David Sherman & Starfist

I have recently completed Starfist Force Recon: Recoil by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. The best aspect of the Starfist novels that I enjoy is the relaxing read they are. Some novels require you to plod through technical descriptions that can last for pages and breaks up the story flow. This is not so with David and Dan’s works. They take the time to discuss the TO&E of the regiment but are not long winded enough about it.

I believe that part of what makes these novels an easy read is the amount of action they contain. Generally, every other chapter is very active and the in between chapters don’t slog along even if they are at a bit slower pace. I am very impressed that after 17 novels of the series, the pace is still the same as the first few.  The last Starfist novel was getting a bit long in tooth but not as bad as some other author’s series. David and Dan had taken a break to develop the Force Recon franchise. This has help the main Starfist franchise by allowing the readers to see another aspect of the Starfist Universe.

I enjoyed Recoil so much, I had to partake in a bit of fandom and tell David how nice his novels were to read and how I appreciated his craft of writing. I was graced with a very nice reply to my e-mail and was quite happy to have himm take the time to wirte back to me. I can just imagine the volume of e-mails that he gets, so I felt a bit special getting the reply.

I would recommend this book and the whole series. The Starfist series is 14 books presently. Force Recon is at 3. They both can be read separately. If you are a bit particular about reading series, I would recommend starting at the Starfist: First to Fight.

Thanks David for your reply!

Book Review: <em>The Dark Side of the Diamond</em> by Roger I. Abrams

The Dark Side of the Diamond (2007) by Roger I. Abrams is the antidote for anyone who looks at the state of our National Pastime and yearns for “the good old days” when baseball and virtue went hand-in-hand.   As Abrams dutifully enumerates, professional baseball in the “bad old days” offers plenty of examples of gambling, game-fixing (commonplace in the era from 1870-1920), abuse of alcohol & recreational drugs, performance-enhancing drugs (Pud Galvin used an extract from animal testicles in 1889), and fisticuffs, racism and other violence on and off the field.  It is to Abrams credit that it is similar in tone to many traditional baseball histories in the reverence toward the game as oppossed to just being a tell-all expose such as Chico Escuela’s fabled memoir Bad Stuff ‘Bout the Mets.   Abrams’ work is the story of baseball with an added emphasis on the warts.  Still I would have liked it more if he could have given a broader context to how these flaws played out in shaping the game.  Abrams is good at making comparisons to American society at large but oddly doesn’t make a case for the game itself being helped or  hindered by the cheating, drunken, violent thugs that played the game.  In the end though Abrams does make a good case for baseball really being representative of America’s greatness and its evils all in one National Pastime.

Favorite Passage

“A more complete picture of baseball behaviors can tell us much beyond the heroics of a few fine atheletes.  It can tell us a rich story of a complex continental nation that was founded in liberty for some and slavery for others, that strove to find gold in individual achievement and in coordinated thievery, and that ultimately emerged on he world stage in the twentieth century as a boisterous adolescent convinced of its destiny.  Baseball was our mantra because, in the minds of many, it symbolized a nation where joint effort and individual excellence wer rewarded.  It was also a game where reules were broken unless the umpires saw the transgressions.

…

Baseball was designed in the beginning as a pure and healthy exercise and it has provided entertainment to the American public for a century and a half.  Over that expanse of time, the game demonstrated the American character to its multitude of fans.  We hoped that baseball would teach our youngsters about resourcefulness and fortitude, adherence to rules and authority, teamwork and pride. At the same time, however, it taught the next generation about partisan rivalries, violence, disparagement, cheating, and human frailty.  It resonated with the full context of American society, and it has told us much about whom we were and whom we are today, ” - p. 32.

Author : Abrams, Roger I., 1945-

Title : The dark side of the diamond : gambling, violence, drugs and alcoholism in the national pastime / Roger I. Abrams.

Edition : 1st ed.

Published : Burlington, MA : Rounder Books, c2007.

Description : vii, 216 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

LDS Fiction: Whitney Shoulda Woulda Coulda

Let me begin by saying again CONGRATULATIONS to all the Whitney winners. Way to go, you have worked hard, and it must be so gratifying to have so many people love your work and vote for it. You are all farther along the path I hope to get on at some point.

There are a bunch of books I wish could have won something too, though, and so I’m going to write a little about them, in no particular order. Note: this is not to diminish or take away from the winners, or second-guess the decision of the Whitney Academy. As has been written elsewhere, everyone who won deserved to win, because they wrote stories that compelled interest and loyalty. I just that I wish all the books I loved could have been recognized with awards. I know that’s not possible, so I am going to write a bit about them here.

Seeking Persephone: Annette Lyon blogged about this great book here. I read through the .pdf I was sent in one sitting, it was so compelling. And this is my Amazon review of it:

What a fun read! I very much enjoyed Seeking Persephone. It had well-developed protagonists, a resonant plot that combined the Hades/Persephone myth with Beauty and the Beast, and above all, that zing! that a good romance brings. Recommended!

If you like clean Regency-era romances, and character-driven conflicts, this will be the book for you. I was quite impressed. Reading over my review of it again, I remember how much I enjoyed it. And I start second-guessing my decision to vote for Taking Chances. Ultimately, I went with Taking Chances for this reason, which is personal to me but nevertheless part of my judging rubric: I wanted the books I voted for to reflect Mormons in a way that I agreed with. I liked the Mormons in Taking Chances; I liked the healing. Because what I most want is a literature that depicts Mormons in an honest way, any book that does this gets bonus points for me. This may not be fair, but it’s my bias nonetheless. But I have to say, it goes both ways: I am much harder on books whose depiction of Mormon characters irritates me. And I’m easily irritated. So, because I liked the Mormons and the healing in Taking Chances, I voted for it over Seeking Persephone. But I LOVED Seeking Persephone too; it had a pretty sophisticated, resonant plot, and great characters.

Taking Chances: you know I loved this one, so I’ll just refer you to my earlier review.

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow: ah, I loved this book. I really, really loved it. So much. Great writing, a faithful retelling of a fairy tale I love, and so many great Norwegian touches. But Jessica Day George does not overplay her research: it’s just a detail here and there, enough to give it authenticity without going overboard. So hard to do, but so well done.

Alcatraz and the Scrivener’s Bones: Brandon Sanderson has the coolest magic systems, and Alcatraz is no exception. The coolness of the magic system, its sheer originality, was what made this book a high-ranking one for me, even though the snarky tone got a bit grating sometimes.

Fablehaven: If we ranked books based on what our kids liked, which is another perfectly legitimate way to choose in the youth fiction category, Fablehaven would be right up there. My son loves these books. Devours them.

Farworld: See my previous comment about Fablehaven. While I enjoyed this book, my son has read it about three times. He’s very excited for the sequel.

The Reckoning: Wow. I was amazed by its authenticity of setting and characters: an American journalist imprisoned in Iraq. But it’s not just an adventure story; the protagonist has to confront her childhood demons here too. Very well done.

Keeping Keller: It’s the story of a couple seeking to care for their misdiagnosed autistic son, and each other, in the face of prejudice and lack of information. The voice is distinctly fifties, and very well done, I might add. It was so unique, I really wanted to see something good happen with it.

The Wyrmling Horde: Made me want to read the rest of the series. I’ve never read any David Farland before, and now I have a whole new series to enjoy.

The Host: Not a Twilight fan. But I did like The Host, quite a bit more than I expected, and well enough to say hey, Stephenie Meyers deserves some props here. If you’ve been overwhelmed by Twihards enough to not want to read those books at all (*cough* raises hand), then I have to say, read this anyway. It’s a fun beach read, and it raises some interesting questions.

Master: Okay, I will be frank: I thought I would hate this book. That is based on its cover, which is a style of art depicting the Savior that I dislike intensely. But I actually enjoyed this book very much. I learned a lot about the New Testament. I liked her choices to make all direct quotes from the Savior actual scripture; I was so relieved by it, I can’t tell you. And I liked the main character, Almon. It felt… more like an extended parable to me than a novel, though. Almon’s arc didn’t quite work for me. But. It’s still a book I would recommend reading, in spite of the cover art, because the prose is pretty tight and there’s a lot to be learned from it. It’s an impressive book.

Legend of the Jewel: I loved Isabel! I loved her spunk! I loved that she met up with a Mormon guy and made polygamy jokes in her head! I loved the mystery, and the tight plotting. This was a great read.

I realize that it’s a bit scary to put Whitney favorites out there publicly like this: I realized that when hardly anyone commented with specific choices on my Segullah post or on Robison Well’s similar post. The LDS writing community is small, and everyone wants to be friends. And I guess that by writing about the books I liked best, I’m automatically generating a list of books that weren’t my favorites. Sigh. But I just want to applaud a few more books that I was grateful to have discovered through the Whitneys, even if they were not official winners. I loved my experience reading all of them–even the ones that were not my favorites really helped me analyze what I like and dislike in writing, and I’m grateful for that. I’m learning to read as a writer, and that has been very valuable for me.

Go Whitneys!

The Noticer by Andy Andrews

I am so very excited to share a fabulous new book with you today! After reading about all the wonderful things about the book, The Noticer, I knew I had to read it…so I went to Thomas Nelson’s Book Review Bloggers page but alas all the copies were gone. Sigh. But a week or so later I decided to check again and there it was!

So without further adieu let me introduce you to a fantastic new book,The Noticer.

About the Book:

Orange Beach, Alabama is a simple town filled with simple people. But they all have their share of problems – marriages teetering on the brink of divorce, young adults giving up on life, business people on the verge of bankruptcy, and many of the other obstacles that life seems to dish out to the masses.

Fortunately, when things look the darkest – a mysterious old man named Jones has a miraculous way of showing up. Communicating what he calls “a little perspective,” Jones explains that he has been given a gift of noticing things that others miss. In his simple interactions, Jones speaks to that part in everyone that is yearning to understand why things happen and what they can do about it.

