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Old Ogden Nash Hardcovers, Praising e-Readers, and Brain-Changing Reading

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For some years, I’ve had a water damaged copy of Ogden Nash’s Good Intentions. Here’s a look at a good copy of it; this one has the slip cover too (I hadn’t seen it before).

Yesterday, I found similar red, hardback copies of Many Long Years Ago, a collection of mostly previously published verse from 1931-1945, and The Private Dining Room, new verse published in 1953. I refrained from replacing Good Intentions or buying another volume they had, so you know what that says about me. We don’t need to say it out loud. I also could have purchased one of a couple more recently published anthologies. This is one of them. But, if I do anything, I’d like a set of the five red hardcovers.

Here are a few lines from Many Long Years Ago.

“Who wishes his self-esteem to thrive
Should belong to a girl of almost five.”

“We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty
And buy our clothes for something-fifty.”

“If turnips were watches they’d make as good eating as turnips.”

Reading: In praise of e-readers and the joy of winning an argument with a print-only reader who has so many books that he loses the ones he has.

How would Jesus advertise? I have a hard time believing Jesus would encourage us to spend millions on advertising his character traits. How many vice is being funded with a Super Bowl ad? But I also have a hard time throwing stones at this.

Does reading change the brain? “When it comes to a cultural trace in the form of literature, we would really like to know whether there is some sort of permanent alteration to the structure of the brain.” They chose Robert Harris’s Pompeii to see if they could detect a small brain change.

Banned Books: Anthony Sacramone has a book challenge for public schools. “Try and get all these at one go onto a public school curriculum (NYC, LA, SF) and see how that goes. I’d love to be proven wrong.”

Mystery: John Wilson reviews another Cameron Winter story, A Strange Habit of Mind, by Andrew Klavan, to be released in a few days.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Truth and Beauty,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were the leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law.

That was what it was like to be the truth in the world….

When Andrew Klavan released his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, I compared it to C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. But Surprised By Joy was a kind of re-working of a subject Lewis had handled allegorically in his earlier work, Pilgrim’s Regress, whose subtitle is: An Allegorical Apology for Reason and Romanticism. In his new (fairly short) book, The Truth and Beauty, Klavan addresses the same volatile topic.

As he tells the story, he was troubled by his inability to understand Christ’s teaching. He knew the gospel story. He understood the doctrines (as much as any of us understand them). But how do we follow Jesus’ teachings? Are we really expected to give everything we own to the poor? Not to resist an evil man? To pluck out an eye that leads us to sin? What is Jesus talking about?

His son suggested that perhaps he was trying to solve a problem instead of trying to get to know a Man. So he plunged into the gospels – taught himself Koiné Greek to read them in the original language. And what he began to understand – oddly – led him to the Romantic Poets of England.

The book casts a wide loop, but always returns to those Romantics – Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge on the bright side, and Byron and Shelley on the dark side. And among them, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in whose novel Frankenstein he finds a key to understanding much of the modern rebellion against nature – Victor Frankenstein, he hypothesizes, was not trying to play God. He was trying to eliminate the Female. Which makes him a harbinger of our times.

There is much to ponder in this book, and I can’t claim I understand it all. I need to read it again. But the answer to the problem of getting to know the mind of Christ, as Klavan sees it, is seeing how in all nature – not only the natural world around us but our own nature – the truth of Christ is revealed. The Trinity is everywhere, giving us glimpses behind the veil, calling out to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The life that Jesus lives is promised to us. The Romantics at their best glimpsed this, and some of them embraced it in the end.

There were things in this book that troubled me from a doctrinal point of view. I think any thoughtful Christian will have a similar experience. Because Klavan isn’t doing apologetics here. He’s peering into mysteries. He may be wrong at some points, but I’m not prepared to say so on one reading of the book. By and large, I think he’s on the right track.

Highly recommended for thoughtful Christians, especially those who love literature.

Fiction, Reviews

Cleansing the palate with ‘When Christmas Comes’

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But he was wrong, you know. Eddie-My-boyfriend got it wrong altogether, evil little troll that he was. That wasn’t what the look on my face was expressing, not at all. I wasn’t feeling shock and horror at the hypocrisy and phoniness and decadence of modern life. In fact, in that moment, it didn’t seem hypocritical or phony or decadent to me at all…. The one solid reality I could cling to… was, again, our Christmases, our past together, my love.

It was a strenuous weekend, by my declining standards. We got a heavy snow Friday night – I’m not sure exactly how much, but I think I read it was about 7 inches. Heavy stuff, too. And my kindly neighbors, who always move the snow for me (we share the driveway) suffered a failure of their snowblower. So they hired some neighbor kids, whose snowblower broke down too. Thus, there I was, with the neighbor lady, shoveling in front of my garage for about a half hour. Somewhat to my own surprise, I didn’t collapse of a heart attack.

