I was encouraged to read Susan Wise Bauer’s confession in The Well-Educated Mind: “My bete noir is Moby Dick; I know it’s one of the great works of American literature, but I have made at least eight runs at it during my adult life and have never managed to get past midpoint.” I’m only on my second try; maybe I’ll give it another read in a couple of years and see if I can finish. As you can see, I did glean something from the part I read.

American Bee by James Maguire

Dec18

Subtitles: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds, The lives of five top spellers as they compete for glory and fame.

First we watched the movie Akeela and the Bee. Immediately, Brown Bear Daughter, who collects enthusiasms as if they were candy, told me that she wants to be in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Actually, she wants to win the National Spelling Bee. Then, I saw this book at the library and thought I’d read it to find out what’s involved in spelling bee competition. I had visions of “stage moms” pushing their over-achieving children to memorize the dictionary and chidren who ended up neurotic by age fifteen.

If those horror scenarios are true, Mr. Maguire didn’t see them as he spent about a year researching spelling bees in general and interviewing some of the top young adult spellers in the United States. These are the kids who get to be on TV (ESPN) once a year as they compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. in late May, the week of Memorial Day. The children who compete at the national level come across in the book as somewhat obsessed with words and spelling bees and very competitive, but as Mr. Maguire reiterates in the book, the dedication and hard work required to reach the upper echelons of spelling competition must come from within the child himself. No parent or teacher could manufacture or coerce that kind of discipline and intensity in a middle school aged young person.

American Bee was published in 2006, and Mr. Maguire chose five spellers who were favored to win the 2005 National Spelling Bee and followed their individual paths to the nationals. Unfortunately (SPOILER) he didn’t happen to choose the child who actually won the 2005 bee as one of his five interview-ees. On the other hand, I looked, and one of the spellers he profiled in his book came back and won the National Spelling Bee in 2006 after the book was published. So maybe Mr. Maguire wasn’t such a bad picker after all.

Other chapters in the book give profiles of past spelling bee champions and what happened to them after their spelling days were over, information about the history of spelling and spelling bees, and a general history of English language spelling with an emphasis on why it’s so hard to spell many English words. Mostly, it’s because English is such a scavenger language and no one’s in charge of the development of the language. Did you know that France and Spain each have a government agancy that makes decisions about what words are allowed into the language and how those words will be used and spelled? Americans would never stand for such a bureaucracy . (By the way, I had a lot of trouble spelling that last word; most of the spellers in this book could have reeled it off without breaking a sweat.)

If you’re interested in words or spelling or kids and competition, American Bee is a fine introduction to a particularly engaging subculture. I’ll let you know if Brown Bear Daughter maintains her new-found passion for spelling long enough to actually compete. It’s not looking too promising; she’s already lost the spelling bee booklet she needs to begin her preparations.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born December 16th

Dec16

Jane Austen herself was born on December 16, 1775. What’s your favorite Austen novel?

Also born on December 16th: Noel Coward (1896, playwright), Arthur C. Clarke (1917, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey), and Marie Hall Ets (1895, author of many children’s picture books including Gilberto and the Wind and Nine Days to Christmas).

Today is also Beethoven’s Birthday (1770). Will you be celebrating the birth of Schroeder’s favprote composer, and if so, how? I think I’ll play some of Beethoven’s more famous compositions and play guess the composer with the urchins.

Beethoven and Jane Austen could have met (same time period), but I would imagine that they didn’t. Wouldn’t that have been an interesting meeting? The Observant Writer meets the Grumpy Genius.

Links:
Krakovianka on re-reading Jane Austen.

Trollope on Jane Austen.

Does Jane Austen Really Have a Christian Worldview?

Jane Austen, Not Explicitly Christian But a Moral Universe.

Jane Austen’s Writing Style.

The Jane Austen Society of North America 2007 Essay Contest.

Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata and Blue by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

Dec15


Two books set during World War War II: One takes place in California and Arizona; the other book is set on the other side of the country in North Carolina. Sumiko is twelve years old and lives with her aunt and uncle and cousins on a flower farm; Anna Fay is thirteen and has become “the man of the house” since her daddy’s gone to fight in the war. Both girls are typical older children, responsible, obligated to grow up fast and take care of younger brothers and sisters. Both girls use gardening as a way to work through their problems and challenges. And each must face her own war, her own imprisonment, and her own fight against ignorance and prejudice.

