The Readers' Cafe

New Site!

2010-06-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the move, but check out greatbooksforteens.com, and remember to save it as a favorite!

So Sorry

2010-05-28T15:38:00.001-07:00

Dear visitor, I am so sorry about all the crazy extra spaces in the book list and that it takes forever to move from post to post. Soon I am moving to a new website. I'll tell you what my new address is as soon as I build it. In the mean time, I highly recommend The Road, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but I dare not put up more posts on this site, as everything seems to be falling apart.

Big Fish

2010-05-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

In "Meditation 17," John Donne says that "God's hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another" with such poetic beauty that, reading it, I forget what a terrifying idea that actually is. Do I really look forward to being fully known? If I could be assured that I would be fully accepted (something the Bible does assure, but that I have a hard time believing), I would long for it. In Daniel Wallace's Big Fish, Edward Bloom wants acceptance from his son, but can't bring himself to open up to him. He has been fabricating stories about himself all his life, and refuses to turn his back on them.

His son William asks him to just have one completely truthful conversation with him before he dies. At various points it seems like he might be finally opening up, but the seriousness gets shunted off the tracks into some silly joke. William grieves not only for himself but for his father's sake: "Beneath one facade there's nother facade and then another, and beneath that the aching dark place."

The stories that Edward tells all make himself out to be the hero. He subdues a giant, saves a little girl from a mad dog, buys a town to preserve a simple way of life for its people. Edward is safely able to tell these stories because he spends so much time on the road while William is growing up. "The very idea of coming home at the same time every single day made him just a little nauseated," so he travels, and when he comes home, he tells stories. William reflects on the times when his father was away: "I'd say I missed you, if I knew what I was missing." His father is gone most of the time, and when he comes home, he brings a false sense of who he is.

Daniel Wallace has hit on an archetype that must resonate with every father and son who reads the book, the father who feels that he must be judged by his own son. Men have a wild desire to prove themselves, and it is ther sons who can see through them, to see clearly when they are posing. The most sincere thing Edward says to his son is actually a question: "As a father . . . do you think I did a good job?" All of his insecurity is wrapped up in the question. The sad thing is that he wants the affirmation without the honesty, as though the words themselves, "You are a good dad," were "some sort of password" into the afterlife.

Ultimately Big Fish leads the reader to think about his own lies and their effects on his relationships. Don't we really want to be loved for who we are and not for some facade we are throwing up? We're such posers! Beyond that, the book makes us question our idea of reality because so much of it comes through stories others tell. Edward's deathbed scene is told four times. The first three come in chapters entitled "My Father's Death: Take 1," "My Father's Death: Take 2," and "My Father's Death: Take 3." These all seem to be the same very realistic, unsatisfying scene told over again in slightly different ways, as though William is trying to find something good in it, but can't. Then the book ends with what seems like the real deathbed scene, "My Father's Death: Take 4," but it veers off into a wildly mythical, truly wonderful ending, worthy of one of Edward Bloom's stories. It's as though William has decided that his father might as well die the way he lived, and one has the impression that his children's children will hear this version.

Riding the Bus with my Sister

2010-04-11T11:04:00.000-07:00

I am a shy stranger. In the locker room at the recreation center, I am amazed at the men who strike up conversations with others they don't know. I speak when I'm spoken to. I feel awkward when others are overly friendly. I'm alarmed when someone draws undue attention to themselves. I took a trip to New York once with one of my students who is the most extraverted person I know. On every bus and subway car, at every bus station and subway station, on every sidewalk, and in every line we stood, he struck up a conversation with someone we didn't know. He had a gift. Rachel Simon's Riding the Bus with my Sister really reminded me of that trip, of both the embarrassment and the wonder.

It's a true story about Rachel and her sister Beth, who has mild mental retardation. Beth is a thirty-some year old woman who spends her days riding buses in Philadelphia. Rachel tries to put aside her judgment of her little sister's lack of a job and promises to ride the bus with her off and on for a year. At first I wondered if this book would be sentimental, depicting Beth as one of "God's true angels" who speaks truisms out of her open-hearted naivety that the rest of us jaded, "normal" people long for. Simon actually scoffs at that depiction of people with mental retardation. Beth is headstrong and often downright rude. Jacob, one of Beth's bus driver friends, tries to model the golden rule for Beth and convince her to follow it herself, but she isn't going to be easily swayed.

Chapters in the book alternate between describing Beth's relationships with people--whether they be bus drivers, her social workers, or her boyfriend--and telling the heart-breaking story of Rachel and Beth's years growing up. As the book progresses, the two sisters come into clear focus as two wounded people who are stuck in ruts they find nearly impossible to climb out of. Rachel realizes that she is just as much "a clock that nobody can reset" as her sister is. What started out as a favor to her sister, just spending whole days riding the bus with her, becomes a transformational experience in her own life.

For the most part, it is the bus drivers who are the heroes of the book. I will never look at a bus driver the same way again. It takes a real gift to be courteous to rude people, understanding of hurried people, sympathetic with hurting people, and compassionate toward people like Beth who don't fit easily into society, all why negotiating traffic and weather. Some of the bus drivers start out with great intentions, but weary of Beth's persistent demand for attention. I could so easily see myself as one of those. True love is shown over the long haul. It has been a long time since I have felt as convicted by my own lack of love as this boook has made me feel.

Even Rachel comes to several points at which she distances herself from her sister. Once, she goes to the back of the bus and acts like she doesn't know her. It sounds terribly hurtful, but having read to that point in the book, I completely understood. Those who love Beth the most seem to set boundaries for their relationship, but continue to care for her even when she bucks against them. Relationships aren't easy. When those boundaries are set though, they really do enjoy her, and just riding the bus all day, Beth really does have a lot to offer society.

Having a sacramental view of sex and marriage, I found that Rachel Simon's acceptance of people living together outside of marriage was a hurdle I had to jump over in order to appreciate the book. Apart from that one difference in values, I felt like the book would really be great for high school students to read on their own or even study in class. Riding the Bus with My Sister belongs on the shelf with other great nonfiction books like Angela's Ashes, Obasan, and The Color of Water. It had me in tears at several points. The ending was particularly a wonderful surprise.

The Help

2010-03-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Stockett's The Help is about black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's gaining the courage to tell the truth about their circumstances, though they risk their jobs and even their lives in doing so. It's a fun, lively, and thought provoking book. Stockett has a great sense of drama and an amazing ear for dialect.

There are several heroes, but the central character is Aibileen, a middle-aged maid who eventually gets the others involved. Aibileen is particularly heroic because she is the first woman willing to tell her story to Skeeter, a young white reporter who wants to write about more important things than how to clean things. Together, and eventually with others they enlist, they set to writing a book about the experiences of black maids in a nameless town in Mississippi. In the process, Aibileen discovers that she herself has a talent for writing as well as persuasion. In order to get her friend Minny to join the effort, she simply acknowledge's that Minny is right:"We don't want a change nothing around here." As a result, Minny starts thinking about the word "Truth." "It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that's been burning up all my life."

Truth is as important to Skeeter as it is to the maids. Constantine, her own maid when she was growing up, taught her the importance of it. Tall and gangly, Skeeter always felt unattractive, an impression that her mother encouraged, but Constantine taught her to say, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?"

"Them fools" includes much of society at that time in the South. Skeeter finds a book of Jim Crow laws, which she realizes defy logic. One involves segregating blind people who can't even see color: "The Board shall maintain a separate building on separate grounds for the instruction of all blind persons of the colored race." The truly blind are those who see color, and one of Skeeter's best friends, Hilly Holbrook, seems to be the worst of them. Though she is horrified by having to use a toilet that a black person might have used, she somehow doesn't think she is a racist. "'It's true. There are some racists in this town,' Miss Leefolt say. Miss Hilly nod her head, 'Oh, they're out there.'" Probably the most obvious indication of Hilly's blindness is her desire to help "poor starving children in Africa," but her total disregard for black people in her own neighborhood.

Though the book is a clear indictment of the racist South, Stockett carefully avoids painting Hilly or any of the others as monsters of evil. Aibeleen, for instance, can't help but admire Hilly's love for her children: "One thing I got to say about Miss Hilly, she love her children. About every five minutes, she kiss little William on the head. Or she ask Heather, is she having fun? Or come here and give Mama a hug. Always telling her she the most beautiful girl in the world. And Heather love her mama too. She look at Miss Hilly like she looking up at the Statue a Liberty. That kind a love always make me want a cry. Even when it going to Miss Hilly. Cause it makes me think about Treelore, how much he love me. I appreciate seeing a child adoring they mama."

The book also shows the passive, cowardly type of Southerner in the form of Stuart, who wonders why Skeeter wants to "stir up trouble." My guess is that there were as many Stuarts in Jackson as there were Hillys, though that may be giving too much credit to human nature. The only character who doesn't "see the lines" between the two races or even between the classes is Celia. She wants to sit down in the kitchen with Minny over coffee, but be one of Hilly's high society friends. You can't help but love Celia, but even she isn't idealized. Her life is a train wreck in itself, and she desperately needs someone like Minny.

Though the book is primarily about racism, it's almost as much about mothers and daughters--about Constantine and her daughter, Elizabeth and Mae Mobley, and Charlotte and Skeeter. All of these mothers at one point or another give in to society's expectations rather than loving their daughters. Of course the book is as much about Constantine and Skeeter and Aibileen and Mae Mobley--relationships where the black maid truly mothers the child.

The Help has some strong language, sometimes that is central enough that you can't pass over it and get the plot. The situation involving "the terrible awful" is one case in point. I won't be a spoiler, but it is aptly named. I never quite recovered from reading this part of the book. I'm trying to decide whether I'm a prude or not. One of my best friends is a seventh grade math teacher who once put up a poster of a guy picking his nose on the door to his room. I feel sure that he would love this part of the book. I'm just saying it isn't for everyone.

The Screwtape Letters

2010-01-25T10:43:00.000-08:00

This is a review by Richey Riviere, one of my students.

Many people struggle with the daily grind of trying to stay faithful and be a good person, whether they are Christians or not. In one's own life it is hard to imagine the subtle ways in which the devil "comes to steal, kill, and destroy." Temptations from the devil seem like they would be sins that are clearly defined in the Bible and that pastors in local churches regularly comment on. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, however, expounds on a more thoughtful and descriptive perspective of Satan's techniques.

The Screwtape Letters is an account of the letters from senior demonic tempter Screwtape to his young, inexperienced nephew, Wormwood. In his letters, Screwtape offers advice on how to turn the man Wormwood has been assigned to away from "the enemy" (God) and to assure that the man's final resting place be reserved in the pits of hell. The Screwtape Letters forces one to examine one's own life and brings to light certain weaknesses in the human mind, whether one is a Christian or not. Most of what the book expounds on isn't even what most Christians think of when they think of someone who is on his way to hell. Screwtape makes a big deal out of the fact that big sins like murder are no worse than small sins like gambling, if they will both eventually lead that person away from God: "Indeed the safest road to hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts . . . ." Screwtape tells his nephew that he should focus on exploiting the common human weaknesses and to let the humans do the rest of the dirty work in the world. In this area, C. S. Lewis displays an extraordinary understanding of human nature and what truly drives men and women.

It is interesting to see how Screwtape concedes that God is genuine in His love for humans and that God only wants the best for them (even though Screwtape later denies acknowledging this when confronted about it by higher demonic authorities). Another interesting point in the book is when Screwtape acknowledges that all pleasure comes from God and is beneficial to a human's relationship with God, even when it is achieved through sinful and non-beneficial means, such as sexual sin. He says that while the actual act is the sin and can often drive the person further from God than the pleasure will benefit him, the pleasure is still from God, no matter what the circumstances: "Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving close up to the enemy makes against us in the long run."

Lewis also points out the dangers of pretending to be someone else in order to impress others. Screwtape states, "All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be." This is a warning not to pretend to be someone who does not love God or someone who sins on a regular basis because one just might turn into this imaginary person.

All in all this is a very good book. One criticism of the book is that it might cause many high school students to have to pull out their dictionaries or read certain sections over again to understand them fully. The vocabulary and sentence structure was sometimes difficult. Still, the book is a great classic and well worth the effort it takes to read it.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

2010-01-24T17:14:00.000-08:00

Jesus took a child in his arms and told his disciples that if they wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they should become like one of these little ones. I think at least a part of what he meant was to let go of the jaded cynicism that allows adults to talk about evil as though it is something we all must accept and live with. The best way to really see through the pretenses of even the worst things in the world is to see them through the eyes of a child. In John Boyne's The Boy with the Striped Pajamas, Bruno, a nine year old boy, discovers first hand the horrors of the holocaust.

Boyne calls the book a parable and writes with a simple style that matches a child's innocent point of view. Bruno's naivety allows the reader to discover the concentration camp with "the charm of novelty," as though those images from history books and documentary films were never stamped sharply on his mind and he is standing with Bruno at the window of his new bedroom, both of their mouths "in the shape of an O," wondering what this could be. "To begin with, they weren't children at all. Not all of them, at least. There were small boys and big boys, fathers and grandfathers. Perhaps a few uncles too. And some of those people who live on their own on everybody's road but don't seem to have any relatives at all. They were everyone."

In some ways, Bruno seems too naive. I really think that at nine years old, if I had seen a vast array of men in striped pajamas surrounded by a fence, I would have surmised that this was some sort of prison. Still, there had to have been some purposefully self-induced blindness among German people during World War II. The alternative for Bruno was to accept that his father was a monstrously evil man, a conclusion that Bruno does not want to hear from his new friend Shmuel, but cannot always avoid, considering some of the glaringly wrong things he witnesses. One of the best illustrations of Bruno's inability to really take in his experiences is when the story of Shmuel's past does not sink into Bruno's mind until he is telling it to his sister. As Jesus often said of people, he had heard the story, but hadn't really listened to it.

Occasionally, Boyne goes too far and makes the children in the book unrealistically naive. When Gretel sees the concentration camp, she suggests that it is the countryside. After Shmuel's encounter with Lieutenant Kotler, Bruno asks him if he fell off his bicycle. Come on! My willing suspension of disbelief failed at those moments; the story crashed to the ground like the Hindenburg. Still, the story has stayed with me, and I have found myself mulling over it again and again.

Inkheart

2010-01-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

Dr. Roger Lundin, my professor of American literature at Wheaton College, could have gone the whole semester without teaching us, and his class would still have been one of my favorites. He could have stood at his lectern and read from William Bradford's journal every period, and we would have been mesmerized. He could have read James Fenimore Cooper, the wordiest of writers, and we would have been mesmerized. He had an amazing gift. He could read and make you feel like you were in the book. Twenty five years later I still distinctly hear his voice saying the word "beans," and it brings back the wonder of Walden. Cornelia Funke celebrates this wonderful gift in Inkheart.