Then I had to go and buy a new inkjet printer. Because for the life of me I couldn’t make the old one work with the new wifi. Also the tray has been broken for some time. That meant a trip to my favorite computer store and a long wait in line. And then the inevitable siege, trying to make it talk to the wireless network. I succeeded at last (this always feels like sorcery, employing incantations I don’t understand at all). Which made it possible, at last, to print my Christmas newsletters.

Moving on to books, you may recall how intensely I disliked Trevanian’s The Loo Sanction, which I reviewed on Friday. Fortunately, I had the perfect antidote at hand. Andrew Klavan’s new book When Christmas Comes, which I adore and was planning to re-read anyway.

When Christmas Comes could almost have been written as a counter to The Loo Sanction (I’m not saying it was. I’m just saying they both deal with the same questions in drastically different ways.)

Both the heroes, Trevanian’s Jonathan Hemlock and Klavan’s Cameron Winter, are American academics who formerly worked in covert espionage operations. Dangerous men, skilled at killing.

And both of them walk into situations where hypocrisy is (or is apparently) rife. Hemlock into the world of cutthroat international politics. Winter into a seemingly idyllic American town where a clean-cut, decorated veteran is on trial for murdering his sweet wife. With the Christmas season as a backdrop, offering lots of opportunities for comment on commercialization and the emptiness of tradition.

But unlike Hemlock, who smashes fetishes and is himself smashed in return, Winter never closes his heart. Much of the book is taken up with his narrative – to a psychologist – of the story of his love for a girl named Charlotte, whom he spent time with every Christmas as he was growing up. And how the magic of those early Christmases was undermined and overwhelmed by old secrets of horrific ugliness.

And yet Winter has the wisdom to discern the truth, even in the midst of lies and hypocrisy. “The great good thing,” as Klavan describes it in his autobiography. As long as he still believes in the great good thing, he remains open to salvation.

A repeated theme in When Christmas Comes is “psychomachia,” the literary device where the characters in a story represent aspects of the storyteller’s own soul.

If that’s so, then in giving life to others, as Winter does at the end of the story, he may also be given life himself.

I don’t know whether it would be better for Andrew Klavan to write a sequel, or just leave us with that hope.

Personally, I vote for the sequel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘When Christmas Comes,’ by Andrew Klavan

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“I have,” he told her mildly, “a strange habit of mind.”

“Oh?”

“I hear about things. Things people tell me. Stories in the news. Or I read about things online somewhere. And sometimes, I can think my way into them. Imagine my way into them, as if I’m there. And because of that, I begin to discern the causes of events when other people can’t.”

“You’re talking about…”

“Crimes mostly,” he said….

A new Andrew Klavan book is always cause for celebration. In this case, it’s a Christmas celebration. If Graham Greene had written A Christmas Carol, it might have turned out something like When Christmas Comes.

Cameron Winter claims to be, and actually is, an English professor at a midwestern University (apparently it’s in Indiana). But close examination, especially of his hands, indicates he’s something more. He used to be (and probably still is) some kind of a covert government operative. Yet he seems to have freedom to operate on his own.

The story of When Christmas Comes starts with three different narratives, their connections not initially apparent. A young military veteran in the idyllic town of Sweet Haven has confessed to murdering his wife, a school librarian who was universally loved and whom he adored. Cameron Winter, in a session with a psychologist, tells a long, poignant story about his first love, a girl with whom he spent many Christmases in the past. But her family had a dark history, devastating when revealed. And Cameron gets an appeal from a former lover, now married and a lawyer. She’s defending the accused veteran; she knows she can’t get an acquittal, but can Winter discover anything that might give the judge grounds for showing mercy?

As Winter pokes into the lives of the veteran and his victim, he uncovers more secrets. Dangerous ones. If he makes the wrong decisions, he may ruin lives and get people killed.

I loved this book. Wished it were twice as long. Nobody is better than Klavan at delivering, not only a riveting story, but living, breathing characters with palpable inner lives, all packed up in a bed of crystalline prose.

You should read this book. Can’t recommend it highly enough. I pray Cameron Winter will return for another story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘MindWar,’ by Andrew Klavan

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I’m probably too much of a snob to properly appreciate young adult novels, even ones by the great Andrew Klavan. But to the extent that I can imagine what a book like MindWar (and its two sequels – they’re a trilogy) would mean to its audience (young gamer males, I imagine) I would say the book is excellent value for money.

Rick Dial used to be a high school football hero. But then came a terrible year, when his father left him, his mother, and his brother behind to run off with his old girlfriend, and Rick himself was crippled in a car accident. Now he spends his time alone in his room, playing video games. He’s living without hope, but he’s become very good at the games.