Sumiko, heroine of Weedflower, is a Japanese-American girl; her parents are dead, and she faces prejudice against “orientals” from the beginning of the story when she is dis-invited to a birthday party for a girl in her class. The challenges only get worse after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and all the residents of Japanese descent on the West Coast are gathered and sent to internment camps. Sumiko, her aunt, her two older cousins, and her little brother are sent to Poston in Arizona. There Sumiko must learn to survive and even overcome the heat, the dust, the hostility of neighbors, and even the threat of succumbing to “the ultimate boredom.” The latter is her grandfather’s term for the temptation to give up, to lose your dreams, to surrender hope, a temptation that Sumiko must face and defeat if she is to win her war.

Anna Fay, the main character in Blue has a battle to fight, too. A polio epidemic has invaded western North Carolina in 1944, and Anna Fay’s little brother Bobby falls victim to the dread disease. Later in the story, Anna Fay herself must battle polio, even as she worries about her daddy fighting Hitler in Europe and about whether her family will ever be together again. Anna Fay is trapped in the polio hospital just as Sumiko is trapped in the internment camp, and Anna Fay faces boredom and prejudice, too. The discrimination comes when Anna Fay becomes friends with a “colored girl” who also has polio, but the two girls can’t convince anyone that they should be allowed to share a hospital ward as well as a friendship.

I thought both of these books were excellently well-written. Blue goes for the tear-jerker, drama reaction; the writing in Weedflower is a little more restrained. Sumiko is the stereotypical Japanese, determined to keep her emotions under control and her tears hidden; Anna Fay is comforted by her friend’s word picture of a God who saves each person’s tears in a bottle on a heavenly window-sill. (Anna Fay’s bottle is blue.) Each girl compares herself to a flower: Sumiko is a weedflower, a flower of the field that is both beautiful and resilient; Anna Fay is sometimes as fragile as a mimosa blossom and other times as tough as wisteria.

These books would work well, paired, in a unit study on World War II to give students a good picture of different aspects of the time period. Other World War II books for girls:

Denenberg, Barry. Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941.
Denenberg, Barry. One Eye Laughing, The Other Weeping: The Diary of Julie Weiss, Vienna, Austria to New York, 1938.
Greene, Betty. Summer of my German Soldier.
Osborne, Mary Pope. My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck, Long Island, New York, 1941.
Rinaldi, Ann. Keep Smiling Through.

Weedflower and Blue also have another thing in common; both books are nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

Christmas 1823

Dec14

He was on the point of retreating when his eye fell upon the fireplace–one of those vast tavern chimneys where there is always so little fire when there is any fire at all, and which are so cold to look at. There was no fire in this one, there was not even ashes; but there was something which attracted the stranger’s gaze, nevertheless. It was two tiny children’s shoes, coquettish in shape and unequal in size. The traveller recalled the graceful and immemorial custom in accordance with which children place their shoes in the chimney on Christmas eve, there to await in the darkness some sparkling gift from their good fairy. Eponine and Azelma had taken care not to omit this, and each of them had set one of her shoes on the hearth.

The traveller bent over them.

The fairy, that is to say, their mother, had already paid her visit, and in each he saw a brand-new and shining ten-sou piece.

The man straightened himself up, and was on the point of withdrawing, when far in, in the darkest corner of the hearth, he caught sight of another object. He looked at it, and recognized a wooden shoe, a frightful shoe of the coarsest description, half dilapidated and all covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette’s sabot. Cosette, with that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet never discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearth-stone also.

Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and touching thing.

There was nothing in this wooden shoe.

The stranger fumbled in his waistcoat, bent over and placed a louis d’or in Cosette’s shoe.

Then he regained his own chamber with the stealthy tread of a wolf.
From Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Christmas is an expensive time. Just to buy presents and a Christmas tree and all the special ingredients for Christmas treats and tickets to all the Christmas entertainments for our family of eleven is a budget-breaking endeavor. But find something in your budget to give away, to reward that “hope in a child who has never know anything but despair.” If you don’t already have an opportunity for giving, consider clicking on the kettle on the side bar to contribute to the Salvation Army. They do good work all year round, and my kettle goal is $100.00. Please consider giving generously in honor of our Saviour’s birth.

Advent December 14: The Keith Green Story

Dec14

I haven’t done much, if any, exploring on you.tube, but I just found out that you can watch the documentary video The Keith Green Story there. Here’s a link to part 1; it’s in seven parts.

If you don’t know who Keith Green was, he was hippie flower child musician turned Christian who sang some powerful music back in the seventies. For the most part his career only lasted that one decade, but he was quite influential in the development of Christian music and in many people’s lives. Whether you’ve heard of Keith Green or you haven’t, I think you’ll find the video inspiring.