The most compelling passages in the book describe Mo reading aloud: "So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained-glass pictures, tickling the skin."

Funke takes that figurative idea of making things come to life and makes it literal. Whenever Mo reads aloud, something or someone comes out of the book. What a great plot idea! Mo's daughter Meggie has never heard him read aloud though because there is a catch. Whenever someone comes out of the book, someone goes in. Though Meggie doesn't know it at the start of the book, this is why her mother is gone.

The conundrum of people going in and out of books begs the characters in Inkheart to compare the worlds of fiction to the world we live in. Wondering how she can rescue Mo and Meggie from thugs that have come out of Inkheart, the book within the book, Aunt Elinore ruminates, "The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live in. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness--and love. . . . Love, truth, beauty, wisdom, and consolation against death." While he considers Elinore naive because he has experienced the terrors within Inkheart, Dustfinger, a firebreather who was pulled out of the book, desperately wants to get back into it even as he guesses that he will come to a bad end there. He finds our world cluttered with noise and only feels comfortable at night.

The plot of Inkheart is incredibly creative and the characters are compelling, but it isn't told that well. Nothing makes me angrier than when an author witholds information from the reader in order to purposefully misguide him. It is not until pg. 395, well after we first heard about a maiden named Resa who is serving the villain Capricorn, that Funke "dramatically" tells us Meggie's mother's name in the blunt, clunky line "Teresa was her mother's name." She could have easily mentioned Teresa's name earlier in the book and let the reader put it together, even if Meggie didn't. Likewise, we are told even later than this that Dustfinger is in love with her. Also, the scenes in the book tend to meander. The writing is not as taut as, say, J. K. Rowling's is in the Harry Potter series. For instance, Capricorn hangs Resa and Dustfinger in nets for a while (which seems like it would be difficult to do in a chapel), but then sends them down to the crypt supposedly because anyone who is executed has to spend time in the crypt. How is that a reason for moving them, and why were they in the nets to begin with? Motivations are often unclear or made clear too late.

You have to read Inkheart for the beauty of the whole story rather than looking at each part too closely, but I still recommend it highly, and my daughter tells me that its sequel, Inkspell, is even better. I'm still wondering about whom I would read out of a book if I could--maybe Innocent Smith from Chesterton's Manalive or Rebecca from Scott's Ivanhoe. Better yet, what book would I like to be read into--maybe somewhere fun like The Importance of Being Ernest or a magical place like Peter Pan.

Darkness at Noon

2009-12-24T07:20:00.000-08:00

Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon is a fictional account of Stalin's purges in the late 1930's, in which many of the founding members of the Communist party either just disappeared, or were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for divergent points of view. The main character, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov has spent his life sacrificing the lives of individual people for the common good. Now he himself has been arrested for having divergent ideas. In prison, Rubashov realizes that he must either admit that he was wrong in sending others to their death or go to his death willingly himself.

Rubashov calls his personal point of view "the grammatical fiction" and tries to resist listening to its appeals to a sense of personal justice or longing. He has constructed his whole life on the principle that the individual, one person, is merely "a million divided by a million." He reminds himself that during the revolution, empiricism replaced morality: "We had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion." Because they were so confident that their course was inevitable, if anyone, even others who called themselves Communists, stood in their way, the person was arrested and executed.

Over time though, the Communist government devolved into a dictatorship. Rubashov mulls over how it happened, and his only explanation is that the masses were not ready for the revolution. He compares history to a ship going through a series of locks. When the ship passes through a lock, it has to wait for the water to rise to a level where it can pass through the next lock. The masses are like the water in that they needed time to adjust. The present dictatorship is a necessary intermediate time in which the government has to sacrifice the happiness of a generation of people in order to move forward in its original revolutionary purposes. In the mean time, no one must call into question the dictator's policies. The unity of the Communist government must be preserved at all costs.

For Rubashov this means his life, and most of the book is about his struggle to come to terms with this sacrifice. He reasons that a person's sincerity means nothing. He thinks about thirty-one men who were killed because they disagreed with the dictator over what form of manure the country should produce. However sincere they might have been, they might have caused the agricultural ruin of their country: "For us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. He who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. That is the law of historical credit." Rubashov scoffs at the Christian point of view that the individual is sacrosanct. He points out that among Christian nations, in "exceptional circumstances," the rights of the individual go out the window. Considering the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or more recently, the prisoners interned at Guantanamo without a trial, he has a point.

Behind all of Rubashov's ruminations, one can clearly see Koestler's disenchantment with Communism. He points out that the Communist leader must have "an axiomatic faith in the rightness of one's own reasoning" to suppress others' points of view through persecution. He points out that such a course of action suppresses creativity and the communication of ideas. In fact, the founders of the revolution were doomed from the start to kill each other because they were bound to disagree on some things, and minor divergences meant death. Finally, Communism offers no answers to the ultimate question of what lies beyond death, which must be faced as an individual.

Darkness at Noon is a prophetic book that that criticizes Communism from the inside out. While Animal Farm seems to present Stalin's dictatorship as a hijacking of Communism, Darkness at Noon shows how it was an inevitable result of the original revolutionary policies. I highly recommend this book to high school students who truly want to understand the twentieth century. I have talked about it mainly from a philosophical point of view, but it also offers incredibly intense drama as Rubashov faces multiple interrogations and relates to other political dissidents in prison.

The Bad Beginning

2009-12-21T06:39:00.000-08:00

There is nothing more horrifying than ordered chaos. The most terrifying people in the world are like the suave, articulate duke in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" who matter-of-factly "gave commands" for his wife to be killed. I think the appeal to The Bad Beginning, the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events is that horrific things are presented in such a matter of fact, ordered, and rhetorical way.

Take for instance how the three orphans learn of their parents' demise. A banker walks onto the beach and tells them, "Your parents have perished in a terrible fire." What could be worse than finding out this sort of thing from a banker? What could be worse than finding out this sort of thing from a banker who uses the word "perished"? What could be worse than finding out this sort of thing from a banker who uses the word "perished," and then defines it: "Perished means killed."

All the trials and tribulations of the three orphans are described in a patiently articulated, parallel form that would excite the mortal William Strunk and E. B. White. "Excite the mortal" here means "Bring back from the dead." This is an allusion to Shakespeare's Macbeth, which is another story in which things go from bad to worse. Notice the patience with which Count Olaf's friends are described: "There was a bald man with a very long nose, dressed in a long black robe. There were two women who had bright white powder all over their faces, making them look like ghosts. Behind the women was a man with very long and skinny arms, at the end of which were two hooks instead of hands. There was a person who was extremely fat, and who looked like neither a man nor a woman." In each case, we are introduced to the person, given a description, and then given an extension of the description. Each sinister character fits into place like gears on a clock, giving the impression that their grotesqueness is inexhorably woven into the fabric of things. There is no escape from calamity.

Having finished the book though, I am wondering if we have all been duped by Lemony Snicket. He calls the book The Bad Beginning and warns us that there won't be a happy ending. Come on! I'm not going to say how, but the kids get the best of Count Olaf in the end. You wouldn't have a story if they didn't. If you really want something without a happy ending, watch the movie "Doubt," or go see the play Waiting For Godot. I actually think The Bad Beginning is a good beginning. We'll have to see how things turn out at the end of the whole series. Maybe the kids will all get eye tattoos on their heals and join up with Count Olaf's acting troop. Klaus will learn that the reading of many books brings great grief, Violet will discover how to breed anthrax, and Sonny will try to chew her way over an electric fence.

The Princess and Curdie

2009-12-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

As a freshman in college, I became sophisticated. I remember my friend Joanne McAllister asking me what happened to my old fun self. I had swapped it for French Existentialism and thought it a good trade. It's not that I actually became a French Existentialist; I just associated myself with it and felt very intellectual. Camus and Sartre seemed to see through everything, and their despair had a compelling allure. When I earned a C in philosophy, I had to rethink the whole thing; my professor saw through me. Like Curdie in George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie, I'm actually a natural believer, but growing up muddies the mind. MacDonald says of Curdie in his youth, "He grew at this time faster in body than in mind--with the usual consequence, that he was getting rather stupid--one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen. At the same time I do not think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of superior faculty and strength of mind."

MacDonald's description of the people of Gwyntystorm gives a prophetic picture of modern society: "All men said there was no more need for weapons or walls. No man pretended to love his neighbor, but everyone said he knew that peace and quiet behaviour was the best thing for himself, and that, he said, was quite as useful, and a great deal more reasonable." Without any sense of the eternal, people are reduced to believing in "commerce and self-interest." For those who are depressed by the lack of higher ideals, there are "pills for enabling people to think well of themselves."

It's hard to read this book without seeing George MacDonald as the forerunner to C. S. Lewis. The Princess and Curdie is like a rough version of The Chronicles of Narnia. That wonderful blend of Romanticism and Christianity is there, but in a crude form, as though Narnia has been dipped into Grimm's Fairy Tales. Two kinds of people with very different perspectives inhabit this world: "In the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection." Notice that the dying part is inevitable. For the person who believes in enduring things, a day is a death not only to self, but to this world. Curdie is given grace to be "forever freshborn."

The old princess also gives Curdie another gift, something one might want to use on a used car salesman. Curdie can shake hands with a person and tell whether he is continuously dying and becoming more bestial, or continuously being resurrected and becoming more truly human. Curdie's best friend is a grotesquely ugly dog. Though Lena has a short body with long legs "made like an elephant's" and her underteeth are somehow outside her lips, when he holds her paw, it feels like a small child's hand.

Armed with this gift, his ugly dog, and a miner's mattock, Curdie heads off on a mission set before him by the old princess, "Old Mother Wotherwop." You have to love that name. The Princess and Curdie is a wonderful adventure, though somewhat episodic at first because we don't figure out what the mission is until a good way through the book. It's enough like the old fairy tales that you never know what Curdie will swing his mattock at next. My favorite character is the creature with "neither legs nor arms nor head nor tail," who proves useful in ways I will not divulge. The story gathers force and ends with an exciting climax, though it clunks to a finish on the last page. I recommend it to anyone who wishes there was another book in The Chronicles of Narnia. It might not be another course to the meal, but it makes a great hors d' oeuvres.

Deerskin

2009-11-25T09:15:00.000-08:00

I recently read an article in U.S. News and World Report that claimed that roughly one in three women in the world have suffered physical or sexual abuse at some point. I think of the world as a relatively safe place for women, but it just isn't. Even if I could wrap my mind around the scope of men's disregard for women that that statistic implies about our world, it couldn't quantify the suffering of even one individual. It would take a book like Robin McKinley's Deerskin to do that. This book at first seems like a typical escapist fantasy novel, but it takes a savage turn into an intense story of a girl's recovery from horrific abuse.

McKinley relentlessly drags the reader through Lissar's emotional turmoil and physical hardship. Alone in the harsh, but quiet place she escapes to, Lissar sees herself in a bucket of water she has poured to try to clean herself. The sight and touch of her own body brings back a "howling darkness" that she cannot face, and she blacks out and throws up. "There was little in her stomach to lose, but it felt as if her body were turning inside out to get away from itself; as if her flesh, her inner organs, could not bear the neighborhood of the demon that ate at her, that by exposing her body the demon became visible too." How can a woman recover when her own self--her own body, her own memories--cause her to wretch from shame and humiliation?

Lissar manages through a miserable winter with the companionship of her dog, Ash, who has shared in every step of her suffering. Whenever she comes to the end of her rope, she either feels Ash's tongue "licking her wounded, bleeding body," or hears her "loud whuffling breath in her ear." On one level, Deerskin simply celebrates the close relationship that man and dog can have, the deep sympathy and loyalty that can spring up between the two. In Lissar's case, that sympathy is a fundamental part of her healing.

Ultimately, Lissar cannot heal on her own though, even with the love of her dog. At her lowest point, divine intervention brings her the gift of time, and when she is ready, a chance to confront the man who assaulted her. Much of the book dwells on time spent healing. Even a time of denial is a necessary stage to heal some wounds. McKinley is incredibly patient in painstakingly drawing that period out; when Lissar returns to confront her past, even then, she does so tentatively and only because of a desperate crisis. The confrontation scene felt a little over-drawn to me; I had a hard time reconciling the flaming avenger with the innocent victim. But then the scene is saved when Ossin does distinguish between the two and takes the real Lissar's hand. I'm still thinking through why I was uncomfortable with the scene. I recently saw Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards and felt like the total reversal of power in which the Jews avenge themselves in a demonic fury on the Nazis was totally unsatisfying and farcical. Deerskin rightly stops short of that.

The themes in Deerskin are too mature for most high school students, especially for boys. However, I recommend the book to adults. It may have the most likable prince in all of literature, and while he pursues Lissar nobly, he does not sweep her off her feet and resolve all her problems for her. His heroic nature does not crowd out the dignity of her personal struggle to recover. He offers her sympathy and love, but beyond that, he respects her as a woman--a real woman who rolls around with dogs, likes to feel the ground under her feet, and can peg a charging wild beast in the eye with a rock.

The Midwife's Apprentice

2009-11-14T12:06:00.000-08:00

What do you want? Every teenager needs someone to ask him that question. I remember having no idea what I wanted as a teenager. Graduation from high school came as an utter shock. My world collapsed, and for the first time I seriously asked myself, "Now what? Who am I going to be?" In Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice, Alyce is confronted with this question. Her answer is "a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world."

From the start, Alyce has been steadily pursuing what she wants with an inquisitive and industrious mind. As the story opens, the midwife finds her sleeping in a dung heap and derisively calls her Dung Beetle. As demeaning as the name is, it reflects her ingenuity; she slept in the warm dung to keep herself from freezing. Throughout the book, Beetle keeps her eyes open and learns what she can, whether it is listening in while the midwife delivers babies, or cleaning up the inn close to the old scholar while he teaches his cat to read. She's not afraid to try things either. This is most notably shown when the Devil comes to town and all her enemy's vices are exposed. However, this quality is put to its greatest test when she is asked to help Emma Blunt through a difficult delivery.

So many things contribute to Alyce finding her place in the world. A merchant compliments her hair and gives her a comb. She makes a friend of an enemy. She makes another friend through a compassionate act. She tries something a second time and learns perseverence. She gains in dignity in the reader's eyes long before she does in her own.

Maybe most important of all, she decides that she will have a name. How important a name is! "My name is Alyce." This is a book about a poor girl who simply wants a place in her village, but as she demanded that others call her Alyce, I was reminded of the movie Gladiator: "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius."