Based on a remarkable true story, The Noticer beautifully blends fiction, allegory, and inspiration.

About the author:

ndy Andrews hails from the setting of his new novel, Orange Beach, Alabama. A bestselling novelist and in-demand corporate speaker, Andrews has been praised by a New York Times writer as “one of the most influential people in America.” He is best-known as the author of the international bestseller, The Traveler’s Gift which has sold more than 1.5 million copies and has been translated into 20 languages since it was released in 2002. Andrews is also the author of The Lost Choice and Island of Saints. For more information, please visit AndyAndrews.com.

***************

My Thoughts:

Your problem is just a matter of perspective. -Jones

I was immediately intrigued by this book. Andy Andrews writes in an easy flowing style that is not only interesting but fun to read. After the first chapter I could hardly put it down. I was drawn in by Jones, the t-shirt, jeans, and flip-flop wearing fellow. He always seemed to be at the right place at the right time. I was soon so caught up in the story of Jones and those he was helping that I did not realize how my perspective needed to be changed too. Each chapter finds Jones providing a little perspective to those who need it…and as a reader I found myself nodding my head and taking notes about how to change my perspective. Jones is unassuming and not easily noticed unless…He notices YOU. Other than being a man you do not know much about Jones: where he is from, his ethnicity, or his age. And while at times the characters are puzzled by Jones there is no doubt they listen. And in listening their perspective starts to change.  And even more, the readers perspective starts to change. Each chapter deals with a certain person’s perspective, like the worrier, the wayward, or the useless. (for more information watch the video below)

Not only is the book challenging but there is a fantastic Reader’s Discussion Guide with some wonderful questions…for you to answer yourself or to do within a group.  I personally cannot wait to share this book with friends and then have a Noticer Discussion Night.  This book, if you give it a chance, will change the way you look at things, your perspecitive, and give you a chance to look at your own life and be a noticer.

One of my favorite things coming out of this book is The Noticer Project which gives you a chance to notice those around you and tell them how you feel. I am so excited to do this and will be featuring those I have noticed on my personal blog.

“I am a noticer. It is my gift. While others may be able to sing well

or run fast, I notice things that other people overlook. And you know, most of them are in plain sight. I notice things about situations and people that produce perspective. That’s what most folks lack—perspective—a broader view. So I give ’em that broader view . . . and it allows them to regroup, take a breath, and begin their lives again.” –Jones

If you would like to purchase the book (which comes out tomorrow, Tuesday, April 28) Go HERE!

Elizabeth Strout's 'Olive Kitteridge' Is Not 'A Novel'

Why have so many critics bought into the hype that the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge is “a novel in stories”? The publisher’s claim serves a clear marketing interest: Novels sell better than short stories. (”A novel in stories” doesn’t appear on the title page of Olive Kitteridge, which might have been a sign that the phrase came from the author instead of the publisher.) And the hype is – to put it charitably – misleading. Olive Kitteridge is a collection of linked short stories, known as a cycle of stories or short story cycle — a group of tales that, though entwined, can stand alone.

A critic who got it right was Jessica Treadway, who teaches at Emerson College and wrote in the Boston Globe:

“Although the book is being marketed as ‘a novel in stories,’ it is not a novel” but “a unified cycle” of “tales focusing on characters inhabiting a single town.”

The Pulitzer Prize judges also correctly described Olive Kitteridge in giving it the 2009 fiction award, calling it “a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine.”

Does harm really occur when critics regurgitate hype such as that Olive Kitteridge is a “novel in stories”? Part of the answer lies in the recent spate of fraudulent books billed as “memoirs,” which has shown how many people can be duped when critics and others don’t question publishers’ claims. And in the case of Olive Kitteridge, a more subtle harm may result.

American fiction has a stellar tradition of short story cycles that includes books different as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York. Comparing Olive Kitteridge to one or two of these might enrich anyone’s understanding of it. By calling Strout’s book a novel, the publisher has made it less likely that people will do this. It has also raised the odds that readers will expect something closer to a traditional novel and come away disappointed.

A review of Olive Kitteridge will appear next week on this site. The weekly children’s-book review appeared in the post that preceded this one.

www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

Rich Wallace’s Tale of Young Chess Players, ‘Perpetual Check’

Teenage brothers face off in a novel about a chess tournament

Perpetual Check. By Rich Wallace. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 128 pp., $15.99. Ages: See discussion below.

By Janice Harayda

Perpetual Check has a warning for parents who overpraise their children’s modest talents, hoping to enhance self-esteem. The caution comes from Zeke Mansfield, a high school senior who is a good athlete but less than the star his father imagines. Zeke realizes at a chess tournament:

“Having his father telling him what a star he is for all those years hasn’t been a plus after all. Somehow it made him decide that an extra hour of working on his ball control was plenty, no need to make it two; that 50 sit-ups after practice were just as good as a hundred; that sometimes it wasn’t worth running hills in the pouring rain. He was great; he was unbelievable. His natural talent would carry him as far as he wanted to go. It was heady stuff at 12 or 13 or 15.”

That “heady stuff” gets tested at the Northeast Regional of the Pennsylvania High School Chess Championship, held during a snow-encrusted weekend at a hotel in Scranton. Zeke and his pudgy younger brother, Randy, a freshman, have both qualified for the event. Randy can beat his brother nine times out of ten and outranks him in other ways: He’s better student, has a girlfriend, and can guess the colors of M&Ms in his mouth with his eyes closed.

So when the two brothers meet in the semifinals, there’s a showdown, complicated by the presence of their father. Mr. Mansfield is a hypocritical, overcontrolling, sexist who tries live out his failed dreams through Zeke. His boorishness has fueled the natural rivalry between his sons, a reality that emerges in chapters told from the brothers’ alternating points of view.

Will one son outperform the other in the tournament? Or might both embarrass their father by losing to – oh, the horror! – a girl? Wallace controls the suspense well in a lightweight, fast-paced book that portrays Zeke and Randy with more subtlety than their father, who is a caricature. By the time the tournament ends, the brothers have had insights into more than chess strategy: They understand better the role their father has played in their relationship and in their parents’ shaky marriage. Zeke reflects early in Perpetual Check that “he never had a chance to be the big brother in the equation” with his sibling, because Randy had so many strengths. The equation may not be solved by the last page, but the boys’ have the formula.

Best line: “Randy knows that Zeke will often make a seemingly careless move early in the game. The strategy is to leave the opponent with ‘He must know something I don’t’ bewilderment.”

Worst line: “Dina giggles again.” Wallace casts Mr. Mansfield as a sexist, without using the word, but isn’t it sexist to have only female characters giggling, as in this book? Perpetual Check also has many lines such as, “He’s a dick,” “This guy I’m playing against is a prick,” and “No way you’re sitting on your fat ass for another summer.”

Published: February 2009

Ages: The publisher recommends this book for ages 12 and up, a label that appears based largely on its use of words such as “dick” and “ass.” This seems prudish and misguided given that many children start hearing these words in preschool.  Apart from the “bad words,” this short novel — a novella, really — would better suit ages 9-12 and strong readers as young as 8.

Read an excerpt form Perpetual Check.

About the author: Rich Wallace also wrote Wrestling Sturbridge and Playing Without the Ball.

Caveat lector: This review was based on an advance reader’s edition. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Reviews of books for children or teenagers appear on Saturdays on One-Minute Book Reviews.

© 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.twitter.com/janiceharayda

The Winner of Today's Gusher Award for Achievement in Hyperbole in Book Reviewing Is ...

A line in a review of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, in the “Briefly Noted” section of the May 5, 2008, New Yorker:

“Strout makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”

The last part of this sentence is meant as praise, but why is it good that a book leaves you “gasping for air”? Doesn’t it make reading this novel sound a little like having an asthma attack?

One-Minute Book Reviews will have a review of Olive Kitteridge next week.

Nothing like a triple threat!

Face of Betrayal co-authored by Fox News Legal Analyst Lis Wiehl and April Henry, is the first in a promised series of four called the Triple Threat Novels. There high school classmates find a common bond in their ten year reunion and a chocolate desert called, the Triple Threat. One is a Federal Prosecutor, another a FBI special agent, and the the third a TV reporter. As the story begins, its is apparent they have shared their resources in the past to solve various cases.

When a 17 year old US Senate page disappears, the three find themselves in the center of her apparent kidnapping. There is much to like about Wiehl’s first outing in Christian fiction. The pace is fast without sacrificing character development making for a quick and interesting read. Wiehl brings a wealth of knowledge from her experience with the Washington inside to an otherwise oft-told story: wealthy family involved in a kidnapping, powerful politician obstructing justice, etc … What brings real life to Face of Betrayal is its description of justice and journalistic procedures without becoming bogged down bogged down in needless detail.

While an excellent freshman effort, this suspense novel has a few distracting drawbacks. Most notable is the hurried up feel of the ending. Too much is introduced too late in the story and then lose ends are tied up in ways that feel more forced than necessary. In spite of those problems, Face of Betrayal is still a powerful story.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

Title: Wintergirls

Author: Laurie Halse Anderson

Category: Young adult

Worth It? More yes than no. So check it out.

The Nitty Gritty: Eighteen-year old Lia is anorexic and a cutter, despite a few treatment center stints. Her recovery is tenuous at best as she battles her overbearing mother, copes with being rejected by BFF Cassie and adjusts to living with her father’s newly blended family. When Cassie is suddenly found dead, Lia is racked with more than grief. She’s fraught with guilt. Guilt over ignoring the plethora of calls Cassie made to her on that fateful night—sending Lia into a viscous tailspin that could jeopardize her very life.

The Good: Laden with multi-layed subtext and symbolism. Raw, uncensored emotion and an unfettered view into the psychology of eating disorders and self-mutilation. Clever and interesting ways of weaving in medical terminology and explainations of anorexia’s effects. Accurate portrayal of step-families. Authentic YA voice. Important and timely subject matter.