The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen by M.T. Anderson

Dec13

M. T. ANDERSON is seven monkeys, six typewriters, and a Speak & Spell. It took them ten years to write The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. Their previous books include Adf2yga^vvvv, Wpolw0ox.S Ppr2dgn shr Elssf, and The Riverside Edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Adf2yga^vvvv was a National Book Award finalist. The M. T. Anderson Monkey Collective is located outside Boston. Its hobbies include flash cards, hopping, and grooming for lice. It divides its time between the parallel bars and the banana trough.

Uh, yeah. I get the joke. I think I get the joke of The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen. Some of it was very funny. But did we have to discuss snot for so long, in so much detail? I got my fill, so to speak, of nasal excretions after about one sentence of descriptive prose, but it went on and on and on. It reminded me of a bunch of college guys who tell a gross joke, and then another, and another, and all the girls in the room are looking at each other and shaking their collective heads. (Now that’s an interesting word picture, collective shaking heads!)

The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen (I’m going to call it, affectionately, Lederhosen for short) is a pastiche of all those series you read when you were a kid back in the fifties and the sixties, if you were a kid back in the fifties and the sixties: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Danny Dunn, the Bobbsey Twins, cowboy series that I never read, stuff like that. Did you know that my librarian wouldn’t buy any of those series books because she said they weren’t up to the library’s standards? This was at the public library, mind you, not even the school library. I wonder what Ms. Karen, who in spite of her disdain for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, really was a great librarian, would think of Lederhosen? Actually, I shudder to think.

Because I tend to pick up the style of the last book I read, I’m now doing a poor imitation of the style of Mr. Anderson (and the monkeys) in Lederhosen. He does tend to get lost, wandering down various rabbit trails, before getting to the point of the chapter. And what was the point, you ask? Well, I meant to say that Lederhosen makes fun of our childhood heroes in a good-natured, but sometimes snotty, way, and I wonder if children of the twentieth-first century who haven’t read Hardy Boys or other series of bygone days, will get the joke? As I type this review, Karate Kid, who has read Hardy Boys, is reading Lederhosen. I promise to ask him later what he thinks. He’s not laughing out loud.

To be continued . . .

After a couple of chapters I asked Karate Kid what he thought of the book. He said it wasn’t as good as Hardy Boys, so I think he gets the connection but not the joke. However, he’s still reading.

I’ll update you again when he’s finished, or you could just pick up a copy at the library for yourself. I can promise you that it’s . . . different. Lederhosen is one of the many odd books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. Ummm, I mean “good books.” M.T. Anderson is the same author who also won a National Book Award this year for his historical fiction title, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s a much different book from Lederhosen. A prolific and versatile guy, Mr. Anderson, or maybe the monkeys . . . ?

Happy Kid by Gail Gauthier

Dec11

Review by Brown Bear Daughter, age 11, almost 12:

I really enjoyed this book. It was absolutely HILARIOUS. It had a couple of places in the book where…oh…let me tell you all I liked about if before I tell you what I didn’t.

First off, as I said before, it was the most hilarious book I’ve read lately. Also, it shows the exact emotions that any real kid would show in the situations that the main character finds himself in. I just thought to myself, “This author (Gail Gauthier) must really understand kids.”

It was easy to imagine what I would do if I was accused of bringing a weapon to school, (though I’m homeschooled, of course) which does happen to Kyle, the narrator. Okay, now I’ll give a small summary of the first couple of chapters:

Kyle hears his mother yell for him to come open his “back to school present.” So after his sister opens hers, he unwraps Happy Kid: A Young Person’s Guide to Satisfying Relationships and a Happy and Meaning-Filled Life! After being reminded to thank his mother for the gift, Kyle says, “Thank you for believing I’m such a reject I need a book on how to be happy. I really appreciate the thought.” I couldn’t help but laugh at this because it sounds like something I would say. Is that good or bad? Anyhow, Kyle’s mother thinks that he looks at everything negatively…so when she saw the book that “just screamed (Kyle’s) name,” she bought it immediately.

There were a few gross parts which I will not mention, and a bit of bad language also, but altogether I consider it a very interesting and well-written book. I had sooo much fun reading it!

Happy Kid is another good book nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.

2006 Book Lists

Dec11

I don’t read many new books, books published this year. I get most of my books from the library, and I can’t afford to pay twenty plus dollars for a new book unless I already know I will like it and want to own it. So most of my book purchases are classics and books I’ve already read and know I will want to re-read. These are some of the many lists that are popping up all over of “best books of 2006.” Maybe I’ll get around to a few of them in 2007.

Hornbook Fanfare List: Best (Children’s) Books of 2006. Of these I read The Book Thief (Semicolon Ambivalent Review here), but I didn’t really get what all the fuss was about. A few of the others sound intriguing.

Kirkus Reviews’ Best Children’s Books of 2006. Again, The Book Thief is the only one of these I’ve read, but I’ll probably get around to several of the others thanks to the Cybils.