The Midwife's Apprentice was one of the most satisfying coming of age stories I have read. On top of that, the book gives a full picture of life in a Medieval village in England. Cushman gives an author's note at the end, supplying a short history of midwives. By that point, she had me as curious as Alyce was about all the strange practices, and I read it eagerly.

The Hero and the Crown

2009-10-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

At my daughter Joanna's graduation, I presented her with a sword. I told her that God had put within her an adventurous spirit and that I was proud of her and wanted to see her go out and make the most of it. It probably seemed hokey to some people, but I stand by it. At the time, it felt a little strange because the sword already belonged to her (I had stolen it from her room for the ceremony), but now that I have read Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, I realize that there is a precedent for presenting a daughter with her own sword and that good things happen when you do.

The first half of this book would be awe inspiring for any girl with a romantic thirst for adventure. Aerin struggles through a debilitating illness, befriends an injured war horse, trains him back to greatness, and with a dogged patience that would rival Thomas Edison's, develops a concoction that will defend her against dragon fire. Thus armed, she heads off to fight dragons. Step aside, St. George! Step aside, Prince Whatever Your Name Is in Sleeping Beauty! The description of Aerin's battle with Maur beats any I've read anywhere in English literature. It makes a mockery of such silliness as Beowulf leaning up on one arm and prying Grendel's claws back with one hand. You don't defeat a monster many times your size without being slung around, charred to a crisp, beaten to a pulp, and left for dead yourself.

The second half of the book is a bit harder to swallow. Who is this Luthe guy? How old is he? Is he really bald? Why fall in love with him when Tor is back home fighting off the northern demons? Aerin's experience with Luthe drags on beyond endurance. Listening to Aerin and Luthe beside the silver lake rivals listening to Bella and Edward talk in the cafeteria. When she falls in love with him, it feels like Luke Skywalker has fallen in love with Yoda (minus the gender problem--okay, maybe that was a bad analogy). All the same, at the end when she has nicely turned back to Tor but somehow keeps Luthe in her heart for the next life--yuck--it reminded me of what a good thing it was for Rowena that she didn't know how often Ivanhoe thought about Rebecca. We're supposed to believe that "it was her love for Luthe that made her recognize her love for Tor," that "her destiny, like her love, like her heritage, was double." It never comes together for me.

All the same, when Aerin gets back to Damar, the book picks up again, and there are some great battle scenes. The book is like a beautiful figure with a gaping wound. What do you do with it? Joanna tells me she just reads the parts she likes. That answer would make Aristotle turn over in his grave, but if you look at it like an Arthurian romance where the whole is clunky and episodic but certain parts pierce your heart, it might work. In that sense, The Hero and the Crown fits right in with other great fantasies in the Medieval tradition.

Peter Pan

2009-10-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I day dreamed about getting tied to a stake. It wasn't always the same bad guys who captured me. Sometimes it was Medieval bandits, sometimes Arabs, sometimes pirates, sometimes Nazis, sometimes Soviets, but most often it was Indians. The shape of my world sprung from "Rin Tin Tin" episodes. I watched them avidly and idolized the little boy who owned the dog and got to wear a uniform just like the Cavalry officers. My mother sewed a stripe down each side of my blue pants for Christmas one year and proved her worth. They always captured me and tied me to the stake because I was trying to save a girl who was already tied to another stake. So there we stood a few yards apart, our hands tied behind our backs, without a hope in the world. If she was gagged, she stared at me with burning eyes that said, "I love you. Thanks for trying." If we weren't gagged, I said something along the lines of "To die will be an awfully big adventure." I know that J. M. Barrie had these same sort of dreams as a child. The amazing thing is that he seemed to fuel them into his adulthood and wrote Peter Pan.

Neverland is familiar to anyone who had a backyard growing up. Things are not as perpetual in the Neverland of the book as they are in the Disney movie, where the Indians are usually spoofing when they catch the lost boys. Neverland is gloriously dangerous in the book. The pirates are out to kill the lost boys, the Indians are out to kill the pirates, and the animals are out to kill the Indians. Hook may kill a pirate simply to show his method, and when there are too many lost boys, Peter "thins them out." Yikes. Apparently, children on the mainland need to do some more clapping too, because not all fairies survive this tale.

There are plenty of other familiar things too. There is a wife's kiss that a husband can't ever quite catch. There is a boy's arrogance that makes him really believe that someone else's idea was his own, and yet his desperate need for bandages for the slightest of wounds. Above all, the book acknowledges that children are heartless; this is what makes them so attractive, because it shows an absolute faith in a mother's love. "Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time; and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be embraced instead of smacked."

If you enjoy the sort of word play and rhetorical flourish that you find in Alice in Wonderland, or A Series of Unfortunate Events, you will love Peter Pan. I must offer up an example: "It was the grimmest deed since the days when [Hook] had brought Barbecue to heel; and knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised had he now paced the deck unsteadily, bellied out by the winds of his success?" Read and dream again.

Peace Like a River

2009-09-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite songs is Bob Dylan's "Brownsville Girl." In that song, he describes watching a cowboy movie in which Gregory Peck is gunned down while riding across the desert. The townspeople want to string up the kid who shot him, but the dying gunfighter says the kid shot him in a duel fair and square. He says, "I want him to feel every moment what it's like to face his death." What a great line! Bob Dylan says that the scene keeps blowing "right through me like a ball and chain." I get that. I feel the same way about Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, which is a modern Western.

Peace Like a River is really about which of two kinds of heroes Reuben Land is going to become. His older brother Davy is the independent Lone Ranger type who takes matters into his own hands. Early in the book, Davy asks Reuben, "You think God looks out for us?" and when Reuben answers, "Well, yeah," Davy asks, "You want Him too?" For Davy, having someone take care of things for him goes against the grain. When Davy hears the story of how their father was flung four miles away by a tornado and God delivered him unbruised, it really bugs him. The truth is Davy is amazing. Reuben's description of Davy hunting is right out of a Chuck Norris poster:

"His right index finger is just whitening on the trigger, and on his face is nothing at all but the knowledge that the goose is his.
Not confidence--I understand confidence. What Davy had was knowledge."

Reuben and his little sister Swede idolize their older brother. Swede, a romantic eight year old, writes narrative poetry about Sunny Sundown, a lone hero from the Old West. At one point Sunny rides into town and threatens a whole mob of people who are about to hang an innocent man:

"His clothes and hat were black as ink, his dancing mustang pale,
His eyes were blue and hard enough to make the sun turn tail.
He said, 'You want to hang this man, I'll give you each the same.
I don't much like a mob,' said he, 'and Sundown is my name.'"

It's incredibly inspiring, but as the novel progresses and Davy becomes a vigilante, Swede runs into difficulty trying to make things turn out all right for Sunny.

Reuben's other hero is his father, Jeremiah, the quiet and steady janitor at his school. If Davy is like Chuck Norris, then Jeremiah is like Gregory Peck. He is concerned, but unruffled by threats against the life and well-being of his family. He prays, trusts in God, and teaches his children that retalliation only leads to escalation, but when it comes time to act, he wields his broom with a vengence. His faith doesn't come easy to him though. On occasions he has shouting matches with God, and one night seems to wrestle with him like Jacob. God works extraordinary miracles through Jeremiah, often ones he doesn't even notice himself, and some of them remarkably self-sacrificing. When a vindictive principal fires him, Jeremiah touches his face, healing him of a bad skin condition.

Reuben's own physical condition factors in the way he relates to his brother, his father, and ultimately God. He has terrible asthma and says that he couldn't be self-sufficient like Davy even if he wanted to. "The weak must bank on mercy--without which, after all, I wouldn't have lasted fifteen minutes." At the same time, he struggles with reliance on a God who miraculously saved him at birth, but left him with lungs like clogged dryer vents. When his father miraculously walks off of the back of a pick-up truck one night, Reuben wonders why God hasn't healed him. "For the first time the thought ingressed that if this man, my father, beloved by God, could work miracles--if he could walk on air--then fixing my defective lungs ought to be a picnic. Yes, indeed, a day at the old beach."

Reuben eventually meets Jape Waltzer, one of the creepiest villains in all literature. Jape is the epitome of self dependence. He scolds Reuben for thanking God for the food. "You are thanking God for the food when he did not give it to you. I gave it to you and did so freely. Thank me." He sneers at Reuben's timidity and tries to teach him how to breathe: "No, no. Make the attempt. Make up your mind and breathe." I wanted to reach into the book and smack the guy, but I know if I met him face to face, he would freak me out as much as he does Reuben.

Peace Like a River is an American classic that probes a value that Emerson made our most defining characteristic, self dependence. Enger writes with a beatifully poetic and yet boldly masculine style that often jumps off the page. I use this book for summer reading, and on the whole kids love the book and discuss it enthusiastically.

Watership Down

2009-08-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

I wish I were a knight. I would have been a miserable one, no doubt; lugging heavy armor around has to be tough on a weak abdomen and a guy who has had four hernia surgeries wouldn't have lasted long, but I still wish I were a knight. A few years ago I read John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and I think though I have wanted to be a knight all my life, that's when I realized it. A man is meant to face his worst fears, fight for truth and justice, kneel before a king, devote himself heart and soul to a lady, wear shining armor, ride out on impossible quests, make oaths that will eventually cost him his life--all that stuff. This brings me to Richard Adams's Watership Down, a book that unabashedly says that one should live on the edge. By the way, it's about rabbits, but don't be fooled into thinking it's a warm fuzzy story.

In Watership Down, Hazel and his compatriots encounter a warren of rabbits who have forgotten what it means to be rabbits. They are rich--filled full with flayrah (garden vegetables) every morning--huge, healthy, sophisticated, modern, and strangely depressed. In my mind they personify a lot of what's wrong with modern man. The more this society looks like our modern world, the more uncomfortable the visitors get with it. It's as though someone from Medieval England stepped into 20th century America, or I suppose England. Fiver, Hazel's little brother who has prophetic insight, wants to have nothing to do with the unnatural society from the start and is only dragged in against his will.

The downfall of their spirit begins with having security and wealth handed to them. A man walks by every morning and leaves them food. He shoots any predators that come their way. He pretty much leaves them alone to live in perfect bliss. The catch is that every once in a while a rabbit mysteriously disappears.

A whole culture develops out of this unnatural situation. The rabbits make no raids on neighboring farms. They have no leader because they don't need one. As they sit around in their warren with nothing natural to do, they develop into a "high society." For instance they greet each other with a strange dance, they sing their young to sleep, they store food underground, and they laugh in ironic situations. When Hazel tells Cowslip that he is going outside in the rain to eat some grass, Cowslip laughs, presumably because it is so unnecessary to eat in such an uncomfortable situation. Hazel is utterly freaked out by the laughter, which is totally alien to simple rabbits, and runs away from him. Even though the rabbits of the warren are huge, there is a weakness of spirit to them, and Blackberry says they just don't seem like fighters.

The difference between the two groups reaches a head when they tell stories. Dandelion's story is about the wily, adventurous El-ahrairah, the mythical first king of the rabbits who wages bets with Frith, the sun god, and raids his enemies' gardens. The rabbits of the warren call the story old fashioned and say they prefer dignity to trickery. Their "story teller," Silverweed, on the other hand, recites a poem in which he accepts death with an eerie romantic dignity and asks Frith to take his breath away as though it were the natural course of things--something Elizabeth Kubler-Ross might have written. Fiver freaks out when he hears the poem and tries to push his way out of the warren. When his friends question him about his rude behavior, he says, "Something can be true and dangerous folly at the same time."

This is why I tend to vote conservative, save the orange skins for our compost pile, and want to be a knight. I don't want things done for me. I don't want to be safe. I don't want to accept the circle of life and the inevitability of death. I'm with Fiver. "Though wise men at the end know dark is right," I want to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." William Wordsworth warned us two hundred years ago that as society becomes more sophisticated, people live less. He shook his head at aristocrats who had servants pour their tea and put their boots on for them. Why would doing nothing make one superior and happy? He was all for milking one's own cow. For the rabbits, that means foraging in dangerous grounds, stealing does from other warrens, and raiding farms--living with danger, courage, and trickery.

It's a wonderful life to live, and Hazel embraces it with such zest that when I turned the page to the final section of the book and discovered "Hazel-rah" in bold letters, I was ready to ride out with him in battle (or hop out). And pitched battles there are! I have not even mentioned the evil General Woundwort and his regime that "keeps his warren safe" with monomaniacal repression. I cannot recommend Watership Down enough. In my opinion, it belongs on the shelf between The Once and Future King and Lord of the Rings.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

2009-06-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is an incredibly fun adventure story. It clips along, always engaging the reader with wonderfully creative things in the magical world such as trading cards with moving characters who leave their pictures because they have better things to do. The characters in the novel are absolutely Dickensian, from Vernon Dursley--the fat, blustering uncle who sells drills--to Hagrid--the gargantuan, but tender-hearted gamekeeper who desperately wants a baby dragon.

I think I personally liked the book best because it captures the spirit of a boarding school, a place where you are forced to sink or swim with teachers and fellow students. When Professor Snape picks on Harry, making fun of his fame from the very first day of school, Harry just has to tolerate it and try to get along as best as he can. Harry loves Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry though. He makes the best friends of his life there, and they spend endless amounts of time together, whether they are studying, hanging out, or sneaking around the castle.

At one point in the book, Professor Dumbledore tells Harry, "The Truth . . . it is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone does more than provide a great plot, setting, and characters. The themes in the book are universal, placing J. K. Rowling squarely on the side of absolutes, as opposed to say Lemony Snicket, who skates away from truth with brilliant negative capability in his postmodern series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. A study contrasting both series would create great discussions in a high school classroom.

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry returns night after night to the Mirror of Erised until Professor Dumbledore warns him that the mirror gives "neither knowledge or truth. . . . It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live." There is at least a nod here to the idea that reality is not what we make it. Contrast this to the sort of blather you hear from mindless movies and TV shows: "You can be anything you want to be." Later, the man with two faces tells Harry that Lord Voldemort taught him that "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it," a central idea in the teachings of Nietszche and Foucault, among others, that has so dominated 20th century thinking. In opposition to this, Rowling elevates sacrificial love as the essence of what is good and what paradoxically has the power to transcend and defeat what Voldemort calls power, a lust for personal gain. Ultimately, if self sacrifice to the point of death is to be of lasting value, if life here on earth is not everything and the greatest good is not to live as long and as happily as possible, then there must be a greater reality beyond death. Professor Dumbledore explains that Nicholas Flamel and his wife have discovered just this: "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."

Finally, I love this book because I love conspiracy theories. What if there really were magicians all around us doing their best to hide all their fun activities? It's worth a second glance at the kitchen chimney to see if a letter will come flying out of it. Okay, I live in America and have no kitchen chimney. Where is America in all of this anyway? This is a very Anglo-centric book. The world of the series broadens to Europe later, but for all the Americans buying the series, you'd think Rowling would include us a bit more. I think we should demand a sequel of our own from her--I don't know--something like Harry Potter and the Connecticut Conspiracy. I'm seeing Harry, now an Auror, swooping over to New England to face the secret spawn of Voldemort who has infiltrated the CIA through a long lost tie to the Salem Witch Trials. . . naaah, doesn't work. Harry belongs in the world of shepherd's pie and crumpets.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

2009-06-15T07:21:00.000-07:00

In Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Cody Tull wonders if you can "classify a person . . . purely by examining his attitude toward food." It's a fascinating idea. In my own immediate family, we have very different attitudes toward food. My daughter Joanna, for instance, eats the same thing for every lunch--a Dagwood sandwich (with turkey, Provolone cheese, tomato, cucumber, and mounds of lettuce), pretzels, and a cut up apple--with a kind of joy that I can only dream of. My other daughter, Emma, goes through stages in which she binges on one thing or another until she gets sick of it--bagels, Oreos, tuna fish on crackers, Michaelina's frozen meals, salads with tomatoes and mushrooms. My wife, Betty, could have the same menu every week and be perfectly happy. I, on the other hand, want at least one experimental meal every week and would be delighted if we rarely ate the same thing twice. As the shopper in the family, I buy the standards for Joanna and Betty, keep up with Emma's new trends, and look around for the one interesting thing that I want to enjoy that week. You thought I was going to start interpreting here, but I know better. If Cody is right, maybe you can figure us out.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is really about claustrophobic family relationships. The sins of the fathers are passed down to the sons. Things that happened ages ago keep getting drudged up. Narrow patterns of behavior from childhood are inescapably carried into adulthood and infect all other relationships. Ways of coping with sorrow and bitterness somehow feel like glossing things over. It's a world in which everyone lets each other down. And yet it is a world in which the family keeps getting together, and love is the scabs on our wounds.

If no one has labeled the idealistic family member an archetype, it's time someone did. Isn't there someone in your family that is bound to burst out, "I just wanted us to have a wonderful Christmas together," utterly surprised that the broil has begun again? In my family it is my father, bless him. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, it is Ezra Tull, who keeps planning the proverbial family dinner, sure that this time everyone will somehow get that Frank Capra feeling. You could actually see the main conflict in this book as the family vs. the dinner. Can they finally make it through a dinner all together, no one having thrown water in someone else's face or run out the door in a flood of tears?

I would never require a student to read this book: it might be so familiar to him that it would feel like being locked in a closet. It's that realistic. However, I would shove it toward any serious reader or writer. Both the writing style and the characterization are excellent, and any aspiring writer could learn from Anne Tyler.

Black Like Me

2009-05-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus tells Scout that one person can never fully understand another person without stepping into his shoes. I don't think anyone has done that to the extent that John Howard Griffin did when writing Black Like Me. The "knee-knocking courage," as Dick Gregory puts it, of what he did--changing the pigment of his skin through taking pills (sounds like something out of a dermatological horror show), exposing himself to ultra-violet rays, staining his skin, and then walking around in the Deep South to see how it felt--is astounding. Because the book seemed as confessional as it seemed indignant, because he spoke as a black man, but also as a torn white man behind that black man, the narrative drew me in.

Griffin's experience pointed out things I had never considered in practical terms before. For instance, I had always thought that for every drinking fountain or bathroom for white people, there was one for black people nearby, that the problem was merely the insult. Griffin describes one situation in which he is not allowed to use a dilapidated outhouse for whites and has to walk fourteen blocks to the nearest bathroom.

One of the most compelling revelations to Griffin was the anonymity he felt as a black man. He determined from the start never to lie about who he was, but very few people asked. Most white people simply saw him as an old black man whose past they had no interest in. This anonymity of merely being part of the black mass, coupled with the stereotype that black men have an uninhibited sexual virility, revealed itself in an even uglier way. As he hitch-hiked through Mississippi and Alabama, Griffin had to endure conversations with white men who felt that they could tell him anything about their sexual desires and ask him equally indecent questions.

The reader feels the strain of the decent black man who has to smile submissively to the hateful and degraded white man who never the less feels superior. Griffin describes the feeling "a hate stare" from a white man in a bus station gave him: "Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: 'What in God's name are you doing to yourself?'"

I've imagined the mixed reception this book would receive in my classroom. For the most part the white kids think racism is now a non-issue and become resentful when the black kids still bring it up. There is a prevailing attitude that once laws were changed back in the sixties and seventies, the effects of hundreds of years of oppression were easily wiped out. They love reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and I can't stress how much good that book has done in the Deep South, but it is to a certain extent inocuous because it depicts a white man helping a black man. Toward the end of Black Like Me Griffin points out that the civil rights movement had to move beyond this kind of paternalism. He describes how the paradigm of "fragmented individualism," in which a black man tried to fit into white society, gave way to the paradigm of a nation within a nation, in which black men built a society of social and economic strength of their own alongside white society in hopes that in time the two would merge gradually on an equal footing.

Late in the book, Griffin faults a white crowd for clapping for him while remaining aloof when a black man said essentially the same things. He says that "white men could not tolerate hearing them from a black man's mouth." Ironies like this were understandably difficult to deal with, and for the most part, Griffin presents a fair picture. Occasionally, a critic could see through some of his erasures. For instance, he condemns the white people's stereotype of the sexed up black man as totally unfounded, but later mentions that when he was white again, he had to guard against using the "semiobscene language that negroes use among themselves." He also spoke out against white people's notion that when black people bought homes in Atlanta, property values were bound to go down by saying, "In every instance, they have improved the homes they have bought from the whites and built even better ones." That seems overstated.

For all the talk about us having moved beyond racism in the Deep South, I believe teaching this book in my class would create heated conversations, maybe necessary ones. A few weeks ago I suggested to another teacher at my school that we teach The Red Badge of Courage, and she said, "It's hardly worth it because the kids get bogged down in arguments over the northern point of view." It didn't surprise me. A student walked into my classroom a few months ago and announced that he had carried a sign in a parade the night before that read, "My president is black, and so is my future." I asked him exactly what kind of a racist he considered himself, and he seemed surprised and indignant that I would accuse him of such a thing. I don't believe he is the norm, but the fact that he felt good about carrying that sign and telling all his friends about it shows me that we have a long way to go.

The Princess Bride

2009-05-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

"Boo!" That's what I say. I've always agreed with the "withered and bent" old woman who tells Buttercup what she thinks of her marrying Humperdink. I've always liked it that Wesley slaps her across the cheek when she says that she has loved "more deeply than a killer like [he] can imagine." Okay, I admit that the slap was a bit shocking, but it certainly convinced me that he has become the Dread Pirate Roberts and that he has come along way from the farm boy who said, "As you wish," to every whim she had. What I have always loved about the Princess Bride is that it takes place in a world where things mean things, where ideals are worth bringing people back from the dead for. This is why I say boo to the book.

It's annoying enough that I had to stop every ten to twenty pages to hear William Goldman, or rather his pseudo-author, go on about the hot poolside woman, or his cold wife, or his fat son, but little by little he starts deconstructing his own book, so that by the time Fezzik and the baby are facing their final crisis, it doesn't really matter anymore. True Love is off grazing in a field, while Reality is selling funnel cakes in the town square. Would you believe that the message of The Princess Bride is "Life isn't fair"? The central conversation in the book doesn't even take place in the narrative of Wesley and Buttercup. The central conversation takes place between a bitter author named Edith and a little boy, the pseudo-author when he was young, who has just lost a badminton game in her back yard. She tells him he may never beat the kid who just beat him, not just in badminton, but in anything. The pseudo-author realizes this is true, and it sets him free. He goes "bonkers" with joy. "The point is, we're not created equal . . . life isn't fair. I got a cold wife; she's brilliant, she's stimulating, she's terrific; there's no love; that's okay too, just so long as we don't keep expecting everything to somehow even out for us before we die."

It's disgusting. Later, the author, or rather the pseudo-author, describes how he felt when his father told him that Wesley dies and Humperdink lives. "I guess the most amazing thing about crying though is that when you're in it, you think it'll go on forever but it never really lasts half what you think. In terms of real time. In terms of real emotions, it's worse than you think, but not by the clock. When my father came back, it couldn't have been even an hour later . . ." he had finished crying and recovered. When I read this, my "willing suspension of disbelief" clattered to the floor. Ain't no way Morgenstern wrote the bilk about Buttercup agreeing to marry Humperdink; that was right out of the mind of the pseudo-author, or maybe this time I should say the author.

Shame. Sorrow and joy go deeper than he would have you believe. Slap him in the face.

Okay, I'm done with slamming the book. I loved reading the narrative part. I loved reading the story for the ways it was similar to the movie and the ways it was different. I loved the Zoo of Death! I loved all the background stuff on Fezzik and Inigo. I can't say I liked the first chapter of "Buttercup's Baby"; I was annoyed by then, and the author's pessimism was interfering way too much with the narrative. If you can bring yourself to do it, quit where the movie ends.

Laura Serota, a Reader's Autobiography

2009-04-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

This is an autobiography of a reader written by one of my students, Laura Serota.

Reading is like traveling. A good book transports the reader into another world where there are people and situations. These might be similar to real life or complete fantasy. The tale might involve a serious or lighthearted subject. In my opinion, the greatest stories I have ever read were told as they followed a character through life changes. The maturing of a character through events and circumstances might require several books in the telling. From this preference, I must conclude that I am a series reader. This could include all the books written by the same author or books about the same character. In addition, the story line that appeals to me the most is one that contains a certain historical element. Reading, to me, is not only enjoyable, but also a learning experience. I like to learn details about a particular society of people. My second choice is a fantasy series. This type of book is truly an escape from reality. However, I am very selective. I am not one to pick up a book to read just for something to do.

I have great respect for the quality of writing from a story teller. I make an effort to know something about the book before I choose to read it. A personal recommendation from a friend is always the best. This is helpful, not only in assessing the quality of the writing, but also taking great precaution in what I allow myself to read. I have learned that when I find a story I love, I read it over and over again. I do not like to rush the plot. I like to take time to savor the detail as it unfolds. I make an effort to get full understanding of the depth of the characters as well as the twists and turns of the events. Sometimes, I get so caught up in the plot and the characters that they consume my thoughts, even my subconscious ones. I dream about the story, seeing the events happen through the eyes of the main character. Nightmares have occasionally come from this plot reenactment. Therefore, there must be careful consideration of any novel before I read chapter one. I also enjoy stories that have been treasured through the years by such authors as Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott.

My childhood was filled with as many hand-me-down things from my brothers that a girl could possibly acquire. This included books. My dad took a break from training, coaching, and disciplining my brothers for some “father-daughter time.” He read aloud a book that he had loved as a child, The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. This is a series of fables explaining the beginning of the animal kingdom. Some of the chapters include “How the Camel Got His Hump,” “How the Leopard Got His Spots,” and “The Elephant’s Child.” My imagination took off, and this became my earliest memory of fairytales. After this, I was intrigued with every fairytale book I could find. I came to love all of the classic fairy tales and insisted that my mom read them to me countless times.

My first love of series literature came from the novel Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The life story of Laura Ingalls growing up in the 1860’s in the untamed pioneer land out west expanded into a ten book series. I heard and read this story many times throughout my elementary school life. My mother read it aloud to me when I was too young to read, and I re-read it several times again by myself. I related to the main character in more than one way. We not only had the same first name, but shared similar responsibilities: our families expected and needed us to work around the house. This story became real to me. I imagined myself living Laura’s life. I felt that I could have done the things she did in the hardships of growing up during that time. I learned about how to churn butter, make a straw bed, milk a cow, season meat, use every available bit of anything edible, survive in below-zero temperatures, depend on myself and my family for entertainment, and reverence the Bible as the word of God. I particularly remember how happy Laura is with a simple corn-husk doll. She is grateful for simple pleasures and does not complain about chores. She is content with a hard-earned meal and a good fire in the fireplace.

My Mark Twain stage followed my elementary school years. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn made me wish my childhood could last forever. I appreciated the outdoors more after I read those books. They presented a challenge in reading ability and a realization of that particular section of society to me. To decipher the African-American dialect of that age and class level was difficult. I came to appreciate the positive changes that have occurred in the southern way of life. These books and Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe helped me to be grateful that I was living in modern times rather than the times when these stories were written.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott made me long to have sisters. They had a special bond that a girl with all brothers cannot connect with. Still, I identified with Jo March. I felt as if I shared her dreams and vision to be different from the ordinary society around her. She loves her family completely and yet feels pulled by some inner force to strive towards an achievement greater than the women of her time were accomplishing.

I realized what an escape from reality novels could be the first time I opened the cover of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. I was captivated by the world of Hogwarts. I have read all seven novels countless times. Each novel brought a different element to the series. My imagination was pushed to a place that I did not know existed.

I am a very selective reader. I do not pick up a book to read just to pass the time. I enjoy the classics, the stories that have been treasured through the years. I love to read a good novel, but, because I take precaution with the books I choose, my book list may be few in number compared to other novel lovers. When I read a good novel, I feel as if I am traveling to that place and time. I might find myself amidst the animal kingdom or among the group on a wagon trail bound for uncharted territory; I might be traveling down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave or on a mysterious train destined for Hogwarts. I feel that reading quality literature is something I will enjoy throughout my entire life.

Matt Morris, a Reader's Autobiography

2009-04-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

This is an autobiography of a reader written by one of my students, Matt Morris.

Before I started writing this paper, I did not consider myself to be much of a reader. As a senior in high school, I would have told you that I did not enjoy reading. However, when I started outlining this paper, I realized how much books are a part of my life. Books have increased my knowledge and perspective in every area of my life. As a young reader, books fascinated me. The stories came to life, and I often vicariously put myself in the place of one of the characters. The best part of my whole day was family reading time. My dad’s voice sparked my imagination every night. Even as I moved into junior high, I often asked my mom to read books to me for school to capture the full effect. I always enjoyed the book more if my mom was reading because I did not get distracted by the length of the pages or by the size of the words. In junior high, I hid the fact that my mom still read to me. If I had revealed the secret of my reading comprehension to my peers, my pride as a young independent athlete would have been crushed. I guess that I am an auditory learner, so when I hear something, I usually remember it. However, I do not always hear unless I am looking at the reader. In kindergarten, I was diagnosed with a mild to moderate hearing loss that has worsened through high school. This year I was told that I should be wearing a hearing aid, which I adamantly refused to do. I actually think that I concentrate better when I listen because I have to look at the reader or speaker to fully understand. I think I remember every book anyone has ever read to me, and while I do not mind reading, I am more easily distracted when I read to myself. Also, I am supposed to wear glasses when I read, and I am not a big glasses fan. Despite my auditory and visual issues, I appreciate all the knowledge and insight I have gained through reading. My life has been influenced by childhood books, school-assigned reading, and pleasure reading.