The Bad: Halse hints at the causes of Lia’s anorexia and cutting, but none are satisfying. Maybe that’s why it was to hard sympathize and/or root for Lia. Or maybe I was distracted by unresolved plot lines and issues, e.g. why Cassie was Lia’s partner in all things destructive, or what happened to her before she moved in.

The Ugly: It bears repeating, it was hard to sympathize and/or root for Lia.

Other YA Halse Anderson Reads: Speak, Catalyst, Prom and Twisted.

"The Chrysalids" - John Wyndham

John Wyndham, The Chrysalids. London: Penguin Books.

John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids was one of the seminal books of my childhood. I first read it at about 10, and to this day I still read it every couple of months. There are passages I could probably recite from memory. What fascinated me about this book was partly the setting, and how comfortably it settled with New Zealand’s iconic anti-nuclear policy – in The Chrysalids, the mutated survivors of nuclear war headed towards New Zealand as a relatively pristine haven from the resulting environmental and social catastrophe.

It also introduced me to the idea of mutation – both biological and cultural. I didn’t recognise it in so many words when I first read the book (at ten years old, genetic mutation and social upheaval as such were still far in my mental future) but the idea that one sudden event could prompt an explosion within the human body, and the beginnings of a new type of human being… that was fascinating. What was even more fascinating was the way that this new type of human was treated – hunted down by the genetically pure, sterilised, and thrust out into the wilderness. The really creepy thing was that people would suddenly turn on their neighbours. We see this in the real world all the time – the Rwandan genocide is a particularly brutal example of a flash-point being reached, where neighbours are suddenly dehumanised due to social and cultural expectations of “us” and “other”.

If anything, The Chrysalids represented possibility, and that possibility continues to define the book for me: the idea of sudden and drastic genetic change – how it may have occurred in the past, how we have the capability to bring it about today, why we retain that ability, knowing what it can do… and how we would cope with any possible results.

Being raised in a non-religious family, The Chrysalids was my first real experience of the depths to which religion could be twisted to justify the inexplicable in order to make it understandable. How many could stand up against the need to find meaning after nuclear catastrophe, when scientific knowledge is lost and religion appears to provide a means of protection and escape – if only one can conform enough? This fear of difference and nonconformity – biological and intellectual – and the wholesale rooting out of these perceived spiritual imperfections is chilling. The child David’s dream about his father sacrificing his six-toed friend, Sophie, as he sacrificed a mutant calf is chilling, not just for the cruelty but for the indifference.

We all stood looking at her, and waiting. Presently she started to run from one person to another, imploring them to help her, but none of them moved, and none of their faces had any expression. My father started to walk towards her, the knife shining in his hand. Sophie grew frantic; she flitted from one unmoving person to another, tears running down her face …. He raised his other hand high, and as he swept it down the knife flashed in the light of the rising sun, just as it had flashed when he cut the calf’s throat… (28)

As horrible as this childish dream is, however, if pales to the later realisation of Sophie’s life as an adult – mutilated, sterilised, and thrust out into the radioactive Fringes as a child, as an adult still living there as the lover of a mutated spider-man who would throw her over in an instant for a woman who could give him children. (It appears that only the women were sterilised – male Blasphemies escaped that fate in one of Wyndham’s rare slips.) In her instinctive emotional understanding and her knowledge of her own limitations Sophie despairs: wisdom banished to the wilderness.

Wyndham is careful enough to emphasise the horror of this war-induced dystopia in two different ways. He refuses to make the dystopian community of Waknuk and its surrounds a homogenous set of people. David is exposed to the worst of it, as his father Joseph is a true and unrelenting bigot who is happy to crush his own family in the name of faith. Indirectly, this exposure also allows David to find the humanity in others – in his Aunt Harriet (who drowns her mutated infant and herself to escape having to give up her baby) he sees the possibility of an adult figure prioritising love over religion and its mandated conformity. As he ages, he sees more individuals who think this way, but they are always individuals – there is never the possibility of a community of the dispossessed. Purity of species overrides purity of heart, but even those entrusted with preserving the former can be decent enough to preserve some of the latter. The Inspector who condemns Sophie comforts David more than his father does.

The growing claustrophobia felt by David and his telepathic friends is real and immediate. Despite their abilities, they are powerless in a world of rigid power structures, where governments and individuals take pride in the power of being a true Norm. This takes its toll on them, who would share in that power without truly meriting it by the standards of their own community. They are betrayed by one of their own (and Anne is to be pitied as much as Sophie and Harriet), tortured, killed, and their leader left behind in anonymity as they escape to Zealand, where the new species is growing. As the most ordinary of the Chrysalids, David is the pivotal figure. He is neither as powerful as his little sister Petra, as practical and as his lover Rosalind, or as intelligent as Michael. All David has comes from his genetic makeup – his psychic abilities, his growing realisation of difference, and his legacy from his father. David is everyman as he wishes he could be. He is us.

It is that identification, that ordinariness, which provides the subtlest and most horrifying part of the book. For when the escaping Chrysalids are rescued by the Zealand airship, the pursuing Norms are killed – and the Zealander shows no remorse. Her evolutionary rationale for the destruction of inferior species is shocking – especially as the reader is left with no alternative but to accept that the Norms are inferior, and that in the coming struggle – far into the future, to be sure – they should lose, whether they are neighbours or not. In effect, the Zealanders are really no different to the Norms – they aim to preserve their species above all else. Both sides have privileged power above ethics – with some justification. But is some enough? David, who is like us ordinary in his extraordinariness, may dislike the reasoning of his new friend and may think fondly of some of his former family, but he is on his way to a new family, a new community, and his place in it promises to be as secure as his father’s is within the old. In effect, he has escaped his father only to take his place.

Genetics will out, one way or another.

Review: Slob by Ellen Potter

Slob by Ellen Potter

Product Description from Amazon.com:

Twelve-year-old Owen Birnbaum is the fattest kid in school. But he’s also a genius who invents cool contraptions— like a TV that shows the past. Something happened two years ago that he needs to see. But genius or not, there is much Owen can’t outthink. Like his gym coach, who’s on a mission to humiliate him. Or the way his Oreos keep disappearing from his lunch. He’s sure that if he can only get the TV to work, things will start to make sense. But it will take a revelation for Owen, not science, to see the answer’s not in the past, but the present. That no matter how large he is on the outside, he doesn’t have to feel small on the inside.With her trademark humor, Ellen Potter has created a larger-than-life character and story whose weight is immense when measured in heart.

I received this ARC from Penguin and before I could even look it over, my 11 year old daughter snapped it up.  Maybe it was the Oreo cookie on the cover, or maybe it was the title, but she devoured the book in less than 2 days.   It’s a YA novel meant for kids 9-12 years old.  Rather than review it, my daughter wanted me to ask her questions about it, so here we go!

What is Slob about?  Who is the main character?

Slob is about a fat genius named Owen who tries to figure out a mystery about his parents.  Owen is 12 years old and goes to middle school. 

What challenges does Owen face?  

Owen is overweight, which presents a lot of problems for him, especially in gym class, where his coach is out to get him and embarrass him.  Someone suggests he get a ‘fat exemption’ from the doctor but he decides to tough it out.  Owen wants to solve the mystery about his parents so he builds Nemesis, a radio/television that can see the past and expand on what was caught on the security footage of a camera across the street from their deli.  It’s complicated.

How would you describe the book?  What was your favorite part?

I would describe it as suspenseful.  It has both serious and funny parts.  It’s mostly a mystery. The cover is really cool.  On the cookie, where it would say “Oreo”, it says “A Novel”.  The part I liked best were the parts at school, because he helps his arch-enemy recover from a seizure, and then they become friends.  

Were the characters believable?

I thought they were.  I liked Owen but the character I found most interesting was Mason Ragg.  He has one brown eye and one milky-blue eye and half his face is always sneering due to a medical condition.  It was rumored that Mason carried a switchblade in his sock, but it turned out it was just a key carrier.  There was another rumor that he was kicked out of his old school for being a handful.  It shows that people often make assumptions based on incorrect information. Mason knew about his reputation but didn’t let it bother him.

Did you like the ending?  Is there anything you’d change?

I did.  Owen learned a lot about himself by the end of the book.  He never did solve the mystery about his parents, but maybe some things are better left unsolved.

Who would you recommend this book to?  

I’d recommend this book to middle school kids, kids who’ve been bullied, kids who are friends with a bully, kids who are different, and kids who love to read.  It’s an easy read, and not too long (208 pages).  I’d give it 4 out of 5 stars.  

 

Slob by Ellen Potter will be released on May 14th, 2009.  

Start by envisioning a world

Become an artist (All profound works of literature have two themes: love and death) ample doses of recreation

In becoming intellectual, we often wonder where to begin.  The beginning does not matter, it only matters that you do in fact begin somewhere.  You set down all your childish books and you pick up works that will force you to think.  Your voyage will be akin to swimming, but you will not drown, unless you decide to go completely under without the proper equipment.  Start with the Classics my friends.  Use them to bulldoze the entire edifice of modern rubbish and Hollywood zombosis that has clamped down on your psyche.  Fashion logical explosions and drip it drop by acidic drop on the faces of the famous nobodies.

We will tell you that there is a world to be seen and felt and experienced far beyond the confines of your couch and your four cornered plasma screen jail cell.  Come to life with us.  It is easy.  Cancel your cable contract.  Rip your television from the wall, and give it to charity.  Take your video games, that electronic crack that you have been feeding your time on this glorious planet to - and give them to someone with more time on their hands.  Let them waste their one and only life in a quest for entertainment.  It seems like you are accomplishing something, but I will tell you….it is all scripted.

Just like literary movements start with stumbles, you will fall flat on your face.  You will start to wonder about your world.  And you will start to create it.  Ezra Pound said, “The essential thing in a poet is that he builds us his world.”  You must have thought about your world to build one.  Otherwise you are lost in a city of piled shit upon shit, so enamored with the smell that sublime rose oil would be the ultimate putrescence.

We imagine a world without copyrights, where we can read unimpeded, an online menagerie of facts and figures and lines and verses, which in fact the entire canon of mankind’s literary output will be encoded and scanned and hyperlinked.  Wikipedia falls flat.  Short of this goal.  When an author mentions another work, you can hyperlink to it.  I do not ever envision that I will make a dime off of my work.  My next novel will be made available for sale.  Whatever money I make off of it will be put into writing my third novel, and other projects.  I will attempt to write one work per year until I meet with a bullet fired from the gun of a madman, or mad insurgent, or I meet my fate lost in thought trampled by horses as I stroll past the gray cobblestone street of an Italian village.

I don’t know how I will meet my end.  It will not be self inflicted.  I will burn brightly shining for my brothers in the darkness.  I have made my decision.  No matter how low it goes, I will claw my way to the surface to breathe.  It is all we can do.

Don’t get lost in yourself.  When you start to turn inwards, use the great works of classical literature to fashion handholds for yourself.  Understand that your lack of emotion only enables you to see the stream for what it is.  This life.  You will be in it, but you will be above it.  You shall not rage against your enemies.  You will merely understand what makes them rage.  And you will defeat them.

I am sorry, you are going to die.  I know I am going to meet my fate, I tell myself that everyday.  I am no longer afraid.  As a conscious entity I cannot comprehend nothingness.  This is not a source of despair.  My death will not happen to me, but for others around me.  I will simply be removed.  But know this, you are going to go the way of the Pharaoh.  Generations will pile on top of you carrying your traits, provided you spread your traits to them.  You came from nothingness, and it did not affect you in the least.  You are alive now.  You know there exists a world in need of your aid, you genius of tomorrow, you teacher of men.  Here is your chance to draw a line.  Set down your game controllers and your remote control.  It is your duty.  You must.  Start by envisioning a world.

Jeffrey M. Hopkins is the author of Broken Under Interrogation, therapy for him to avoid taking poison following his second tour in Iraq.  Writing is the therapy of my choice.  Otherwise I would rage against myself, which is unhealthy after your twenties.  Philosophy is the best therapy.  Construct possible worlds in your mind and destroy them.  One writes to avoid rotting from their toes up, dipped in the river Styx, to no avail.  Immortality is never possible, and frequently a source of upset.  Revel in your mortality.  Give praise to the old ones around you.  Talk to them and discover the past.  Learn their mistakes.  Try your hardest to avoid them.

Leslie's Journal by Allan Statton

 Title: Leslie’s Journal

Author: Allan Stratton

Rating: A

Good If… You’re a mature teen looking for a heartbreaking and eye-opening story.

Summary: (Taken from publisher’s site)

Leslie can’t seem to avoid trouble, whether it’s at school or at home. Just as life seems at its lowest, Jason McCready, the exceedingly cool new guy at school, enters her life.

Now Leslie is the envy of all the girls. But Jason’s appearance is deceiving –he is determined to control every aspect of Leslie’s life and he begins terrorizing her in unimaginable ways.

When a substitute teacher reads the private English-class journal in which Leslie reveals Jason’s abuse, Leslie is suddenly forced into hard choices and terrifying action to take back her life.

My Thoughts: Leslie’s Journal is one of those books that you have to put down and walk away from. It’s a vile story but one that needs to be told and be heard. Leslie’s Journal tells the story of an abusive relationship and tells it well, with emotion that will ring true in every teen’s ears, and give them no choice but to pass it along to their friends.

Leslie is a character that everyone can relate to in one way or another, whether it’s her vivid personality or the fact she falls for the wrong guy.  All of the adults in the book seemed wrapped up in their own problems and simply dismissed Leslie’s calls for help as childish drama, which is something that often seems to happen in real life, unfortunately, and I definitely think that all teens will be able to connect with that.  

I did not enjoy Leslie’s Journal - only a sick-minded person would enjoy a book about abuse - but it is a book that will stick with me forever.

Book Review: Victory

5 Reasons why you should pick up Victory by Peter Schweizer from the library this weekend:

1. Here’s the subtitle - “The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union.”  Doesn’t that make you want to read it?
2. It reads like a John Grisham novel, except it’s all true.
3. If you say you don’t have time, here’s another option: you can order it on tape and listen to it as you drive to work.  Listen to a true historical thriller?  How much better does it get?
4. Peter Schweizer draws upon extensive interviews with senior Reagan officials.  It is well researched, well documented, and well written.
5. Schweizer explores the fascinating connection between the Reagan Administration and the Vatican during the Cold War and discusses how the President and the Pope worked together to bring down communism.

Short and sweet - it’s one of my favorite books.  If you haven’t read it, you’re missing out.

An Action-Packed Collaborative Novel

Noah’s Ride: A Collaborative Novel

By Elmer Kelton, Judy Alter, Carlton Stowers, Phyllis Allen, James Reasoner, Mary Rogers, Mike Cochran, Mike Blackman, Mary Dittoe Kelly, Jane Roberts Wood, James Ward Lee, Carole Nelson Douglas and Jeff Guinn

(Texas Christian University Press, $19.95, paperback)

Turn 13 authors loose on one novel and what do you get? In the case of Noah’s Ride, you get an action-packed Western adventure full of twists, turns, tension, love, brutality and cattle. The story also is rich with mean characters trying to catch the book’s hero, a runaway slave, who has ended up in Texas and tried to hide behind the name Freeman on a ranch named “Free Land.” Each of the authors has created a chapter, and some of the fun is watching how the prose flows from Elmer Kelton to Judy Alter to Carlton Stowers and so on, as each writer suddenly steps into the story and takes it in new directions, while trying to hang onto the established tone. One writer, Mary Dittoe Kelly, previously was unpublished until she entered a contest and won the opportunity to write Chapter 8 of Noah’s Ride.

Book review: 'Audrey, Wait!' by Robin Benway

When 16-year-old student and music fan Audrey broke up with Evan, her wannabe rock star boyfriend, she could never have imagined it would inspire him to write The Song. “Audrey, Wait!” is aloof Evan’s ode to his apparent heartbreak, and Audrey is suddenly a celebrity as the catchy and irrepressable tune rockets up the charts, catapulting the Do-Gooders — and Evan’s “muse” — to instant international fame.

Audrey, Wait! by Robin Benway is the title character’s “tell-all” — her version of the events that led to the chaos that became her personal life in the wake of one of the most popular songs in recent history. As Audrey’s high school yearbook photo is splashed across gossip rags, her private number and screenname are leaked online and entire message boards are suddenly devoted to her style choices and whether or not she’s dating another famous lead singer, our heroine has to decide how much is enough — and what she’s going to do in order to take her life back.

Along the way, we meet Audrey’s funny and hardcore best friend Victoria, her boyfriend Jonah, Audrey’s well-meaning and often hilarious parents and James, Audrey’s adorable — and adorably in love — coworker at an ice cream shop.

The book is fast-paced fun and, though I cringed a little at some of the over-the-top “teen lingo,” that may just be because I feel more and more removed from it every day! I really loved the novel. I felt for Audrey and couldn’t imagine hearing a song about me blasted at every turn, or watching as paparazzi were on tap to chronicle every move of my first date. While reading, I did have the sense that the book will seem a bit dated in the not-so-distant future . . . there are tons of references to current technology, like MySpace, that already seem passe. But it might be like a fun time capsule!

I really loved that since Audrey is supposed to be such a music maven, we can actually get a sense that she is. She goes to shows, talks about her favorite albums, chats with James about what sort of music he likes and bops along to the radio. I feel like in other books I’ve read, characters seem to be “defined” by a certain trait — but the author never actually shows us why. He/she tells us the person is into music, but you never really see it. Definitely not the case here! Each chapter is introduced by a pertinent music quote, and even I recognized a few of them.

A fun, interesting book with nice resolution. I can see where some might argue the ending was a bit too “tidy,” but I like for all the loose ends to be wrapped up. Lots of memorable scenes and quotes, even if some were a bit cheesy! Teens might enjoy the book more than adults, but I’m 24 — I still had a great time reading! And I have the feeling that if I ever actually heard the song “Audrey, Wait!”, like every character in the book, I’d have a hard time getting it out of my head, too.

 

4 out of 5!

 

ISBN: 159514191X ♥ Purchase from Amazon ♥ Author Website

Go Green, Live Rich Book Review

While there are a lot of people who are trying to go green for the benefit of the planet and its inhabitants, let’s face it - there are some people who can only be persuaded to go green for the financial benefits.  If you’re one of those people, or know someone who is, there is a fabulous book that you’ve got to read - Go Green, Live Rich.

 

 

I really enjoyed this book.  It’s filled with fifty widely different ways to start saving the Earth while at the same time padding your pockets.  I don’t need to be persuaded to be more environmentally friendly, but many people just need a gentle push in the right direction.  Go Green, Live Rich is that slight nudge that will have you composting and buying low flow toilets in no time.

David Bach, author of five New York Times bestsellers on how to become wealthy, wrote Go Green, Live Rich after converting to a greener lifestyle himself and realizing how much damage we were collectively doing to the environment.

The great thing that Bach points out, though, is that most efforts to be environmentally friendly will actually make you money, and he lists a specific dollar figure that you will save beside each tip.  The tips are listed in categories such as energy, going green at work, green investing and shopping green.  In each tip, usually just a page or two long and written in plain English so it’s easy to understand, Bach reveals shocking statistics that show how much money Americans are wasting every day by engaging in practices that damage the environment.

For example - Did you know that $4 BILLION dollars of energy could be saved if workers simply turned off their computers at night before leaving work?  $4 Billion dollars.  And all we would need to do is flip a switch.

So you might be asking, well, how exactly do I get rich from going green?  Bach has got that answer already calculated for you.  He says if you do just four of the tips in the book -

• Improving Your Car’s Fuel Economy
• Sealing the Leaks in Your Home
• Adjusting Your Thermostat by Three Degrees
• Bringing Your Lunch To Work

then you’ll pocket a savings of $3,758 each year.  If you invest that amount of money each year and receive a 10% annual return, then you’ll have earned $678,146 in 30 years.

Granted, you’ve got to invest that money every year, but look at the return!  You can create a retirement savings while saving the planet and creating a better world for you to retire in.  It’s a win, win situation for everyone involved.

If you’re searching for one book to put into perspective the financial benefits of going green, there’s likely nothing better than Go Green, Live Rich.  It will inspire you, empower you and put a few extra dollars in your bank account along the way.

 

Kimberly Button is a green consultant with greenWell, a green consulting company that helps families and businesses create healthier, greener, non-toxic living and working environments by providing eco-wellness consultations, in-home parties and professional speaking engagements.

Book Review: <em>Founding Faith</em> by Steven Waldman

Founding Faith (2008) by Steven Waldman examines claims made in today’s “culture wars” regarding the religious beliefs and intentions of America’s Founding Fathers.  Did the Founding Fathers create the United States as a Christian nation with religion a core value in government as today’s Christian conservatives claim?  Or were the Founding Fathers really Deists and secular humanists who set up a solid wall between church and state as liberal commentators believe?  Both sides cherry pick quotes to back up their arguments and in a sense both are correct.  And both are wrong.

Waldman conducts an illuminating historical survey of the so-called Founding Fathers and their views on church and state. Waldman focuses on five particular leaders of the Revolutionary and early Federal era: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.  Turns out that the Founding Fathers didn’t agree with one another and like many of us their views changed over the course of their lives.  All of them were spiritual and to a certain extent Christian (although none of them to the strict standards of today’s Christian evangelicals) and believed religion was important to the morality of a society.  All believed that religious freedom from government was a boon to religion and worked to protect religious expression.

Sometimes what they prohibited for the Federal government was acceptable for state governments.   Politics also played a role in that a strict seperationist like Madison would have to make accomodations in legaslation to appeal a wider political spectrum even when it went against his political ideas.  Turns out that what the Founding Fathers said about religion and government was often deliberately vague because they hadn’t figured it out themselves.  What may matter more to us today is what we believe about church and state and not expecting to find cut & dry answers in the words of the Founding Fathers.

I really enjoyed this book and found it a good analysis of complex and nuanced issues.  It’s great that Waldman can go beyond myth-busting and side-taking to create a great historical and biographical work of religious issues in our nation.

Recommended reading to go with this book: The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Favorite Passages

Careening through Adam’s contradictor writings on religion, we are reminded that just because the man was great does not mean he was coherent.  He thought Christianity perfect, except for many of its most important teachings.  He loved his Puritan ancestors except for their core beliefs.  He hated religions’ tendency to squelch rational though but admired its effectiveness at instilling morality.  The Founding Fathers were brilliant but, like all mortals, changed over time, and Adams in particular had no shyness about expressing his views in certain terms, even as he was still figuring them out.  Some of Adam’s views, however, only seem contradictory when seen through the prism of our current beliefs.  His contempt for hypocritical clergy was not a sign of secularism; his belief in an omnipotent God was not a sign of evangelism.  It’s just the way militant Unitarians were back then. - p. 38

Was Washington a “good Christian”?  By the defintion of Christianity offered by contemporary liberal Christians, he would pass muster.  He believed in God, attended church, endorsed the golden rule, and valued the behavioral benefits of religion.  More conservative Christians, however, generally believe that being a good Christian means accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior and the Bible as God’s revelation.  By those standards — those of twenty-first-century conservative evangelical Christianity — Washington was not a Christian.  - p. 59-60

This idea — that freedom comes from God — was the foundation for a new American conception of rights.  If rights resulted from a social compact — a practical way of allowing for mutual survival — then they certainly could by altered by the majority when it seemed practical or convenient.  If they came from God, however, they were immutable and inviolate, whether you were in the majority or not.  This had particularly important implications for wrestling with how to define and protect religious liberty.  Toleration assumed that the state was generously choosing to do the tolerating.  As Thomas Paine put it later, “Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance but the counterfeit of it.  Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of witholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.” A God-given right is something quite different. - p. 92-93

Thus, many conservatives have it backward.  In effect, the conservative accomodationists say that while Congress cannot set up an official state religion, anything else is fair game, since nothing else is prohibited.  Madision wanted us to think of it the other way around: Just because Congress is explicitly forbidden from doing one thing (establishing a national religion), that doesn’t mean that everything else is acceptable.  Madison wanted the opposite assumption — that any actions no mentioned and specifically sanctioned are prohibited.  This concept doesn’t apply just to restrictions on religion but to help for religion, too.  If Congress wasn’t explicitly granted power to aid religion, then it cannot.  Congress is not allowed to interfere, restrict, establish, discourage, or encourage religion.  In Madison’s mind, Congress had one simple assignment when it came to religion: Stay away.  - p. 154

Madison’s most important isnight was that it would lead to a distrust of religion.  It would be assumed, Madison suggested, that the invocation of religion by a politician was, well, political.  He and his Baptist allies would be mystified by the assumption that being pro-seperation means being anti-God.  How on earth does it follow that if you treasure religion, you’d want government touching it?  Church and state, when married, bring out the worst in each other, Madison would say.  If God is powerful, he does not need the support of the Treasury.

Indeed, to equate support for religion in the public square with love God is not only an insult to those God-fearing people on the other side of the debate, but also expresses a profound lack of confidence in God and a disconcerting shallowness of personal faith. - p. 201.

Authors: Waldman, Steven.

Title: Founding faith : providence, politics, and the birth of religious freedom in America / Steven Waldman.

Edition: 1st ed.

Published: New York : Random House, c2008.

Description: xvi, 277 p. ; 25 cm.

[REVIEW] Bad to the Bone - Jeri Smith-Ready

Jeri Smith-Ready

Bad to the Bone (WVMP Radio, Book 2)

Simon & Schuster Pocket (US & CA: 16th May 2009)

Buy (US) Buy (UK) Buy (CA)

The only radio station with real vampires pretending to be real vampires returns for a second adventure in Jeri Smith-Ready’s Bad to the Bone.

When misogynists hijack WVMP Radio’s broadcasts, the station staff investigates, and finds a vampire dog tied to a cross and due to die when the sun rises. So who’s behind the Family Action Network, the Fortress, the Citadel, and who really is or isn’t part of the Control? And what does any of this have to do with she of the human anti-holy blood, Ciara Griffin?

Like the masses of bloodsucker books of late, this series does skew to romance, and the love interest is a brooding sort who lacks a sense of humour. A pretentious snob, Shane is also quite the bitch. Within the walls of the station is a blood-written - I’m not kidding - sign, stating: Absolutely No Foo Fighters. I don’t have any of the band’s songs, but “The Pretender” is particularly awesome, and it’s a shame that Shane won’t admit that. Also: He cringes as he examines it. “Def Leppard. Poison. Warrant…” That’s right, readers; he just dissed my happy music! The songs that make me smile when I’m feeling low. Because Shane doesn’t want me to be happy. He doesn’t want you to be happy, either. He’s such a buzz-killing feckwit that…well, I just don’t like him. But a strong negative reaction like mine is better than a meh reaction, right?

But though Shane is a nob, his author clearly has more humour that she lends to other characters: “Being a vampire is not like being from Finland…They’re metaphysically different creatures.” Other redeeming features include David (’nough said), and some really creepy scenes that don’t include him.

There is, however, a particularly suitable song overlooked for the book’s official playlist. When the protagonist’s surname is Griffin, and the FCC plays a sizeable role in the plot…it’s kind of disgraceful that “The Freaking FCC” song from Family Guy is absent

Still, less cliché and more originality make Jeri Smith-Ready’s Bad to the Bone a unique read.

Review of NUTCASE, by Charlotte Hughes

Nutcase

Charlotte Hughes

Jove

978-0-515-14593-9

288 pages

February 2009

$7.99

Author’s website: http://www.readcharlottehughes.com

Nutcase is part romance, part comedy, part chick-lit. There’s also a touch of mystery to add to the mix. The second book in the Kate Holly psychology series, this is a light read that will appeal to most chick-lit fans, especially those who are interested in psychology.

Kate Holly is a young clinical psychologist living in Atlanta. Unstable patients aren’t the only problems she has to deal with. There’s her firefighter ex-husband, psychologist ex-boyfriend, quirky secretary, and meddling mother… not to mention her little dog, whose depressed disposition gets him into serious trouble.

When a serial arsenist starts terrorizing her town, and a young boy is accused of attacking the local priest, Kate does her best to help while dealing with a quirky array of characters and unusual situations. On the one hand, she’s going to therapy with her ex-husband; on the other, she’s evicted from her office and has nowhere to go to but with her ex-boyfriend, who offers to share his office with her. At the same time, her aunt is seeing one of her criminal patients… In other words, Fate keeps putting obstacles on Kate’s path.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Though there are many hilarious moments and the protagonist has a strong sympathetic voice, there’s no central plot to pull the reader along. There are several subplots going on and no major one to make the reader wonder what’s going to happen next or to really care about the predicament of the characters. Everything seems to be coming randomly from different directions. I had to force myself to finish the book in order to review it; the lack of a strong unity in the plot took away my concentration and desire to care for the characters. The pace moves fairly quickly, the dialogue is natural and energetic and the characters sympathetic, so there are many positive aspects in this book. But the plot has no substance and just doesn’t cut it. I also don’t understand why it’s categorized as mystery/suspense. I got no sense of suspense whatsoever. For me, this falls under humor/satire.

Speaking of Consciousness....

I recently finished reading Doug Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop. I had wanted to read it for a long time, and now that I have, I can say that, to the extent I even understand it, I am depressed. I just can’t find comfort or inspiration in the idea that consciousness is just the brain perceiving itself, and the afterlife is just the remnants of other people’s consciousness that we absorb into our own.

Or something like that. Maybe I’m missing something. Wouldn’t surprise me, since most of the technical stuff just flew right over my head. So in the interest of making this post more, um, interesting, and maybe learning a thing or two myself, here is a collection of links about I Am a Strange Loop and Doug Hofstadter.

The book  is intended to further develop a theme begun in Hofstadter’s previous book Godel, Escher, Bach:

Hofstadter had previously expressed disappointment with how Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for general nonfiction, was received. In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He states: “GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?”

He sought to remedy this problem in I Am a Strange Loop, by focusing on and expounding upon the central message of Gödel, Escher, Bach. He seeks to demonstrate how the properties of self-referential systems, demonstrated most famously in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, can be used to describe the unique properties of minds.

As an exploration of the concept of “self”, Hofstadter explores his own life, and those he has been close to.

Here’s an interview with Doug Hofstadter in which he describes his notion of a soul surviving its original owner’s body (emphasis in original):

One of the most surprising arguments in the book (it has in fact appeared in his previous book, Le Ton beau de Marot) is the idea that the soul outlives the body by having its copies, or “soul-shards”, exist in many brains — the brains of other people, who have known the deceased; perhaps a stronger variation of the idea that a person lives so long as others remember him.

You present a compelling argument for the notion of a soul surviving its physical body by being spread across multiple brains; the more a person is familiar to others, the better his soul is “present” in their brain, too. How will you respond to the claim that the “presence” of one soul in another soul’s brain is merely a simulation mechanism, developed by the evolution process as a means to improve survival? (Being able to predict what members of your clan are about to do can certainly be a powerful survival tool.)

My argument in I Am a Strange Loop is spelled out clearly. If a person’s soul is truly a pattern, then it can be realized in different media. Wherever that pattern exists in a sufficiently fine-grained way, then it is, by my definition, the soul itself and not some kind of “mere simulation” of it.

Testing out the loop:

To get into a properly loopy mind-set for Douglas R. Hofstadter’s new book on consciousness, I plugged a Webcam into my desktop computer and pointed it at the screen. In the first instant, an image of the screen appeared on the screen and then the screen inside the screen. Cycling round and round, the video signal rapidly gave rise to a long corridor leading toward a patch of shimmering blue, beckoning like the light at the end of death’s tunnel.

Giving the camera a twist, I watched as the regress of rectangles took on a spiraling shape spinning fibonaccily deeper into nowhere. Somewhere along the way a spot of red–a glint of sunlight, I later realized–became caught in the swirl, which slowly congealed into a planet of red continents and blue seas. Zooming in closer, I explored a surface that was erupting with yellow, orange and green volcanoes. Like Homer Simpson putting a fork inside the microwave, I feared for a moment that I had ruptured the very fabric of space and time.

“Left flat and underwhelmed“:

Here’s the issue: Hofstadter is not, to me, a good writer. He goes to great pains to be accessible, taking a page from Stephen Hawking’s book and speaking in clear English, with plenty of visual language, examples, and metaphor. But (and isn’t there always a but), Hofstadter takes so long to actually make a point that by the time he does so, it’s underwhelming and foregone. The first half of the book, literally, is spent in short, digestible little sections which are generally little ramblings tangents about whatever ill-chosen metaphor Hofstadter to illustrate his point. …

[...]

Let me profess at this point that Douglas Hofstadter is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author and I am a schmuck with a blog. It is entirely possible—nay, likely—that I Am a Strange Loop is a brilliant book, full of both technical insight and philosophical comfort, but I confessed to being left flat and underwhelmed by the whole book. It seemed to me a long and arduous (not to say semantically-tricky) way of talking about memes, the psychosocial behaviors which are passed onto progeny, and first proposed (using such a word) by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Granted, there are differences between a multi-generational look at common behaviors and a more invasive exposition on the idea of “I”-ness or the sense of self, and how it self-creates and propagates, but it seems to me as though Hofstadter’s point actually proposed very little about the human brain except that its capacity of self-reference currently escapes our ability to describe mathematically with any kind of philosophical comfort.

Blackaby and Alcorn

I must admit that I am a day late posting this because I was determined to finish the book I am about to share with you, however….I still have a little bit to read.  When I received the email about this opportunity to read and review a new book by Henry Blackaby and his Melvin, it was a no brainer YES!!!  You see in college I did the Bible study Experiencing God and it was spiritually lifechanging.  Mr. Henry Blackaby wrote that Bible study.  It was the first Bible study I had ever done with a workbook and I realized quickly that I loved, loved that format.

Blackaby’s new book is Experiencing the Spirit and I have so enjoyed it.  It speaks on the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives and honestly revealed to me how little I understand regarding the Spirit’s working in our lives.  It has challenged me in many ways.  Here are a couple of quotes to wet your appetite:

When it comes to serving God, we tend to look at what we’re good at and what we like to do, then serve according to our ability. The result: we don’t need the Holy Spirit because we think we have everything under control. The world therefore sees good pople doing good things for their God, but they don’t see the power of God working through His people to accomplish what only He can do.

So here’s a question: will God ever ask you to do something you’re not able to do? The answer is yes - all the time! It must be that way, for God’s glory and kingdom. If we function according to our ability alone, we get the glory; if we function according to the power of the Spirit within us, God gets the glory. He wants to reveal Himself to a watching world.

Hmmm…that’s challenging and a little scary.

Why then do many Christians fail to experience the depths of what God has purposed for their lives? The reason is their insufficient personal dealing with God. When our faith is based primarily on the wisdom of men and not on the power of God, we’ve just nullified most of what God intended for our lives. When our faith is built only on a collection of doctrines, we miss out on the Person who wants to be our life.

Gave me lots to think about.  These are some deep weeds.

Randy Alcorn’s book The Treasure Principle was also included in this blog tour. It is a short little book and I haven’t completed it yet either but it looks chock full of wisdom. He discusses the principle of giving and what Christ has to say about that. Interesting stuff b/c the Bible study I did this week was all about the many, many things Christ said about giving. Not easy stuff, but how different would my life look if I really lived a lifestyle of giving?

I have included below a description of each book and some bio on the authors. If you leave me a comment over the next week I will pick one of you and email you and get one of these books to you! If you have a preference about which book you would prefer, then leave that in the comment as well. Thanks for reading and don’t forget if you want to purchase one of these books for yourself or as a gift you can find them at www.amazon.com or your local bookstore!

Summary Experiencing the Spirit:

Serve God as never before

The first Christians “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6) shaking the gates of hell even in the face of severe persecution. The result: People all around “were filled with wonder and amazement” (Acts 3:10).What can give Christians today the same impact?

God’s Holy Spirit is ready to answer that for us in an awesome way, as Henry Blackaby and his son Mel Blackaby make clear in Experiencing the Spirit. You’ll see how the proof of the Spirit’s presence is our awareness of God’s personal assignments for us, plus our supernatural enablement to carry out those assignments. You’ll find essential clarification on the difference between natural talents and spiritual gifts. You’ll explore the dynamics of being filled with the Spirit through intimate relationship with Him, committed obedience, and radical departure from sin.

Instead of considering what you can do for God with your abilities and talents, you’ll be encouraged here to seek what God wants to do through you supernaturally by His Spirit, empowering you beyond your personal competence and capacities. Release the Holy Spirit’s work at the very core of your experience of the Christian life.

Summary The Treasure Principle

Flip-Flop Your Concept of Giving!

Bestselling author Randy Alcorn introduced readers to a revolution in material freedom and radical generosity with the release of the original The Treasure Principle in 2001. Now the revision to the compact, perennial bestseller includes a provocative new concluding chapter depicting God asking a believer questions about his stewardship over material resources. Readers are moved from the realms of thoughtful Bible exposition into the highly personal arena of everyday life. Because when Jesus told His followers to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” He intended that they discover an astounding secret: how joyful giving brings God maximum glory and His children maximum pleasure. Discover a joy more precious than gold!

Story Behind the Book

After years of writing and teaching on the theme “God owns everything,” in 1990 Randy Alcorn was sued by an abortion clinic (for peaceful, nonviolent intervention for the unborn). Suddenly he had to resign as a pastor and was restricted to making minimum wage. Legally unable to own anything, Randy gave all his book royalties to missions work and need-meeting ministries. He and his family have experienced the reality of The Treasure Principle—that God really does own everything, takes care of us, and graciously puts assets into our hands that we might have the joy and privilege of investing in what will last for eternity.

Author Bios:

Dr. Henry Blackaby has devoted his life to the ministry. A multi-faceted talent, he has served as a music director, senior pastor, college president, missionary, and later as an executive in Southern Baptist Convention. Blackaby is the author of more than a dozen books with more than one million copies sold, including the best-selling Experiencing God. As the President of Blackaby Ministries, he is a vibrant speaker and the father of Dr. Melvin Blackaby. Melvin serves as the Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Jonesboro in Georgia, where he lives with his wife, Gina, and their three children.

Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM). Prior to 1990, when he started EPM, he served as a pastor for fourteen years. He has spoken around the world and has taught on the adjunct faculties of Multnomah Bible College and Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon. Randy is the best-selling author of twenty-seven books (over three million in print), including the novels Deadline, Dominion, and Deception as well as Lord Foulgrin’s Letters, the Gold Medallion winner Safely Home, and Wait Until Then.

Book review 5

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. I grew up in an area where people (my parents and grandparents included) had big gardens and where people grew and killed their own animals sometimes. I love to garden too so reading about all their adventures was a lot of fun.

I like the idea of eating food grown locally but since I live in coastal California it’s no hardship at all. I shop at a market which labels their produce with the state or country of origin so I pay attention to that when I shop.

The lifestyle they lived for that year is appealing on some levels. I love walking outside and picking ripe fruits or vegetables. But I don’t like dealing with the critters who want to eat too and it’s a lot of hard work.

I liked a lot of their ideas on “fast” food. Making your own sauces when the ingredients are ripe and canning/freezing them is a great idea. It’s one I’m considering this summer for my family.

This is a good book. It deals with a lot of food security/sustainable agriculture issues. I highly recommend this!

Back On The Path Of The "Peaceful Warrior"

I don’t know how much shines through, but I’m not miltownkid. I’m not Casey Payne either. I am a seeker of “truth.” Aren’t we all? I use my name (miltownkid/Casey) as a key to open doors into more insight (and [2011 Ford Fiesta doors] ).

I want to say “I wonder what makes people lose their drive to seek truth,” but I won’t because I know the answer. I’ve seen the answer. We all start out “seeking truth.” I know because I spent 5 years teaching kindergarten aged kids in Taiwan. ALL KIDS have that curiosity, that wonder. Then it’s stolen from them. Stolen by parents, “teachers”, schools, television, churches. Slowly, year after year, until they’re consumed with answers, not http://miltownkid.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.phpdiscovered on their own or guided to, but hammered into them over and over and over again. Then they, we, have an illusion of truth.

I Thank (miltown)Mom

The best thing your parents can do for you (in my opinion) isn’t money for college, the best schools, cool toys, a nice house or anything that resembles these things. I feel like the best thing a parent can do for you is give you room to grow and act as a guide to help you avoid pitfalls which may effect you for the rest of your life (ie. having kids too you, serious injury, etc.)

My mom tried really hard to be the socially acceptable standard of an awesome single mom (and she was) but this wasn’t as important as the structured space she gave me to grow. I mention this because it gives a framework for where my journey REALLY began.

The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

I read about half of the book ["Way of the Peaceful Warrior"] last night. It was a well timed reminder of what’s really important to me. The book is a story of a young hot-shot gymnastic that runs into an old “sage” that decides to take him on as a student to the “way of the peaceful warrior.” Although I’m not finished, I already highly recommend it. It’s a fun read.

Back on the Path…

It might be hard to tell, but I somewhat despise modern civilization. In high school it was my plan to “escape.” I would often dream of being a Daoist hermit on [WuDang Mountain]. I’m confident that I would have gravitated toward a hermit life had I not met “my master.”

I can’t remember how I presented my dilemma, but I’ll never forget the answer:

One foot in the city, one foot in nature. Balance.

Before hearing that phrase all I could think about was “how can I escape this retched city life?!” Afterward, I realized that I needed to conquer the city. It wasn’t something I should run from, it was a challenge I needed to confront.

Lately I’ve edged towards having both “feet in the city.” Forgetting to set aside enough time for meditation, exercise, reading, studying Daoism and connecting with nature. I need to stop forgetting to, everyday, connect with nature.

At least I meditated today! I’m off to a good start.

"Looking at myself / I see / a plate of carrots & bread / notes / lines / & a radiator / under which no one / has ever swept"

As a first-time reader of Bernadette Mayer, I quickly began to wonder exactly what it was that made me keep reading Poetry State Forest (New Directions, 2008). I divided the subject matter of the poems into some general categories: Food, Weather, Poetry, Politics, Scrabble Words and Nonsense. Not that the poems can be divided so easily, they glide and morph and leap, taking you for a ride.

The book truly begins to cohere with the long (5.5 pages) prose section devoid of capitalization “40-60,” in which Mayer’s persona begins to truly take shape, giving the reader a perspective to latch on to, a lens through which to view the rest of the book. This prose section divulges the stroke she had at 49, debilitating her motor skills & affecting the way she writes. “as a result of the stroke, i am not balanced - i topple & fall easily. if you study how humans walk, it’s by stopping themselves from falling that a step is taken. i write unbalanced poetry, i cannot balance my checkbook, nor do i have one.”

This is pretty exemplary of Mayer’s writing style and persona. Autobiographical minutiae mixed with tangential “fun facts,” overridden by blatant disregard for grammar. The quick interspersing & neck-snapping changes of topic give her writing a careless feeling of whim - though I don’t think it’s fair to assume that the work is as careless as it seems. In the context of the rest of the book it comes to appear expertly calculated - we’ve become familiar with the major characters, locales and obsessions (hating on GWBush, for one) of her life. It also makes the reader read into the silly non-sequiturs as perhaps affectations of a mind altered by stroke or even amicable senility - an intentional locating of persona. The total effect is the accumulation of the everyday mundane, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The end of the book was in large part ruined for me by a section entitled “Old Notebook.” Until then, I was enjoying Mayer’s narrative leaps and embedded social commentary - totally along for the ride. “Old Notebook” (which, by the way, is 20+ pages long) is an actual old notebook (or an amazingly accurate replica of one) reprinted, I don’t know, for the fun of it? Accumulation of everyday minutiae is one thing, subjecting your reader to a barrage without filter - of favorite scrabble words, lists of unpaid bills, disconnected slogans, half-poems, story summaries and bizarre linguistic exercises (to name just a few) is torturous and laughs in the reader’s face - which I suspect is the point. I kept reading hoping something was going to come of all this unmitigated fiddlefaddle, but alas, it was all for naught. About ten pages in I couldn’t resist scrawling “fuck you Bernadette Mayer” in the margin.

There is definitely a diaristic feeling to the book as a whole; a feeling even outside of “Old Notebook” that these words were scribbled down spontaneously. Nada Gordon says in her thesis on Mayer, “The journal form permits the integration of the process of writing into everyday life, using daily experience as the stuff of the writing, but it also permits the inclusion of otherwise ineffable material, and a way out of a repressive world.” Mayer is undoubtedly writing counter-culture simply by virtue of the nontraditional schematics of her writing. The persistent associative leaps and surrealistic flourishes contribute to the feeling of spontaneity. While much can be said for Mayer’s genuine exuberance, shining even through patches of sulky petulance, it doesn’t work when her poems come off so cute as to become precious. This is a good example of a poem that doesn’t work: “Whistle Stop Sleeper”

intermittent incipient nasturtium-snapdragons

climb the fence to the field, knowing we interfere

with their anti-warfare stances as they tumble

like downed trees or alpacas to the green ground

i wish i was an elephant, what would be behind me?

awful coaches or yellow couches tumble too, dusty

all the while like scimitars to regal turrets

ignore the pauses; those caesurae are haughty

my chin’s bleeding, what’s new? who’s late?

i’ll meet you on the other side, I’ll bring

her or him, a blue heron, are you an owl?

fearless? insouciant as an exotic love flower?

have you read The Conquest of Happiness? when?

i just said that to lengthen the line; so there

wish you were here you treelike human or short

imagination’s leaf, soon there’ll be a storm

While I appreciate the irreverence towards politics and “academic” poetry (the haughty caesurae, the spite evident in “i just said that to lengthen the line”), this poem just doesn’t do it for me, despite its hyperactive energy. It’s cute & mildly entertaining but ultimately pointless because it completely lacks an emotional register. Here’s one poem I think works really well, part of a section in which Mayer wrote the bulk of the sonnet at noon and the couplet at midnight every day for a month: “December 23″

Gloomy, unnaturally warmly, still tenebrous

The radiant, invisible dreaming universe,

A year of flowers, see how easy it is

to be a poet, you can say anything

Naming books off the shelf - you have to have

elves and books and leaves and a typewriter

and the lacrymals, once I bought a bookcase

that collapsed when I put books on it

I brought it back, the guy said “you didn’t

put books on it, did you?” This story

has a morose moral: books are insulation

The lights went out here dude

Cars thoughtlessly illuminating us

Same irreverence towards academia, but this time there’s something to latch on to (it happens to be a narrative thread, which I don’t believe it always need be) and though the final couplet is disconnected, it works once you know the constraint she’s using.

The diary form gives Mayer the leeway to play with language and to make it utterly her own, and it normalizes the process of writing as something all-inclusive, something to be done for any reason or no particular reason at all - which is where it begins to border on self-indulgence. It is ultimately an egalitarian form of writing - Mayer is immediately accessible and enjoyable (although I admittedly spent a good portion of the book trying to figure out what the text was hiding and how to unlock it) even if you don’t want to get into close-reading the syntax, her work implies that anyone can (and should) do this. In her words, “But shit man, I don’t know anything, do you?” (”December 31″ sonnet).

This Week’s Gusher Award – A Literary Relay Gone Haywire

This winner of this week’s Gusher Award exemplifies one of the most popular forms of overheated praise, the literary relay gone haywire. It comes from a recent review of Yu Hua’s novel Brothers in the New York Times Book Review:

“Imagine a novel written by William Dean Howells together with D.H. Lawrence, updated by Tom Wolfe and then filmed by Baz Luhrmann, and you’ll have some idea of what Brothers would be like, had it originated in the West.”

The reviewer doesn’t stop with linking a Chinese author to Howells, one of the most influential American writers of the 19th century. He also invokes a fine early 20th-century English author, a bestselling New York novelist, and the Sydney-born director of Australia (after having said that Brothers has a presumably French-influenced “Cyrano de Bergerac-style struggle”). Instead of being helpful, all of these comparisons have the opposite effect: The more of them the critic piles on, the less clearly you see the book.

On a more practical note: Some research has shown that readers start to have trouble grasping statistics when more than three numbers appear in a sentence, and I suspect that a similar principle applies to comparisons. After this critic throws in that fourth name, Baz Luhrmann, he’s lost you.

(c) 2009 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Interview with Joanne Seiff: Day 6 on the Fiber Festival Blog Tour

Here is a scan from a picture of some swatches I did for Blossom, a scarf design I did for Joanne’s book Fiber Gathering. The yarn is Acero, from Brooks Farm Yarn. Not only are these very nice folks at Sheep and Wool festivals, but they also are at Stitches Midwest every year, which is where I happened to meet them. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to these types of events or to pick up the same weight of yarns so the picture illustrates how the lace looks with different weights of yarn.

On to my stop in the blog tour, an interview with Joanne Seiff, the author of the book:

JoLene: One of the things I like to do on my blog is talk about design from the perspective of business because there are so many new designers out there, or knitters interested in becoming designers and I feel that there is not very much information out there that is easy to find to help in that transition to professional designer so I would like to explore the process you went through with your book from that aspect.

1.    What were you looking for in a publisher? I know this is a very broad question, but the process you went through took you through more than one publisher. What made you ultimately settle with your current publisher?

Joanne:

It’s pretty hard to land a book contract with even one publisher! For this project, I needed to have the support of a publisher who shared my values. We needed to share the same vision for the book. There were a lot of issues to consider, but the first one was about compensation.

Publishers have different ways of “paying” for things. For instance, for Fiber Gathering, we (the photographer and I) had to travel a great deal, which is very expensive. The advance had to cover the expenses of the book. (An advance on royalties means the book will have to sell enough to cover that advance—sort of a loan– before I earn any more money at all)

Some publishers offer a large advance, but then expect the author to cover costs like paying for models or for multiple photographers, stylists and illustrators out of that advance. Other publishers offer a smaller advance, but they cover these costs from their own budget. In the end, I had to choose what made the best sense for this book.

There were other concerns, too. I wanted a rural feel to my book, and I had to argue for that rather than a slick urban look. One potential publisher wanted to only use models who were size 6-8, and no older than 23. I wasn’t willing to do this…I believe “regular” women are beautiful, and wanted a variety of ages and sizes in my book as well.

In the end, Wiley was the best fit for me. The editors there treated me with respect. We truly collaborated on the process. I felt great about my choice in the end, although it was a rocky journey to publication.

2.    When a designer has an idea for a book, what process do they go through in presenting their book to a publisher?

Joanne:

The short version is that you write a non-fiction book proposal. Your local library has books that explain how to do this. It’s like a 35-70 page term paper, explaining the book’s concept, the audience, why it will sell and how you will help to market it. The twist is that for a knitting book, you do all this and provide design pitches too, with sketches, concepts, swatches and other details. Most of this is done by email, so it helps if everything is available electronically. (swatches can be scanned!)

Some people have agents who represent them, and others contact publishers on their own. Landing an agent who’s effective and represents you properly is a difficulty in itself. In the knitting world, you can publish a book without an agent if you feel confident negotiating your own terms and contract.

3.    What were the most challenging aspects of your book project?

Joanne:

- Finding a publisher I could trust and collaborate with was the most difficult.

- Traveling. Travel is expensive and very wearing. Even when going to fun events like festivals, it can be very hard on the body. It’s hard to stay healthy.

- Organizing 15 designers’ work. Designers are fabulous, creative people. When one combines frequent travel to 11+ events with organizing the designs, contracts, and designers, things were sometimes hard to manage. It turned out beautifully, though!

- I combined all this with writing my first book. I had no idea how working with a publisher went either, and that was challenging.

4.    What were the most rewarding?

Joanne:

-I had so many positive experiences with lovely people at fiber festivals. What amazing and kind people are involved in our community!

-Writing the essay drafts was a joy. Back at the hotel room, the words would pour out. I’d be grinning like a fool at the computer while I tried to describe it all.

-Seeing the galleys and holding the book in my hands for the first time were rewarding moments, too.

-Finally, every time someone says something positive about the book, it’s like they’ve given me a present!

5.    What were your favorite fiber festivals to visit? As much fun as it would be to go to sheep and wool festivals, was the travel for the book hectic and did you have to approach it from a different perspective since you were doing it for research for your book?

Joanne:

This sounds corny, but every festival was my favorite. There isn’t one best festival…there are special aspects to each event. The people are always fantastic-no matter the event- and the festivals all have important and unique regional differences. For instance, small festivals are less crowded and more intimate. You have more time to shop, learn from others, and have a relaxed experience. Don’t discount a small festival!

The travel was hectic and hard. For a while, we had no days off. For instance, in October 2007, we went to 3 festivals. When we’d get home late Sunday night or on Monday morning, we’d have to go to work right away. I’d have lots to do for the book, and my photographer (aka my husband, the professor) had to get back to teaching his Genetics lectures and running labs.

When you’re writing about and photographing a festival, it’s not like going to a festival for fun. We were at the fairgrounds by 7:30 or 8 in the morning, photographing things and interviewing participants before the crowds arrived. We then stayed for evening events to cover all the different aspects of an event that lasts only 2 days. A rainy day didn’t mean we could go home early—we still needed photographs and something to write about! Then, we’d often drive 2 or more hours back to an airport. Then we took flights back to our home airport, in Nashville. It’s another 70 mile drive from that airport to our house…and sometimes we did this 3 times a month.

6.    Do you have another book planned?

Joanne:

Yes! Knit Green: Twenty Projects and Ideas for Sustainability will be published in September 2009. This book has essays, much like Fiber Gathering, and the topics cover how to incorporate environmental sustainability into one’s knitting and fiber arts. I designed all the projects for this book myself and started working on it even before Fiber Gathering went to press. I’m very excited about Knit Green! 2009 is a big year for me!

If you’d like to know more about Knit Green’s publication, keep an eye on my blog, http://www.joanneseiff.blogspot.com, and sign up for my newsletter on my website, http://www.joanneseiff.com.

Book Review - <em>Here Lies Arthur</em>

Ah, King Arthur. Has any figure from legend become more… well, legendary? Just looking around at my personal possessions at home, I find that I own books about Arthur (Knight Life, One Knight Only and Fall of Knight), as well as a couple movies (Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail). I’ve even used it as a jumping-off point for my own works. As a storyteller within my own universe of role-playing games, I have a vampire character based of Sir Tristan and a story centering around the true origins of Excalibur and Merlin was a major turning point in my gaming universe.

Then of course there’s all the other Arthur-related stuff out there. Everything from The Once and Future King to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to things like Merlin and The Mists of Avalon and The Sword in the Stone. Truly, one would be hard-pressed to find a greater inspiration for much of Western culture than the stories of King Arthur. Only the Bible comes to mind as a great rival to the title.

Now comes Here Lies Arthur, a young-adult book that tries to tell a more “historical” version of Arthur, making him a borderline barbarian only made great through the efforts of his bard, Myrddin. Most of the major characters of the Arthur stories are here and recognizable, though often with names different from what we’re used to (Sir Kay is named Cei, Sir Bevedere is Bedwyr, Percival is Perdur). Absent are Morgan le Fey, Modred and Lancelot (who, from what I recall, was originally a French character who got added to the mythos around the 12th century), but they aren’t missed.

The tale is told through the eyes of a young sometimes-girl, Gwyna. She turns up when her master’s farm is attacked by Arthur’s raiders. She escapes and swims to safety where Myrddin rescues her. Impressed by her ability to hold her breath, he comes up with a plan to have her hide under water and pass a certain sword onto a certain barbarian warlord (though as well all know, watery tarts distributing swords is no basis for a system of government).

From there Gwyna winds up spending a great deal of time hanging out with Arthur’s merry band of raiders. Most of this time she spends in the company of Myrddin, learning all she can from the old man (mostly learning about the power of stories, something fans of Terry Pratchett will find to be a familiar concept). She’s present for some of the great moments of the myth, like the introduction of the Round Table and is the one who finds out that Arthur’s wife is not perhaps as loyal to him as he might wish.

The book is well-written and entertaining and obviously heavily researched. It tells a good tale of what life might’ve been like during the time after the Romans left England but before the Saxons took over completely. It offers a good explanation for how much of the Arthurian legends might’ve come to be.

The one slightly weak point for me was the character of Gwyna. She’s mostly a passive observer who doesn’t do terribly much to advance the story (though she does help a young girl named Peri come to a realization about herself). Mostly Gwyna is just sort of there, watching and listening and being our eyes and ears. There’s nothing really wrong with this per se, but a better story might’ve been done through the viewpoint of Myrddin.

Still, for anyone looking for a more historical, but still fictional, version of Arthur, you might well enjoy this book.

Three Worthy Books On Our War

For six years we have wadded through backwater and gumbo learning about our war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, always bloody and confusing.  It is hard to trust anyone now, yet there is clear-headed history and honest, informed experience being written.  I don’t claim to have read everything but I have found three books I recommend.  Even when what you learn is not comforting, if you trust the author you know you are better off than before.  Both authors give ample reason to trust them.

Two of the books are history based on mind-boggling access to participants and documents.  The third is a personal narrative of a reporter combining his experiences with what he learned or came to understand about all those he encountered in the war zone.  These are must read and must keep books.

Dexter Filkin, The Forever War

Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq, 2003 to 2005

Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble: General David Petraeus And The American Military Adventure In Iraq, 2006-2008

In the last sentence of The Gamble, Ricks writes, “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”  Charles Marlin

CONGRATULATIONS LINDA SANDS!

“Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.”  Karen Ravn

 

As a writer, you have to have equal parts talent and tenacity. You have to recognize that each wall must be climbed, each rejection is merely a stepping stone that will help you improve your work and traverse to the next career tier. 

Linda Sands, the poster child for talent and tenacity, has recently been taken on as a client by Josh Getzler at Writers House in New York.  Mr. Getzler is shopping around her novel We’re Not Waving, We’re Drowning. 

The scratch anthology will also be available soon.  The collection includes work by Ms. Sands, Emily Lupita Plum,  myself and many others.

Keep climbing Linda!