New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year 2006. I haven’t read a single one of the books on this list, and what’s more hardly any of them sound very interesting. I might read a couple of the books on the nonfiction list. Can anyone say “The NY Times is out of touch with Real America”?

Amazon Best Books of 2006: Editors’ PicksI’ve actually only read one of these, The Thirteenth Tale, but a couple of them are on my list to read, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Reading Like a Writer. I haven’t read even one of Amazon’s Top 50 Best Sellers for 2006. Can anyone say, “Sherry’s out of touch with Amazon’s mainstream readers, and proud of it?”

Publisher’s Weekly 100 Best Books of the Year 2006. Same story, I guess I’ve really got to pick up Omnivore’s Dilemma and Mayflower.

Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction of 2006. I haven’t read any of these books either, but I do have The Inheritance of Loss and The Accidental on my list. I even have the latter book on my bedside bookshelf.

Christian Science Monitor Best Nonfiction of 2006. Mayflower is on the list again, and The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan sounds interesting.

Washington Post Best Books of 2006, Fiction and Nonfiction I did read The Secret River by Kate Grenville, and although it was rather violent, I thought it gave a vivid picture of the British colonization of Australia.

School Library Journal’s Best of 2006. We’re back to children’s and young adult books. Thanks to the Cybils, I’ve read or am reading several of these books: Yellow Star, Framed, Fly By Night, and, one more time, The Book Thief.

John Wilson (Books and Culture) Top Ten Books of 2006. This list is a different one from a different point of view; I had never even heard of any of the books oon thie list. However, I’m going to add at lest one of them to my list, Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, by Timothy Larsen. Mr. Wilson says this book tells the story of the Victorians who moved from doubt to faith rather than the opposite.

Slate picks the Best Books of 2006. Editors and columnists each pick one or two favorite books from 2006. I didn’t see any of these on anyone else’s list, nor have I read any of them. So, it’s a distinctive list with a couple of pearls among the swine.

Economist.com Books of the Year 2006. I thought this list was one of the best of the lot, even though I haven’t read any of the books on it either. I found several that I want to read, however, including biographies of Thomas Hardy and George III, a couple of books on why foreign aid doesn’t work so well, a history of Wal-mart, the Omnivore again, and a book called Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life.

Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce

Dec8

Maybe Tom was right. Maybe the paintings weren’t just paintings. Manod had changed a lot since the paintings arrived. Maybe the paintings were like mutagen, changing the town. Maybe we were living in Ninja Manod!!

So there you have it. Framed is a kid caper comedy about Fine Art and Mutant Ninja Turtles. And small town life. And slate mines. And insurance fraud. And family unity.


Mr. Boyce says “Framed was inspired by a news story he’d read in an old scrapbook. During the Second World War, a collection of valuable paintings from the National Gallery was hidden in a slate mine for safekeeping. He couldn’t resist imagining how all that great art might have affected the people who lived near the mine.” Frank Cottrell Boyce is a screenwriter, and I could see that influence in the book. I kept thinking this book would make a good movie. It turns out that Boyce’s first book, Millions, was a movie. I’ve never seen it, but I might look it up.

At any rate, Framed is a funny story. The setting, the small town of Manod, Wales, sort of reminds me of Petticoat Junction with all the requisite characters, including a butcher who’s afraid of liver and a pair of sisters who share the driving since “Miss Edna can see but she can’t drive,” and “Miss Elsa can drive but she can’t see.” Then there’s Daft Tom who collects Mutant Ninja Turtle gear: T-shirts, videos, collectors’ cards, lunch boxes, models of the four turtles, and a full-size strap-on Turtle shell. Sheep run wild, but the distinguishing feature of Manod is its greyness. It’s all grey because it’s perched on the side of Manod Mountain, this great big mountain covered with slate, grey slate. Dylan, the dim-witted but loveable hero of our story, is rather fond of Manod, even if he is the only boy who lives there and consequently has to wait ten years or so for his baby brother Max to grow up before he can play a decent game of soccer.

So, Framed has Setting and Characters and Plot and Humor. What else does it need? Throw in a few mutant turtles and a lot of cars and a few masterpieces by Michaelanglo and Monet, and you’ve got an entertaining mix. The British/kid slang is a bit thick. If you’re NOT British, and you know the meaning of all the following terms, you’re legend. Get yourself a packet of crisps.

1. legend, as in “Ma made a legend breakfast.”

2. pillock

3. hectic, as in “That’d be hectic.”

4. nuddy

5. get nicked

6. a kick-around

7. packet of crisps

8. beastier, as in “DDS is even beastier.”

9. ticking over

10. trunk sale

Framed is one of the many good books nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction.