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Sunday, March 29, 2009

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In college, I was told that this is a book that is generally understood better as one matures and ages. That is true for me. I still don't get it all, but I understood more of it this time! Orual is the oldest of three daughters of a king in a small land. She is not beautiful, and is not treated well by those around her, but nor does she treat them well. Their father provides them with a Greek tutor who becomes like a father to them, caring for them and teaching them in a way that is very different than the beliefs of their people. There are variety of themes that run throughout the book .. religion vs. reason .. faith vs. knowledge .. and love of self vs. love of other. The youngest daughter, Psyche, is given as a sacrifice to the gods to save the people, and Orual finds herself in a fight with the gods over this .. and fights until the end of her life.

Lewis repeatedly and variously asks questions about love. What is love? Is love that is selfish really love? As humans how much can we love? Can humans understand divine love? What does love demands of others? These are almost all asked through story and not simply words. They (and Lewis' answers) are seen in the lives of characters, for either good or ill. Orual tells her own story, and of course she tells it as she sees it, through her own eyes. The reader confronts his own selfishness, the way that emotions and actions which are not really love are treated and conveyed as love. Human love is so far from divine love .. and we have no way to make it perfect or right. At the end Orual confronts the gods and is left speechless. As it should be. Except for the gracious gift that God makes to give us one to speak for us, we have no defense. A book worth reading and re-reading, giving its truth space to work its way down into one's soul.

Title:Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold
Author: C. S. Lewis
Date published:1956
Genre: Fiction
Number of pages: 313
Notes: Repeat reading

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Friday, March 20, 2009

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cover of 'The Eyre Affair'

This book was recommended to me once when I attempted to describe Connie Willis' delightful To Say Nothing of the Dog-- another literary, time-travelling, mystery, genre-bending book (which both sapphire and I have read and love). It's taken me a while to get a hold of a copy to read, but it was just as entertaining as promised. Thursday Next, a veteran of the interminable Crimean war and survivor of the disastrous charge of the light armored brigade, now works in the Literary division of SpecOps, in an alternate history version of England where people seem obsessed with art and literature-- so many people have had their names changed to that of famous writers that they have to be registered and numbered to keep them straight, and there are rallies and mobs on the street about clashes between different periods and views of art. In the midst of this, a seemingly unstoppable villain named Acheron Hades has stolen an original Dickens manuscript and kidnapped Thursday's eccentric inventor uncle and aunt; as an act of terrorism and to demonstrate his power, Hades removes and kills a minor character from Dicken's Martin Chuzzlewit (and since it is the original, all copies of the book are affected), and when he isn't taken seriously enough, he steals the original manuscript of Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jane suddenly goes missing from her own book.

Thursday lives in a delightfully strange version of England. She has a pet dodo named Pickwick (cloned extinct animals were all the rage for pets), her father is a rogue chronoguard (another division of SpecOps) who can stop time and apparently time-travel at will. He drops in on his daughter every now and then and stops time and everyone around them so he can talk to her, and among other things, he apparently also works to fight the French revisionists who are literally rewriting English history. In one particularly delightful visit, he stops by to show Thursday a new, nutritious fruit that comes in its own "hermetically sealed biodegradable packaging" and mentions his plan to go back three thousand years-- after he leaves, Thursday realizes she has just learned about the invention of the banana, named after the woman who engineered it. There are also recurring arguments throughout the book about the real author of Shakespeare's plays, a mystery which Thursday's father resolves in a rather unexpected way.

In Thursday's world, there is also some permeability between the real world and books of fiction. As a child, Thursday once actually entered Jane Eyre and met Mr. Rochester when visiting the Bronte house, and once Acheron starts on his devious plan, she learns that there are other cases where characters have wandered out of the books they belonged in. It's mentioned more than once in the book that people generally found the ending to Jane Eyre unsatisfying and wondered why Jane didn't end up with Mr. Rochester but instead goes off with her missionary cousins. As soon as I read this, I figured that Thursday was somehow going to change this-- in the process of saving Jane from her villainous kidnapper, she would also end up changing the ending to the one that we, in our world, are familiar with. Of course she does, but how she gets there-- and the response from all of Bronte's readers-- makes for an entertaining and satisfying ride.

Thursday is a strong female character, and part of her eventual success against Acheron is a result of the way she sticks to her guns and helps other people out. When she starts working in Swindon, she meets Spike, the one-man SpecOps-17 team who handles werewolves and vampires. When a call for help comes across the wire that all the other SpecOps agents have gotten used to ignoring, Thursday goes to his aid. And one little memento from that encounter turns out to be instrumental later on.

There's also a bit of a love story, and in the end Thursday gets some help via Mr. Rochester and a couple of other grateful characters from Jane Eyre, who help set things right with her former fiance and end this book the way comedies traditionally ended-- with a wedding.

Title:The Eyre Affair
Author:Jasper Fforde
Date published:2003
Genre:Alternate History / Fantasy
Series:Thursday Next
Number of pages:374
Notes:recommended by Tavishi and others

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Thursday, March 19, 2009

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A story of a young woman who chose to follow God to Eastern Europe, almost immediately after Communism fell. She moved to Romania for a year with 3 other teammates, living, studying, and evangelizing among college students. Because things were so unsettled, life was indeed very interesting. But God showed up in some astounding and beautiful ways. During that first year, she felt God asking her to stay longer, so she stayed another 4 years. After that, she spent another 5 years living in Hungary and traveling around a number of countries throughout Eastern Europe. because the countries in this part of the world had been so closed, when Communism fell, the hunger for God and truth was immense. Hearing the story of someone who was part of God's answer to that hunger and search is encouraging and refreshing.

Because I currently live in Romania, I understand some of what she speaks about .. the culture, the language, the history. Things have changed dramatically in the almost 20 years since Communism fell, so my time here has been less dramatic and exciting than hers was. And I think I'm glad for that! God is still working here .. perhaps a bit less dramatically, but still powerfully and wisely. I am glad for those who have gone before among these people and this culture, planting seeds and watering them. God's Kingdom is always a work in progress, and it's a joy to take part in any of it!

Title:We Wait You: Waiting on God in Eastern Europe
Author: Taryn Hutchison
Date published:2008
Genre: Autobiography
Number of pages: 219
Notes: Given by my parents

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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A young boy is growing up in an Arab family in Palestine, with a father full of pride and anger toward the Jews who will not give them their land. This young boy is very good at surviving, although he doesn't always keep his pride. Because he does well on a test at school, he is given the opportunity to attend a Jewish boarding school and receive excellent training. He doesn't want to go, but his father won't let him back out. So he goes to the Jewish school, but to survive he ends up working to blend in. He can fade into either culture, and does so throughout his life. But .. as with anyone who lives in two cultures .. the question then becomes if he belongs in either one.

Kashua gives a wonderful picture of Arabic life. Narrative-style .. not by explaining or show and tell .. but simply by putting the reader in the room with events as they happen. Enough is explained to understand something very 'other' from what I know, but not so much that one is ever bored. The stories are told vignette style, with pieces and chunks missing. But everything flows together beautifully. I remember Larq talking about how fantasy or science fiction works when authors have so crafted the respective world or culture that slang and expectations about how life works. These rules or expectations are taken for granted, in a way. Which is true of Kashua's writing as well. Things which he has experienced, growing up in similar places to the main character, make some things 'commonplace' for him that I have never experienced in my life. The reader is given a gift in this glimpse into daily life. Not just important events or big stories .. but family relationships, village etiquette, violence, religious rituals .. this book is worth savoring, both for the writing style and the cultural learning to be gained simply by reading a story.

Title:Dancing Arabs
Author: Sayed Kashua
Date published:2002
Genre: Fiction, Cultural
Number of pages: 227
Notes: Given by Jude

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Saturday, March 14, 2009

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cover of 'Serenity: Better Days'

An entertaining, if all too brief, escapade with the crew of Serenity. Presumably set sometime during the days of "Firefly," when all the characters we know and love are on board, this story finds the crew pulling off a heist and being the first guinea pigs to come up against a new, sophisticated, automatic anti-theft/crime-prevention device. They do manage to outwit it, and when they go to sell what's left of it, the cache they are sent to retrieve as payment ends up being far more money than they ever expected. So, interspersed with the rest of the story, as they are being chased down by the makers of the anti-crime machine and Mal or Zoe is being tracked down as a "dust devil" terrorist after the war ended, we also get to see the various dreams of how the different crew members would like to spend their share of the money-- sometimes serious, sometimes joking just to get a reaction, and sometimes downright strange..

The artwork is generally gorgeous but I found it a little uneven, because there were a few points where I wasn't quite sure for a moment or two who a particular character was supposed to be-- usually it was a matter of context or not enough detail, and I eventually figured it out from the story or dialogue-- but it made me realize [again] how much you lose, when you go from actors who all give life to their characters with their voice and bearing, in addition to the way they look.

The "dream" sections when the various characters are telling what they'd want to do with the money are all pretty entertaining, and it seems like it probably gave the artists some more interesting things to portray than they might otherwise get to draw in the serenity-verse. River's fantasy, particularly, is quite strange-- but what makes it fit perfectly is Zoe's wry response (I can just hear her saying it) that now her idea is taken.

The other interesting detail is that somehow, by the end of the story, the money has somehow been stolen. The only one who catches on is Inara-- she notices that Mal never shared what he wanted to do with the money, and guesses that having his crew leave him is the last thing he wants. It's well-written and subtle, but quite clear and insightful into Mal, at the same time.

Title:Serenity: Better Days
Author:Joss Whedon; art by Brett Mathews, Will Conrad, and Adam Hughes
Date published:2008
Genre:Science Fiction / Graphic Novel
Series:Firefly/Serenity-verse
Number of pages:80

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