My childhood was filled with family members reading board books, bedtime stories, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. Dr. Seuss made me smile. The first book I remember reading on my own was The Foot Book, which was symbolic because, at the time, my dad was training to be a foot doctor. The most memorable books in kindergarten were The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Harry the Dirty Dog , and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? There was a song that accompanied the words to the Brown Bear book, so even though I could not actually read, I felt like I was really reading as I followed along with the words. I often wondered how a caterpillar could eat so much, and I really could identify with the dog Harry who was always accidentally getting in trouble. Most impressionable to me were The Giving Tree and The Little Engine That Could. The giving tree gave all it had to an ungrateful boy who became a man. I wondered if I could be like that tree and give all I had so freely and unconditionally. Or was I more like the ungrateful boy who grew into a man and became old, never giving and only taking? Mimi, my grandmother, read The Little Engine That Could every time we visited her. Mimi grew up during the depression and used the example of the engine to teach us a strong work ethic. My other grandmother’s favorite book was The Velveteen Rabbit, which always made me feel sad because the rabbit was discarded and unloved before it was changed from a stuffed animal into a real rabbit. As far as nursery rhymes, "Little Miss Muffet" was there first. She should have just killed that spider.

Since I was homeschooled through third grade, I feel like real school-assigned reading started for me in fourth grade. Reading for school included the books I chose for a book report and the books assigned to me. My favorite books have been the books that I chose, but sometimes I have been pleasantly surprised when I actually enjoyed the books that were assigned. The Westing Game was one of my favorites because of the mystery at the end, and I wondered how anyone could even make up a story like that. In The Light in the Forest, I found myself wondering how different I would be from the way I am now if I had been taken from my family as a small child and raised by Indians. Most inspirational was the story of the missionary Bruchko who had to overcome so many obstacles, including pulling large worms from his throat, just to share the gospel with those who had not heard. In My Side of the Mountain I was jealous that a boy could live outside alone in the woods. I still get sad when I think of the dogs, Ann and Dan, in Where the Red Fern Grows. Honestly, I would have been so angry if I had been asked to be a whipping boy for a spoiled prince. I cannot imagine being whipped every time someone else disobeyed in The Whipping Boy.

Often the harder books are the school-assigned reading books. Spiritually, the book that opened my eyes the most to the reality of spiritual warfare was The Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis had such a great understanding of the deeper things of life, unlike some of the writers of the classics. So many ancient writers, like Homer, wrote great classics like The Iliad and The Odyssey completely devoid of God. While I can see how characters like Odysseus, Achilles, and Poseidon may be godlike or may even become gods, so many of the ancient writings seem empty to me. If I started listing the many obscure books I have read in the last eight years in a classical school, I would be well over my word limit. The main thing I have gleaned from reading the old books is insight into the way people thought thousands of years ago. Old books have given me insight into history, but have not promoted a love for reading. In fact, the worst book I ever read was On the Social Contract by Rousseau about his impressions on French law during the Enlightenment period. A surprisingly good book was The Qur’an, which gives the Muslim perspective on the Bible. While I know the conclusions it draws are different from the Bible and therefore incorrect, I understand better how a culture could be led astray. The book that gives me balance is The Bible with its truths that I will reap what I sow and that I can keep my way pure by keeping it according to God’s Word.

The childhood books and the school-assigned reading encompass the majority of my reading experience, yet I do experience pleasure reading. Some of the pleasure reading has been encouraged by my discipleship leader and includes The Bible, Every Young Man’s Battle, and Don’t Waste Your Life. If I am honest, I would have to admit that most of my pleasure reading comes from reading sports in The Birmingham News and ESPN.com. I love sports and don’t even feel like I am reading when I am trying to find out who won last night’s game and how the win occurred, or which player was swapped, or which coach was hired or fired.

In conclusion, I have discovered that reading is a bigger part of my life than I had previously realized. Reading has probably affected every area of my life, helping me to better understand life, people, history, God, and myself. Despite excuses to avoid reading, my reading life to this point has been rich and full, encouraging me to read more.

Grendel

2009-04-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

Grendel is an amazing deconstruction and reconstruction of a story in the way that "it must have happened." John Gardner paints in the erasures of Grendel's character that the original story of Beowulf leaves out. In the original story, Grendel initially attacks Heorot out of anger that men are praising God for His creation while he himself lives under the curse of Cain. This motivation fades though, into a primal thirst for evil that leaves the reader unsatisfied. Aristotle taught us that a character's downfall must be tied to a deeply rooted flaw within him, one that the reader sympathizes with. The author of Beowulf was not working within an Aristotelian framework, but an Anglo-Saxon one in which characters could be simply evil or good, and quite apart from that, are all brought down by Fate and the hand of God. Gardner honors both traditions by giving Grendel a postmodern perspective, one that longs for truth and beauty, but cannot overcome the futility of a material world and the assurance that all things are doomed to inevitable change.

Grendel starts out as a pathetic monster, crying, "Waa!" for his mother when he is frightened, wondering about his position in the world. With no one to guide him (his mother is a brute monster with a smothering love), he observes the world alone. Because of his hideous form, he is forced to view humans from the shadows, and he is keenly aware of being an outsider. His observations of Hrothgar and the Scyldings culminate in his assessment that hegemony, "the will to power," is at the root of all things human. He looks on them with disgust. Then the poet arrives, spinning the bloodshed Grendel has seen first hand into a revisionist myth of human nobility. Grendel loves the poetry against his will. He tries to explain it away. The poet sings "for pay, for the praise of women--one in particular--and for the arm of a famous king's hand on his arm." Yet something within him cries out that he wants the poet's words to be true, even if it means that he must "be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable."

It's interesting to me that Grendel's longing for truth and beauty comes through art and not through religion. He's truly a postmodern monster. Grendel tricks Ork, the old priest, into telling him about the nature of God. What comes out is a convoluted theological ramble, the gist of which is that evil can best be defined in terms of time: "'Things fade' and 'alternatives exclude.'" God "is an infinite patience, a tender care that nothing in the universe be vain." This is not the world Grendel thinks he lives in. He reasons that "theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain." Grendel would rather eat priests than listen to them: "They sit on the stomach like duck eggs."

Grendel learns to overcome his longings from the dragon, the ultimate materialist. He argues that men build arguments on "facts in isolation," on the givens of his particular time and place, but what seems true in a moment, when seen from thousands of years away, or millions, or a million million, would seem ludicrous. There is no "absolute standard of magnitude." The moment is nothing. The dragon tells Grendel, "If man's the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him," but his final advise is to "seek out gold and sit on it." Grendel comes to see in time that the inverse is also true, that the moment is all there is. "Back there in time" is merely an illusion, something that doesn't exist anymore. There is only the moment, and the moment is always lost. We live in aporia. "Nihil ex nihilo."

Thus Grendel spends most of his time trying to kill his longings. He kills just enough of Hrothgar's men to taint the glory of his Meadhall. He toys with Unferth and his sense of heroism. He turns Wealtheow upside down, makes her squeal like a pig to expose the mystique of her beauty. Through it all, he never quite succeeds, and this is what makes him such a tragic character. I don't know if I've ever loved a villain so much.

I know that many high school teachers teach this book in conjunction with Beowulf, but my recommendation is to save it for college. I want my high school kids to absorb some of the grandeur of Beowulf before we have to deconstruct it. I don't want a modern perspective on the Anglo-Saxons in their heads quite yet. Putting Grendel off would actually honor the book's message that we should try to step outside our limited perspective. There are a lot of teen-age Grendels roaming around these days, kids with sad stories who find it easier to tear things down than believe in them.

The Plague Dogs

2009-03-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

Imagine that the world is "a great, flat wheel with a myriad spokes of water, trees, and grass, for ever turning," and each spoke is a different animal. At the hub, a man lashes the animals with a whip to make them keep turning the wheel, but it's unnecessary because the wheel turns on its own. What he should be doing is adjusting the animals from one side to another to keep the wheel balanced. This is the vision that Snitter has as he is finally on the verge of death in Richard Adams's The Plague Dogs.

This book is not for the faint hearted. It's a dog's version of Angela's Ashes where things go from bad to worse to even worse to, "Okay, that's enough already," to the point where things are so bad that the author feels the need to have a poetic conversation with the reader about the nature of the world:

"It's a bad world--for well you know
But after all, another slave--
It's easy come and easy go.
We've used them now, like Boycott. They've
Fulfilled their part. The story gave
amusement. Now as best I can
I'll round it off . . . ."

Boycott is the lead scientist at the animal research station from which the two dogs, Snitter and Rowf, escape. Adams is telling the reader that if he just wants a happy ending to a nice story, then we have used the dogs for entertainment, just as Dr. Boycott has for his obscure scientific purposes. You can't read this book and remain indifferent to the plight of animals subjected to scientific tests. Adams's criticism extends also to members of the media who blow stories out of proportion and create conflict in order to increase circulation and members of the government who use media hype to advance their own political careers. In the mean time the true stories are utterly neglected and the innocent suffer.

While all of the political stuff is compelling, The Plague Dogs largely succeeds because of its vivid sense of place, Snitter's wonderfully confused poetic mental meanderings, and the author's romantic love of all things feral. Adams's devotion to the Lake District is inscribed on every page. When I finished the book, I googled pictures of the landscape in the book and compared them with the maps. I was delighted to find that the mental pictures Adams had given me were amazingly accurate. Often, this harshly beautiful landscape is described through Snitter's point of view. A scientist has cut part of Snitter's brain out in order to confuse his sense of the subjective and the objective. Snitter often feels like he is outside himself and part of the landscape, and other times he feels like parts of the landscape are somehow inside him. As awful as the surgery is, it gives him a mystical experience of everything around him. By the end of the book, I loved him as much as Rowf does and really wanted them to survive. Both Snitter and Rowf try to become wild, learning from a wily fox how to survive. Adams praises the dark and wild as part of a nature man wrongly tries to suppress in favor of a Heaven where all is light and tame: "What will then become of your dreams, and of the phantasms that your own heart has summoned out of firelight and the dark?"

This book is not nearly as great a novel as Watership Down. The Plague Dogs feels much more didactic. It may just be that certain issues are so emotionally charged that the only appropriate response to them is an angry tirade. The book contains passages that I wanted to skim over though. The message was not seamlessly woven into the story. Though the descriptive passages are probably too long to keep high school students interested, I recommend the book to adults.

Animal Farm

2009-03-14T15:41:00.000-07:00

George Orwell's Animal Farm is a great book for high school students to read in the present political climate. Most Americans have woken up recently to a world in which they have a lot less savings and will have to work a lot harder. We're all feeling like someone has deceived us, but we're too dumb to understand exactly who or how. The easiest thing is to be like the sheep in the book and chant whatever political slogans we've been taught. My gut reaction to the economic stimulus package is to start bleeting, "Big deficit bad! Big deficit bad!" It looks a lot like a magnificent but flimsy windmill. Still, I've had to step back and wonder if I really know what's best. I'm in a situation where, being too dumb to understand, I'm having to trust others who may or may not have my best interests in mind.

The animals on the farm are smart enough to question the deception when "Four legs good, two legs bad" is changed to "Four legs good, two legs better," but they never question the integrity of the original slogan. Four legs are no better than two legs; they've been boondoggled by their own kind. This really resonates with me, a good Republican who trusted my daughter's college money with a "Christian" firm that lied to us about where they were investing our money. Now we're having to decide whether to join a class action suit based on a two-hundred and some page legal document that reads like the instructions on your DVD player. It really does seem like the easiest thing to do would be to throw the document in the trash, trust that these people always meant well, and say, "I will work harder."

Of course, Animal Farm is meant to satirize Soviet communism. Snowball is to Trostky as Napoleon is to Stalin. A glorious revolution devolves into a dreary totalitarian state. The seven original principles by which the new society will function are one by one altered to suit those in power. In the preface to my edition, Russell Baker says that Orwell believed in Socialism and was outraged that the Soviets had twisted it in their country into a murderous hierarchical society. I think nothing irked Orwell more than misinformation. The great tragedy in the book is not that the animals rebelled against their human oppressor and tried to set up an ideal society based on Old Major's speech, but that the pigs derailed the revolution for their personal gain. C. S. Lewis says in The Great Divorce, "It's not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels." If Animal Farm has anything to teach, it's this: beware when you are trying to do something truly revolutionary and make changes, and everyone is yelling, "Yes we can." Great good can come out of these times, but so can great evil if people in charge start controlling the press.

The only one in the book who isn't duped is the cranky old donkey, Benjamin, but he is the ultimate political agnostic who thinks it doesn't really matter who's in charge. Life will be miserable. I'm tempted to think he's the hero, but he is totally ineffectual. I wonder if he is a frustrated Orwell incarnate. In the preface, Baker says, "There is an aloneness about Orwell, an insistence on being his own man, on not playing along with the team as the loyal politician is so often expected to do, or else." That's Benjamin. So here's the last lesson. If you're one of those cranky old guys that no one seems to listen to, give it some time, and the world may call you a prophet.

The Education of Little Tree

2009-03-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

Barry Walker, a fellow teacher and good friend, died suddenly a few weeks ago. He introduced me to Angela's Ashes and Redeeming Love; I introduced him to The Color of Water and Peace Like a River. We were always shoving books at each other. Even though he was an avid reader (or maybe because of it!) he always had a simple air about him like Jed Clampet. I think more than anyone I have known, he wanted to make the Sermon on the Mount a reality in his life. He loved simple grace, simple love, simple discipline, simple physics, simple math. He was always looking for things in their pure form. He hated things that were complicated with human power, pride, or politics. Sometimes he seemed idealistic and naive, but I loved him for that. Little Tree's granpa in The Education of Little Tree is a lot like Barry Walker. Little Tree says that his granpa "thought Indian," and if anyone thought it was "naive" to do so, it didn't matter because it was good.

Early on in the book, granpa teaches Little Tree to "take only what you need," that this is a fundamental principle in nature and ought to be so among humans. The two observe that the panther takes the slowest deer, thereby strengthening the herd for a better future, where as men often shoot the largest deer as a point of pride or more deer than they need, simply for sport, and then wonder why the herd has weakened or moved away. Little Tree's education in the ways of nature teaches him to fit in, to live in communion with the animals and birds and plants around him. The book celebrates the economy of nature. One beautiful passage describes Nature birthing spring in a storm that flings down the weak and old in the forest as though it were "tidying up any afterbirth that might be left over from last year; so her new birthing could be clean and strong." Later, Mr. Wine, a mountain peddler, who being a Jew is another kind of outcast whose nation has been deprived of their land, tells Little Tree about the difference between stinginess and thrift, how the former is as idolatrous as hoarding riches, while the latter is keeping things in their place.

The ways of the Indian are cast into a sharp contrast with the ways of the rest of American society. Politicians, "the Law," and Christians are all lumped together as those who struggle for power for personal gain at the expense of community. Politicians stand on their soap boxes and shout about pointless things, like Catholic priests mating with nuns, in order to rile the ignorant mountain people up and gain their support. "The Law" meddles with granpa's still and Little Tree's education with a ruthless lack of consideration for either one as a real person. Christians are people who cheat Little Tree, condemn him for his supposedly illegitimate birth, and accuse each other of going to hell for baptizing in the wrong way.

Confused by cruel Christians and conflicting accounts of salvation, Little Tree decides to reject not only the idea of hell, but also the idea of evil. He says that the creek and the birds in his hollow "didn't know such word-feelings; and in a little while [he] had forgot them too." The fervor with which he has castigated especially Christians throughout his narrative belies these words. He has a deep sense of good and evil, often punctuated by his endearing statement, "Which is right." In fact, I'm not sure I have read a book with so few good people in it. There isn't a single stranger who is kind to him. The two union soldiers who helped a poor family during his grandfather's childhood are the most altruistic people in the book, and their efforts come to nothing. The world he describes is full of evil. I completely understand the sentiment of Little Tree's statement though. He spent a few wonderful years with two people who loved him deeply in a near ideal piece of nature. The longing for a place where we can live in communion with man and nature is something that the Indian has overtly tried to nurture within himself. It is something which many Christians scoff at, but I believe it is a longing for Eden. Which is right.

Manalive

2009-01-28T14:43:00.000-08:00

When my wife and I were going through counseling before we got married, our counselor, Chris Mitchell, told me, "Never stop pursuing your wife. Always remember that there is infinitely more to discover about her." That may have been the best piece of advice I have ever received, and I've found it to be true. Betty is the most amazing person, and she never ceases to surprise me. Innocent Smith, the hero of G. K. Chesterton's Manalive, will go to any length to remind himself that the things he loves in this world are worth loving.

It isn't the people we love or the things we love that become dull; it is we ourselves who become dull to them. We are like the people in Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" who, dull of soul, pass over the breath-taking bridge every morning, thinking nothing of it. Smith says of himself, "I am always trying to find him--to catch him unawares. I come in through skylights and trap-doors to find him." He tries to surprise himself, not with new and exotic things, but with the most familiar things that he has forgotten he loves. Michael Moon calls him "a ritualist," and when he encounters a Russian, Smith tells him that the Communists have it all wrong: "True revolution is a return."

In this wild pursuit, Innocent Smith is full of boundless energy. He climbs trees, shoots guns, folds origami, collects colorful bottles, all with the seriousness of a little boy at play. In fact, I think he exemplifies Schiller's assertion that we are most human when we play better than any other hero. Paradoxically, this way of finding himself comes through losing himself. Jesus would like that. "He was not asserting himself like a superman in a modern play. He was simply forgetting himself like a boy at a party." In one funny scene, which I won't explain and ruin for you, Chesterton quotes Tennyson:

"Self knowledge, self reverence, self control:
These three alone will make a man a prig."

The quotation pretty much defines the villain of the book, Dr. Warner, if he is even alive enough to be called a villain. Mary Gray, the quiet heroine, advises her friends to look for men who "look outwards and get interested in the world." With the open eyes of an outward look, a man can wake up to his world and find eternity in a puddle. A letter from Innocent Smith and one of his friends veers off on one of many tangents: "What is a puddle? A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud."

I've read this book three times now. It's becoming a ritual! It's not the easiest book to read; Chesterton's wit is sometimes overly complex and hard to follow. High school students may feel at some points like they are wading through mud, but I guarantee that if they will give themselves over to it, they will find it full of light.

The Reason for God

2008-12-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

In the introduction to The Reason for God, Timothy Keller talks about a great gulf that separates liberalism and conservatism. "Each side demands that you not only disagree with but disdain the other as (at best) crazy or (at worst) evil." As a conservative Christian school teacher living in Alabama, I have had to fight the desire to paint liberals as crazy or evil, not because it comes naturally to me, but because it's so easy to get a laugh out of my students with it. It's like pushing a button; say the word "Tree-huggers," and everyone is chuckling. I have consciously tried to beat the words "us" and "them" out of myself as a teacher. I have heard Christian authors and pastors, often in the name of evangelism, make fun of beliefs that some of my friends sincerely hold. It throws up a barrier rather than creating a bridge. In The Reason for God, Keller writes to people with a liberal bent, whether they be atheists or some other kind of believer, treating their objections to Christianity with respect. Considering where I live and the circles I walk around in, I'm probably not a great judge of how he comes across, but I can see he is trying, and I really respect that.

In each of the first seven chapters, Keller describes a common objection to Christianity and then attempts to answer it. One issue Keller brings up is the doctrine of God's judgment. "If you believe in a God who smites evildoers, you may think it perfectly justified to do some of the smiting yourself." Keller concedes that the church has a terrible record on this issue--everything from burning people at the stake to going on crusades. Then he argues that the sense of justice that makes such things wrong comes from a belief in God. He quotes from Foucault and Nietzsche, arguing that in a world without God, power is a more sensible motivator than justice. Keller argues that the belief that God will ultimately judge our enemies motivates true believers to leave judgment to God. He quotes Miroslav Volf, a writer who has been at the center of the Balkan conflict: "It takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God's refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die." Keller explains that "if you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped," you have a much stronger sense that there must be a God who judges such things.

Of course, there doesn't have to be. We can conceive of a purely material world set swirling by chance. A great many people obviously have. In the second half of the book, Keller argues that though we don't have irrefutable evidence that God exists, we have many clues that form a strong argument for Christianity, and a number of aspects to Christianity that should be appealing to the liberal mind. One of these aspects is a respect for the world we live in. In Christianity, "we do not see the illusion of the world melt away, nor do we see spiritual souls escaping the physical world into heaven. Rather, we see heaven descending into our world to unite with it and purify it of all brokenness and imperfection." Keller argues that the work of God is not only to restore the human soul, but the world we live in. Part of true Christianity then would be "the restoration of perfect shalom, justice, and wholeness in this material world." I love how God's very real love for this world comes across in the book.

The Reason for God begs for discussion. It would be an ideal book for a twelfth grade class to go through together in one quarter. It provides a good corridor not only into Christian apologetics, but also into postmodern philosophy. Many of my students don't know why anyone would have a problem with Christianity; they just haven't been led to think like people outside their own communities. This book is good medicine for the closed minded on any side of whatever religious fences we have raised.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai

2008-12-22T09:08:00.000-08:00

This is a review by one of my students, Tim Bartlett.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai, authored by Pierre Boulle, sparks the synapses of the brain into the humid jungle of an uncivilized region of Siam. British prisoners of war suffer to build a bridge over the River Kwai by the compulsion of Japanese military officials. Completing the bridge would aid the Japanese war effort by allowing trains to cross the river to supply Japanese lines with the essentials of war, such as food, ammunition, and more troops. The novel climaxes as Force 316, a demolitions team, pours their mental aptitude, time, and energy into destroying the recently complete bridge. The Bridge Over the River Kwai beautifully concocts a satisfying mixture of entertainment, instruction, function of writing style and plot, and virtual realism.

Swirling around from relaxation to intense contemplation, from laughter to anger and sadness—the reader glides through Boulle’s emotional whirlwind of entertainment. The novel grabs the reader’s interest and covers the emotional spectrum. Never uninterested, the reader excitedly jumps into his chair to experience the entertainment enclosed in The Bridge Over the River Kwai. The flow of ink across the pages of the book enters the eye, fills the brain, sparks the imagination, and BANG! an instant intriguing tale about POW’s in a jungle drops before the reader’s eyes like a projector screen. The novel is a creative code that once inserted into the imagination, creates a virtual motion picture. Reading The Bridge Over the River Kwai rewards the audience with the visual clarity of a movie and the acute understanding of a book. The novel provides something for each reader to enjoy, taste, feel, and see.

In its central theme, the novel teaches that pride in excess will destroy honor. Colonel Nicholson is the incarnation of the theme. He never releases his dignity before the Japanese officials, especially Colonel Saito, a man suffering from a raging inferiority complex. After continually questioning and refusing to obey Saito’s authority, Nicholson eventually breaks Saito down into emotional obscurity and self-pity. Undeniably, the poor Colonel Saito cannot conquer Colonel Nicholson’s pride, high morale, and inspirational leadership. At first, Nicholson’s pride increases the morale of the POW camp, but later it leads to a betrayal of the British war effort. After completing the satisfactory bridge, he arrogantly relishes in the success of his structure and resists the British attempt to destroy it. Although Nicholson builds a wonderful bridge, he becomes dishonorable because of excessive pride.

Boulle uses an aesthetically average but enjoyable writing style and plot arrangement throughout his book. The audience will appreciate his smooth, fluid sentences that make the novel relaxing to read. Also, the timing of the two subplots ticks perfectly. The first subplot deals with Colonel Nicholson and his troops in the POW camp, while the second describes the procedures of Force 316 in their efforts to destroy Nicholson’s bridge. The converging of these two plots can be compared to two people, one on each side of a river. They walk in the same direction while occasionally glancing at each other. After much walking and observation of each other, they eventually cross over and meet. In The Bridge Over the River Kwai, the two subplots literally cross from opposite sides and join at the River Kwai. Even though the plot structure and syntax fulfill their purpose, the novel lacks complexity and the advanced writing style that would make it more aesthetically beautiful.

The Bridge Over the River Kwai entertains, teaches a lesson about pride, and provides decent aesthetic value. Readers seeking to learn through its theme will be enlightened, while those seeking aesthetic value will not be satisfied. However, those thirsting for adventure, diplomacy, military procedures, and stealthy maneuvers will soak in every letter and word dripping from this fountain of entertainment. While reading, one is a stealthy demolitions operative of Force 316, lying in the damp jungle leaves, steadily holding a pair of binoculars to gather information about the enemy, worrying that a Japanese patrol might see a glint of sunlight on the dark blue lenses of the telescopic apparatus. The steaming burn of jungle ants, the painful pricking of splinters from touching bridge supports in murky waters, the fear of the bridge explosives being discovered—the audience can experience these visual sights, physical jitters, and adrenaline-rushing emotions. The imagination of being a jungle commando or a back-broken prisoner became realistic in my mind. I feel as if I actually hiked through the treacherous woods and baited the bridge with explosives. The story caused my imagination to be very playful and artistic. I felt like I played a role in the story. Because of its exciting entertainment value, I would highly recommend The Bridge Over the River Kwai to anyone who desires to delve into a jungle military endeavor. Its audience will experience a virtual world in the jungles of Siam.

A Passage to India

2008-12-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

This is a review written by my daughter Joanna Carter:
E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India is written beautifully, but it failed to lead me into a sense of play because of major problems in the story itself. A Passage to India follows two friends, an Indian doctor and a British school principal through the ordeal between their societies when the Indian, Dr. Aziz, is falsely accused of attempted rape. I disliked the book because none of the characters were likeable, the underlying messages bordered on Satanic, and the plot was weak. Forster’s writing style was wonderful, but reading style without a good story is like eating straight cheese sauce without the macaroni.
The first thing I realized about the novel was that it was slow going. I had a nasty shock when I found myself on page one hundred and twelve and was still waiting for something to happen. I think one of the things that made it so hard to get into is the lack of a character the reader can really relate to. The four main characters are Mr. Fielding, Dr. Aziz, Mrs. Moore, and Adela Quested. Of all of these, Fielding is the most likeable, but only because of his lack of any major faults. He is a flat character, the "good guy," effortlessly making the right decision to stick up for Aziz, even though he has no more reason to than anyone else. If it were me, I would not have been so quick to believe Aziz innocent; the Indian is a sensual and syncophanic liar who suffers from dramatic mood swings. I always emerged from a scene with Aziz and found myself wanting a dose of tea and Andy Griffith to recover. Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested are not such nauseating characters as Aziz, but kind old Mrs. Moore completely loses her religion in the Marabar caves, and Miss Quested is as dull and practical as a grocery cart. There was no one I could be comfortable with during my read, no one I could trust or develop any affection for. As a result, I had a hard time getting into the story.
A second thing I disliked about A Passage to India was the underlying theme of meaninglessness and failure. Forster’s sinister philosophy revealed itself fully in the scene where Mrs. Moore enters the Marabar caves and hears the echoing "Boum" that answers any sound, no matter how profound. "But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be Light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum.’" I was so disturbed upon reading this that I almost put the book down. Forster tells the reader that Christianity and religion are meaningless, and that by extension there is no good in the world. According to him, good and evil are the inventions of man. Nature knows nothing of them, for she is eternal and they are only the whispers of a finite creature. This message is so overwhelmingly evil that this book would be repulsive to me even if it had wonderful characters and a great story.
The third thing I disliked about A Passage to India was the plot. Aside from the problems of one hundred and thirty-two pages with only dining room gossip for conflict and pointlessly killing off Mrs. Moore, Forster left the untied thread of Miss Quested’s attacker in the caves. If it wasn’t Aziz, then who was it? Did Miss Quested imagine him? It seems as though Forster needed an attacker, but was too lazy to deal with him once he started on the mess of Aziz’s trial. If it were a less important detail, it would not matter, but the entire book is built around the disaster in the caves. The attacker’s undetermined identity wriggles awkwardly in the story like a stick caught in a bicycle wheel. Forster’s words are beautiful, but his plot doesn’t hold water.
All in all, A Passage to India did not lead me into a sense of play. The beautiful writing style spoke to me directly, but it repelled me. Such a twisting of talent made me feel as if a friend had betrayed me. I wanted to physically and mentally separate myself from the book instead of to explore the ideas it presented. Although Forster describes Mrs. Moore’s despair at the Marabar Caves in an eloquent and natural style, the sinister content of his words kept me from playing with his novel.

The Writing Life

2008-12-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

Picture a dusty region of Africa. The sun is beating down on the grasslands near the water hole. A rhino stands nearly motionless, soaking in the heat. Birds land on his back and talk to each other, walking around as though he is a carpet. Only the gleam of his beady eye shows the rhino's irritation. Finally he can stand it no longer and flicks them away with his tail. That's it; that's the picture of me as a writer. Make of it what you will. I'm not nearly as good at this as Annie Dillard.

The Writer's Life is filled with poetic metaphors of what it means to be a writer, from a bee catcher to Wile E. Coyote to a Zulu warrior to a lion tamer to a dog chewing on a bone to a stunt pilot. Each metaphor illuminates in some way both the wonder that drives a writer and the impossibility of fulfilling his task. The book is a paradox. The harder Dillard makes it sound, the more she inspires you to write. One of the most inspiring passages describes the impossibility of transferring a poetic vision onto the page: "The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work." Why does that make me want to write? First of all, she's saying that the writer's vision might truly be something transcendent, something greater than myself that is worth giving myself over to, even if I can't control it. It's like Kubla Khan's pleasure dome that Coleridge can't get onto the page however wildly his eyes flash and his hair flies around. The vision becomes something else, but there's discovery in that too.

It's all so terrible, like Jesus saying, "Are you willing to drink the cup that I drink?" To follow your calling, you move to a desolate, wind-swept island in the Northwest, pace back and forth in a cold cabin with no insulation, chop wood while people laugh at you, plug in a coffee kettle that's rigged with a clothespin, and (probably most important of all) "throw pots." "The materiality of the writer's life cannot be exaggerated." Annie Dillard is Thoreau all over again, but she seems more like the real deal, maybe because she smokes cigarettes and admits that she would rather play chess with librarians than write. At one point she describes fighting through writer's block until she has written a few sentences: "At once I noticed that I was writing--which, as the novelist Frederick Buechner noted, called for a break, if not a full-scale celebration." Having written this post in no fewer than four sittings, I say, "Amen!" I think one of my kids has some Christmas cookies I should try to celebrate finishing this paragraph.

Annie Dillard is more of a poet than a story-teller, and this bias does emerge in spots. She quotes a well-known writer asking a novice, "Do you like sentences?" One imagines the novice hanging his head and walking away like the rich young ruler. I don't think that J. R. R. Tolkien or Tom Wolfe liked sentences at age twenty though. I think the former was drawn in to writing through his fascination with story and the latter through his fascination with the world. There are different portals. When Dillard starts talking about structuring stories, I take it with a grain of salt. I love to hear her ramble, and The Writing Life is one of her best rambles.

Well, I've flicked another bird off. Now I can go back to basking in the sun for a little while without that nagging feeling that there's something I have to do.

Macbeth

2008-11-28T06:51:00.000-08:00

The idea that one person is really no better than another is deeply rooted in us. I find my students about as willing to question this belief as they would be to try sushi. Its little brother is that all sins are equal, which seems to me as ludicrous as saying that I'd just as soon pick up a cobra as pick up a fire ant. It's worse to murder someone than to lie. There, I said it. But doesn't that make a murderer worse than a liar? And if a murderer is worse than a liar, how can a liar be humble? You can't beat up the little brother without getting the big brother involved.
In Macbeth, Shakespeare takes a war hero and in a matter of minutes turns him into a scheming murderer simply through the power of suggestion. There isn't even any temptation involved. "Hail, King that shalt be." Five words, and he's hooked like a stupid grouper. His imagination does all the rest. Remember how James told us, "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desires"? That's Macbeth. Everyone is singing Macbeth's praises in the opening scenes. He's Duncan's "worthiest cousin," he's "Bellona's bridegroom." His sword "smokes with bloody execution!" Is the thought of murder in his head? No, he's carving his way through the Norwegians with the patriotic furver of a Patrick Henry. Ask him if he'd like to murder the king he is fighting for, and he'd laugh at you or take off your head for such traitorus thoughts. Here's the great equalizer. I cannot say that I am any better than a murderer if I have not seriously been tempted with murder. Even that abstraction doesn't quite fit gear to gear. I'd have to face the temptation as he faces it, with his whole genetic make up and background, to know whether I would handle it any better than he would.
The situation begs two questions. First, what five words tossed out in the most opportune moment could get me to throw away all my noble aspirations? I don't have to think about that too deeply to see what shaky ground I stand on. I'm a sinner in need of grace. Second, how have I handled the temptations I have seriously faced? Now the ground has crumbled under my feet. I'm a sinner in need of grace.
There's a lot more the play has to offer. How the forces of darkness tell us truths in order to betray us, for instance. Consider the temptations Jesus faced. He really could turn stones to bread, and what was so wrong with that? Or how the mind convinces itself that the eye could really "wink at the hand." I'll just turn off my conscience for a bit, not worry about it, and then the thing will be done. Or how when I offer the poisoned chalice to someone else, I'm really lifting it to my own lips. If the lessons themselves don't compel, consider a floating dagger that leads a murderer to his victim, a ghost disrupting a banquet, and a sleep walker divulging secrets.
Macbeth is a great tragedy; the truths are so woven into the plot that they hardly need commentary. Maybe that's why it's Shakespeare's shortest play. That's a compelling enough reason to read it; what teenager would disagree? Now that kids aren't having to struggle with the King James Bible every Sunday, the 17th century language is a much bigger barrier. This play has a lot fewer dated idioms and literary allusions than most of Shakespeare's plays, making it very readable.

The Alchemist

2008-11-26T06:36:00.000-08:00

When I was in ninth grade, I wrote an essay on the misery of living in the TEAM Hostel. I had felt like a floundering swimmer with his mouth barely above the water, sucking what gasps of air I could get from moments of peace. The hostel was a place where missionary kids from my parents' mission could live a little ways off campus; it was supposed to be a home away from home, but to me, it was anything but that. The older kids bullied the younger kids, and our hostel (hostile) parents didn't give a rip. Well, actually, I felt like the biggest bully there was the man in charge. I was angry. So I wrote the essay and turned it in to Mr. Jones, my English teacher--an enormous, jolly man who gave us Dr. Peppers to drink whenever we had a test.
A few days later, Mr. Blair, the head of the English department, called me in to Bedlam to have a chat with him. Bedlam was his name for the book room, which was a fantastically messy room full of books and old papers that would have made Dickens smile. It was in that book room that I first encountered "my personal legend." Mr. Blair encouraged me to write. I told him I was just writing honestly what I felt. He looked me in the eye and said, "Honest writing is good writing." At that moment, my two-fold calling landed on me. I wanted to write, and I wanted to become an English teacher, to be like this great man who so inspired me. Now here I am in my nineteenth year of teaching and trying to get an agent to look at my first novel, and I'm amazed at how God has dragged, shoved, and gently led me into such green pastures.
In The Alchemist, Melchichizedek tells Santiago that if he follows his "personal legend," the world will conspire to help him. Even setbacks will slingshot him toward his dream. "When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision." The real conflict in the book is whether Santiago can keep his focus on his true calling. Santiago leaps over riskier and riskier precipices, all along becoming more alive to "the soul of the world." He comes to the point that he realizes, "To die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day." Life was pursuing his dream, and if God "wasn't willing to change the future" to see him through to his goal, well, that was God's business. The story is incredibly inspiring!
As a Christian, I felt my heart take a leap every time a piece of the gospel was woven into the carpet of the story. Coelho's faith seems deeply embedded in biblical stories, and he clearly wonders about them in ways that I wish more people from my background would. How could you not be fascinated by Urim and Thummim? At the same time, Coelho's universalism made me squirm. I really think that this book captures the spirit of the age more than any other novel I've read. All roads, if sincerely followed, lead to the same place. This is clearly Coelho's position even as he happily sings some of his own personal, orthodox beliefs: "Our world is only an image and a copy of paradise . . . . God created the world so that, through its visible objects, men could understand his spiritual teachings and the marvels of his wisdom." How could you believe these things, but only as a sort of menu item? My copy of the book has an interview with the author at the back in which Coelho explains what he likes and dislikes about organized religion: "The value is that they give you discipline and they give you collective worship and they give you humbleness toward the mysteries. The danger is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says, 'I have the ultimate truth.' Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts." There's some truth to the way he perceives the attitudes of people in organized religion. Man has a hard time owning something without taking pride in it, especially truth. In Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis talks about truth being clear and muddy at the same time. That's a good answer, but now you'll have to read that book too, because it's chewing on the story that gives you the real taste for the argument.

The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher

2008-11-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

Does every guy have an inflated view of himself? I remember back in high school and college having these visions of grandeur that were way out of proportion. It was like my head was a balloon that you could just keep blowing air into, and it would never stop inflating. I remember people, especially girls, telling me that I was full of myself. I shrugged them off like annoying gnats. My friend Steve Knoble and I started flaunting our pride as a way of laughing at our fantastically incorrigible selves. Once I scratched, "Be vein," on the Nojiri Boathouse Wall. The spelling error spoke for itself.
The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher captures this thing about guys and bottles it like pure spring water in the character of Ryan Fisher. He visits church once or twice and starts imagining himself as a pastor. He's not even a Christian, but he wants to save people, change their lives, create a mega-church. He develops this passing thought into a full-blown business proposal, and when his wife stumbles on it, he talks her into helping him make it a reality.
Katherine's motivation is fundamentally different from his. She has always wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself. She is attracted to his zeal, to his willingness to swerve off the road into unknown territory. He might actually live up to some of the ideals that embodied the rocker she was in love with back in college.
While rolling his eyes at Ryan's audacity on every page, Rob Stennett manages to make us not only sympathize, but really love him by the end. He's like the inner ego who's rear end you are constantly kicking. Stennett also puts church and Evangelical culture through the ringer. The cheerful tone keeps the book from becoming a bitter satire, and there are places where Stennett's own sincere beliefs emerge brilliantly. For instance, when Ryan enters a casino to rescue one of his flock from a gambling addiction, the description of the unhappy gamblers with glazed over eyes is poignant. Many of the things that attract people to Ryan's church, though certainly not the petting zoo and cotton candy, are things Stennett recognizes as things the church really needs. I came away from the book longing for a church with a true sense of community and Christ-like concern for the real problems of its members.
The references to present popular culture are going to date this book pretty soon, and for the most part, it's just a fun-loving kick in the pants. I do have to admit though that I was moved in the end by Ryan and Katherine's lives, and to my amazement, found myself in tears at the end.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

2008-10-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a book that grows on you as you read it. At the beginning, it was hard for me to care about Eddie, the old maintenance man at Ruby Pier. What kept me going for a while was the writing. Mitch Albom has an incredibly fluid style with bold, often surprising imagery. Toward the beginning, Eddie makes an animal out of pipe cleaners for a little girl who is described thus: "She had blonde curls and wore flip-flops and denim cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt with a cartoon duck on the front." Specifics like these make the world of the book come alive.
At choice moments, Albom states universal truths with a simple authority. One of Eddie's biggest struggles is with his abusive father. Late in the book, the narrator says, "Through it all, despite it all, Eddie privately adored his old man, because sons adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion." What gives a writer the gall to say such a thing? Is it true? I'm not sure, but I know Mitch Albom thinks it is, and it certainly makes me want to believe it.
Each person that meets Eddie shows him an episode in his life and helps him to see it from a different point of view, one that makes the world make more sense. The message of the novel seems to be an altered Romans 8:28, that everything works out for everybody, that (except for maybe Japanese soldiers) everyone's life makes sense in an interconnected tapestry. God does not appear until the very end, and even then, his voice is the "melded voices" of others. Terrible things happen in this world, but some of the worst things are reconciled in Heaven in really beautiful ways. I came away from the book with a renewed conviction that there are much deeper things going on in the lives of people around me than I realize.
One thing bothered me about the point of view in the book. Ruby seemed more omniscient than the blue man or the captain. While they had stuck to their own stories and the places where they had intersected with Eddie's story, Ruby started telling things about Eddie's father that she couldn't have known in her own life. It seemed too big a shift.
Teen-agers would really like The Five People You Meet in Heaven. I can imagine all sorts of good stuff coming out of reading journals on this book. It would be a great summer reading book because it is short, very readable, and thought-provoking.

The House on Mango Street

2008-10-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

The House on Mango Street is a series of vignettes seen from the point of view of a teen-age Latino girl growing up in a poor neighborhood. The reader realizes long before Esperanza does that in spite of her poverty and the house she is so ashamed of, she has had an incredibly rich childhood with so many human stories to treasure and write about.
The descriptions in the book are always surprising. One of Esperanza's new friends on Mango Street, Cathy, refuses to play with her other friends, Rachel and Lucy; she says, "Can't you see, they smell like a broom?" Cathy says she is moving away because the neighborhood is going bad, apparently never thinking about the fact that she is talking to a girl whose family has just moved in to the neighborhood. Esperanza can put two and two together.
I think my favorite description is about Meme Ortiz's dog: "The dog is big, like a man dressed in a dog suit, and runs the same way its owner does, clumsy and wild and with the limbs lopping all over the place like untied shoes."
The experiences in the book just ring true. In one chapter, Esperanza and Rachel and Lucy get in a big argument while Esperanza's sister, Nenny, is naming clouds. Nenny's persistent obliviousness really made me laugh. While the others are calling each other "Cockroach jelly" and "Cold frijoles," Nenny just keeps naming the clouds, "Mimi, Michael, Moe . . . ." One of the chapters that drew me in the most was the one in which Esperanza asks to eat lunch at school. I'm not going to tell you what happens; I'm just going to say that it rings absolutely true.
The book is a coming of age story too. The chapter called "Monkey Garden" would make a great short story all by itself. It captures the hepless frustration Esperanza feels with having her childhood stolen from her by those around her who disregard her innocence. There are a few chapters in which she faces more difficult things, but this one seemed the most poignant to me.
I think the book hits on universal themes regarding community life, especially in poorer neighborhoods. It took me back to my years on Howard Street in Whittier, California, where there were over fifty kids on our block of duplexes. We were a mix of Latino and white kids from blue collar families. I remember so many things from those days. I remember Rick's mother always kissing and hugging her boyfriend for what seemed like hours at the gate to their duplex, but he never asked her to marry him. I remember David Watson's grandfather claiming that he was the best Backgammon player in all of California and Nevada combined; nobody we knew could beat him. I remember everyone admiring Joe's big brothers while they drove up and down the street in their wide low-rider car, their arms resting on their open windows with cigarettes tucked into their sleeves. I remember my brother pounding on the wall when John's mother and her lover were making too much noise in the adjoining duplex late one night and seeing her lover rush out her front door a few minutes later. John and I played with his racecar set in his livingroom the next day as though nothing had happened. There were endless evenings of kick the can, dodge ball, and truth or dare. Man, a lot went on. And all along we wished we lived on Orange Street.

British Literature: First Half

2008-10-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

What would the perfect year of studying British literature in high school incorporate? I've often wished I could create my own textbook for just such a purpose. This is my stab at what I would include. You could actually use my advice here if you used Prentice-Hall's The English Tradition and supplemented it with paperbacks from the library. In this blog I'm just going to write about what I would include in the first semester.
The Anglo-Saxon period: parts of Beowulf in Burton Raffel's translation, which I think is the most readable verse version, the scenes where Grendel attacks Heorot and where Beowulf fights Grendel, maybe also the scene where Beowulf swims down and fights Grendel's water-hag mother. I would not make any high school student suffer through the whole epic poem! Read the gory parts and skip the long speeches. Note what is said about the pervasive influence of fate.
The Medieval period: Listen to "Barbara Alan" in several forms. You can get a bunch of versions on ITunes and compare them. Some of them have a sappy rose and briar ending that makes me want to gag, but I've had students who love it (and would have swooned over it if we lived in the twelfth century, though I think it was added much later). Enjoy Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (especially if you read it aloud together), the marriage group of The Canterbury Tales--which includes The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale, and The Franklin's Tale--and Everyman. This last piece is very dull, mind you, but you have to act it out using dramatic voices. Death needs to have something like Darth Vader's voice, and Everyman needs to really cower with fear. When you get the gist of it, you can see the awful theology and the need for the Reformation. I would not mess with Thomas Malory directly, but honor him by reading T. H. White's The Once and Future King. This book manages to incorporate the farsical, the romantic, the grand, and the tragic all in one story, and makes it all fit into one narrative, a task Malory did not accomplish to my satisfaction.
The Renaissance period: Macbeth for a Shakespearean tragedy or The Merchant of Venice for a Shakespearean comedy. After reading and understanding each act, watch it on DVD. Get the BBC versions from the late 90's; they feel like stage productions, but are done in a studio with better cinematography. The acting is terrific in both, though there is no way on earth that anyone would travel far to see this Portia's beauty. I would not do more than one Shakespeare in a year, but I think high school kids should have read both a comedy and a tragedy before they graduate. Also read Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 for inspiration and 130 for fun. For some 16th century gender conflict, read Christopher Marlowe's "A Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and then Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd." Finally, read Sir Philip Sidney's "Apology for Poetry," a defense for enjoying poetry from a classical and Christian perspective.
The 17th Century: John Donne's Meditation 17 and Holy Sonnet 14, George Herbert's "The Pulley," Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," and Robert Herrick's "To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time." Be careful how you read "To His Coy Mistress." I believe that Marvell is taking on the persona of a careless atheist, and that the weaknesses in his argument to the woman are embedded in the poem. Then read the passage in John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Lucifer lands in Hell. This has the famous lines where he says he can make a Heaven out of Hell and that what's in the mind is all that matters. For a richer discussion, you could read Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison" where the same idea is presented in a more positive way. Finally, read The Pilgrim's Progress.
If you think it through, the best thing would be to have the students read The Once and Future King and The Pilgrim's Progress on their own, and the rest of it together. This would get you to Christmas.

Things Fall Apart

2008-10-11T09:04:00.000-07:00

Things Fall Apart is great as a personal story of a strong man with overwhelming fears and as a story about a society that is falling apart. The title is ironic because it comes from William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming," which laments the breakdown in society due to the waning of Christianity and the coming of a new dispensation. In Chinua Achebe's book, Christianity is the new dispensation that is crowding out the old religion of the tribal society.
Achebe is very fair in describing the conflicts. Okonkwo, the hero of the book, is forever trying to prove to himself and those around him what a strong man he is, partially to make up for the weaknesses of his lazy father. On the one hand, Okonkwo is a great warrior with deep convictions and a settled commitment to the traditions of his people; he has a strong moral center. When he inadvertantly commits a crime against his people, he accepts his punishment without question. On the other hand, Okonkwo is a harsh husband and father, a hot-tempered brooder, and and so full of the fear of how others perceive him that he is willing to take part in killing someone he loves deeply.
Likewise, Umuofia, Okonkwo's tribe, is not an ideal society of "the noble savage." The local gods terrorize the people of Umuofia and rule them in the bondage of fear, even making them do horrific things like throwing twin babies into the forest to die. At one point, the priestess of one particularly scary god carries away Okonkwo's most loved daughter to do who knows what with her, and Okonkwo and the child's mother can only helplessly let it happen. Still, the society functions with clear laws and traditions that hold things together, and some of these laws seem more just than the laws that the British bring and try to impose on the tribe.
One thing that bothered me about the book was that the Christian missionary argues that these gods are only wood and stone; I think any thinking Christian would recognize that these local gods are demons. Because he doesn't recognize the power of the local gods, the missionary loses credibility in the eyes of the tribal leaders. At the same time, Achebe acknowledges some of the greatest things about Christianity, that it accepts the lowly and the outcast and that its true converts may be people of strong conviction who are willing to suffer for their beliefs. The Christians fearlessly neglect the local gods and build their church in "the evil forest," depending on God to protect them. The main problem with the Christians in this novel is that they open the door for and even collude with an outside power who has no regard for the norms of the traditional society.
Things Fall Apart succeeds largely because the author writes with a great deal of what Keats called negative capability. We see things mostly from Okonkwo's view, but we are given glimpses into the minds of people around him--particularly his son Nwoye and his friend Obierika--that help us sympathize with other points of view. In the end, the story is a human tragedy that moves the heart deeply.

How To Build a Long-Lasting Fire

2008-10-02T17:47:00.001-07:00

Writing poetry is for everyone. Yes, there are gifted people who naturally write more beautiful poetry than the rest of us, but that doesn't mean that poetry is just for an elite set of people. Just because there are professional football players doesn't mean that the rest of us can't enjoy a game in the neighbor's yard. Like football, poetry is a game that takes a certain amount of familiarity. I am amazed at students who tell me, "I can't write poetry," but have only tried seriously to write a poem a few times. What if a baseball player said such a thing about pitching a baseball after trying it only a few times?Why is it an important game though? I believe that every person wants to express what is in his innermost being. Back up. I believe that every person wants to know what is in his innermost being, that he can only get near knowing it if he tries to express what is in it. Self expression leads to self discovery, but true self expression is an art form that takes arduous work before it becomes second nature and a joy.
Carol Morrison's book How to Build a Long-Lasting Fire makes poetry accessible to high school students and helps them enjoy it. Early in the book, the author tells what poetry is not, using funny examples to dispel the myths about poetry that, I think, turn people off to it. Then, step by step, she explains what poetry is, giving simple examples from her own students and offering "firestarters," creative prompts for readers to write their own poems. If a high school student read through this book at a steady pace, say trying to do one firestarter a week, I think he would come to love poetry and wind up with some good poems in the process. He would have to realize that not every firestarter will inspire a good poem in him, but that each one will keep his creative and analytical sparks active so that when the good poem does ignite, he'll be ready for it. Ideally, students would form a poetry group and work through the book together, sharing their attempts at poems and encouraging and refining each other. A parent and a student could go through the book together in the same way. After all, since the whole point of the book is to create "a long-lasting fire," the author is hoping we will continue to write poetry our whole lives.

Laugh Your Way Through Grammar

2008-09-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

Chances are that by the time you have reached high school, you have had enough formal grammar. You probably have a good notion of what the parts of speech are, even if you can't name all of them. Your time would be best used at this point finding the holes in your grammatical education and filling them without wasting time on things you already know. Laugh Your Way through Grammar by Joan D. Berbrich is the best book for finding your weaknesses and correcting them.
The first part of this book has practice sessions in which you read sentences and try to determine the errors in them. At the end of each sentence is a parenthetical note that leads you to the grammatical rule in the second part of the book. The sentences in the front and the examples that follow the rules in the back are mostly either odd bits of fact ("A flea can jump twelve inches, twelve inches for a flea is equal to two football fields for a person five feet tall"), witty statements ("Timid people are sheeps in sheep's clothing"), puns ("Sunday is the strongest day of the week because all the rest are 'weak' days"), or funny jokes ("He went to the drive-in bank to show his car to it's real owner"). Grammar becomes fun!
If I were a student using the book, I would do the practice sessions, checking the rules on the sentences I was unsure of. I would also place a mark by the sentences I was unsure of so I could come back to them easily later before taking the PSAT, SAT, and ACT.I don't think this book is in print anymore. What are the schools and the publishers thinking? You can still get a copy for cheap on Amazon though. I highly recommend this book. As one of the practice sentences says, you don't want your "grammer to be as horrendous as your spelling."

Twilight

2008-09-29T17:49:00.000-07:00

I liked Stephanie Meyer's Twilight a lot, and I think teenagers, especially girls, will enjoy this book. Though the book is a vampire story, it is more intensely romantic than it is scary or violent or overly sensual in the way Bram Stoker's Dracula was. The romance is patiently built; in fact the author's restraint in building it is masterful and is to a large degree what makes the book so intense. The only scary thing for me as a parent having my daughters read the story is that it takes a high school girl's romantic feelings for a guy she is still getting to know so seriously. Of course, that is realistic, and the book keeps pointing out the risk involved in such a total abandon (especially if the guy has an intense thirst for blood).
The plot of Twilight is well focused and rises to a great climax. The reader is led to change his point of view several times with some great reversals. The characters are all very round, and some of them are really likable people; there's a real sense that the author is enjoying telling you about them. I'm trying to say all this without revealing too much. The one annoying thing to me was that some of the lunchtime conversations seemed to rehash the same things over and over. A few times I felt like I would throw the book across the room if Edward chuckled sardonically to himself or said, "You should be running away from me. You don't know how dangerous I am," one more time. As a testimony to the book, I didn't throw it across the room when either thing did happen again; I kept reading.
Like the Harry Potter series, this series creates a fantasy in which our world is infused with fantastical elements. Meyer ties the story in nicely with previous vampire stories, accepting some aspects of the old stories and rejecting other aspects as legend, but giving a good reason for why the legendary aspects grew. At a particular point in the book, the characters even discuss how vampires might be a part of creation or the evolutionary process. It's all well thought out.

The Plague

2008-09-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Albert Camus's The Plague is appealing mostly because the two central heroes, Rieux and Tarrou, refuse to consider themselves heroes. Not in the name of heroism or love, but in the name of common decency, they work steadily to heal the sick and fight death in the face of "a never ending defeat." Both are stricken with an intense sense of honesty about what little they know and what little they can do. Rieux is baffled by radio announcements that come in from outside the city, "Oran, we are with you!" as though the outsiders can claim that they would live and die with those in Oran. He hates any kind of presumptuousness.
On the other hand, Rambert, who starts out a selfish lover who wants to escape the city illegally, accuses the doctor of living "in a world of abstractions" that are "divorced from reality," that if personal happiness is ignored over public good, a man can't truly be happy. He points out that "public welfare is merely the sum total of the private welfares of each of us." Rieux agrees with Rambert and can't help but encourage him to escape the city to join his wife. Yet somewhere along the way, Rambert loses "love's egoism," and decides to stay and help.
As another contrast, after the horrific scene in which the principle characters witness a child's death, Father Paneloux preaches a sermon, stating that we must either utterly reject God's will or totally embrace it. "The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours." Father Paneloux's way of identifying with Christ and the dead child is to acquire a sympathetic illness to the plague and die of it. To him, God is just in his identification with suffering, and I think Camus would be right to criticize Christianity if that is all that it was. Jesus' death on the cross was far more than God's identification with man's suffering; it was God's way of personally destroying death for people he loved deeply and personally.
To Tarrou though, nothing can make up for the death of an individual. As a child, he was horrified that his father, as a matter of business, oversaw capital punishment. As he makes his way in the world, he realizes that "we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody." The ultimate good requires "extreme vigilance" in making sure that we do the least amount of harm to others. If he can keep himself from at least killing people willfully, he can think of himself as "an innocent murderer." What a sad existence!
In the end Rieux acknowledges that in all their hard work with the plague victims, the only thing a person could really "yearn for, and sometimes attain . . . is human love." From the beginning, Tarrou manages to live with an interest in the details of other people's lives. In his journal, rather than reporting the "significant" events of the plague, he reports small events such as a man spitting on cats or a woman suddenly flinging a window open and screaming. He is fascinated with poor Cottard, who because of the preoccupation of the police with the plague, has temporarily escaped a criminal investigation. Cottard is the exact opposite of Tarrou. Rieux realises that Cottard has an "ignorant, that is to say, lonely, heart."
I found myself really drawn in by The Plague. I was most moved by the development of Tarrou and Rieux's friendship. The scene in which they go swimming in the ocean one evening at about the worst point of the plague was truly wonderful.

The Mouse that Roared

2008-09-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Mouse That Roared is one of the funniest books I have read in a long time. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is a European country three miles wide and five miles long. It has been independent since its founding by Roger Fenwick in 1370, and has never changed its military. Its warriors even now are fourteenth century longbowmen.The conflict of this farcical novel begins when the country faces an economic crisis. The Council of Freedom, the parliament of the country, meets with the Duchess of Grand Fenwick, Gloriana XII, to discuss solutions to the problem. The upshot is that the Duchy of Grand Fenwick declares war on the United States of America and sends an expeditionary force to attack New York City. In the meantime the United States is having its own problems. In the face of creating a new bomb of devastating proportions, the government announces an East Coast-wide twenty-four hour nuclear attack drill because another nation is sure to create the same bomb soon. Of course the expeditionary force from Grand Fenwick arrives in New York on the day of the drill. Think Monty Python meets Dr. Strangelove and you have this book.
As farcical as it is, The Mouse That Roared is a serious political satire, addressing such issues as free trade, arms proliferation, war remunerations, and leagues of nations. The issues that were politically relevant in 1955 when the book first appeared seem just as relevant today. Toward the end, the book slips into a tone that seems a bit too serious for how it started out. The author betrays a romantic tendency that seems a bit too idealistic, especially in his apparent faith in the League of Little Nations and his assertion that people are good at their core. From the vantage point of fifty years later, the inclusion of Israel (now a muscular nuclear power) and the exclusion of any Arab or Asian countries seems really odd. Postmodern critics would probably also smile at the idea that Dr. Kokintz could step outside of his American past and look at things purely from the point of view of a citizen of the world after spending an hour in the woods. I feel bad that I have been vague about the truths the book teaches and specific about its faults, but the truths are all wrapped in jokes that I don't want to give away to the reader. Suffice it to say that I think high school students would thoroughly enjoy this book and gain from discussing both the truths in the book and the blind spots in it.