And that gets noticed. Suddenly he’s abducted by government agents, who tell him a maniacal scientist has constructed a digital world called the Realm. Using the power of the Realm, this man has the ability to begin a campaign to undermine and destroy the one entity he hates most in the world – the United States.

They have the technology to inject Rick into the Realm – a place where his body is whole and strong again. They need him to use his gaming skills to destroy the Realm and save America.

Nothing here we haven’t seen before, in books like Ender’s Game and Ready Player One. But Andrew Klavan applies his seasoned storytelling skills to ramp the stakes up and raise the tension to almost excruciating levels. The main lesson, as with all Klavan’s young adult books, is to persevere, to never despair.

And that’s a pretty good lesson.

Recommended, mostly for members of the Gamer demographic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Emperor’s Sword,’ by Andrew Klavan

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I could tell just by looking at their faces that they were awed by the genius of my writing. At least, I could tell they were pretending to be awed by the genius of my writing – and really, this was Hollywood, so what was the difference? In this town, to be admired and to be in a position where people had to pretend to admire you were pretty much the same thing. In fact, the latter might’ve been a little tastier than the former, when you came right down to it.

I’d been waiting for the third and final volume of Andrew Klavan’s Another World fantasy series, but somehow I missed its release. I have remedied that omission now.

The Emperor’s Sword opens on a world in some ways far weirder than the fantasy world to and from which its hero has been shuttling. That weird world is Hollywood. Austin Lively has made it to the big time. He’s sold a screenplay to a major studio, he goes to the best parties, and he’s being hailed as an “important new talent.” He has an expensive car, an expensive home, and his pick of eager starlets to share his bed. However, like Hamlet, he has dreams, dreams that remind him of places and adventures he just can’t remember and doesn’t want to believe in.

But when his neglected girlfriend Jane is framed for murder, the memories come back in a storm. He has an unfinished job to do in the Other Kingdom, and he can’t save Jane unless he completes that job. He returns to the Other Kingdom, only to find it’s too late. The Emperor to whom he was to bring a message is dead. And Austin now needs to fight a duel he can’t win to save innocent people from death.

Fortunately, in the Other Kingdom, death sometimes works differently than it does here.

Nobody, but nobody, knows how to build plot tension like Andrew Klavan. The Emperor’s Sword puts you on a roller coaster like those old movie serials tried to, but failed. The roller coaster works here. The reader accompanies the hero from the depths of despair to the peaks of triumph and back, with barely a moment to catch his breath.

There’s also a lot of (no doubt semi-autobiographical) realism about Hollywood, and how truly evil and soul-destroying the industry and its culture can be. I do not recommend this book for younger readers, because there’s some very sordid stuff going on here. It pleases me, on the other hand, that top-grade fantasy is being written for an adult audience.

I’m a harsh critic of fantasy – I compare everything to a) Tolkien, or b) the things I imagine my own work to be. In terms of fantastic imagination, I wouldn’t say this book climbs the heights. Some of it seems kind of boiler-plate medieval to me. But in terms of storytelling and plotting – mixed in an uplifting way with brutal spiritual honesty – it would be hard to do better. Highly recommended for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Art of Making Sense,’ by Andrew Klavan

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The reason we want stories to make sense is because stories are a way of speaking about reality – and reality makes sense. This is a wonderful thing about reality that we don’t appreciate enough. When you see something in reality that doesn’t make sense it’s only because you don’t know enough about it. You naturally want to find out more in order to find out what sense it makes.

In the wake of reading Andrew Klavan’s The Nightmare Feast, I decided to pick up his collection of essays and speeches from last year, The Art of Making Sense.

In four pieces, entitled, “Can We Believe?”, “Can we Be Silent in a World Gone Mad?”, “The Art of Making Sense,” and “Speaking Across the Abyss: Building Culture in an Age of Unbelief,” he discusses the crisis of western, post-Christian civilization from the perspective of a creative, Christian mind.

I was delighted – but hardly surprised – by the way Klavan constantly returns to the central idea, that reality exists, that it is created by God, and that in the end the truth glorifies God. Knowing this, the Christian artist should be fearless.

I, of course, am not fearless. But ideas like this encourage and delight me. I enjoyed The Art of Making Sense very much, and recommend it. Especially for Christians in the creative arts.

Fiction, Reviews

‘tHe Nightmare Feast,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was smiling in that friendly way friendly fascists smile in California. I guess the sunshine makes our fascists mellow.

Andrew Klavan continues his Another Kingdom fantasy series with The Nightmare Feast.

If you recall the plot of the previous book, Another Kingdom, Austin Lively is a pretty unremarkable Hollywood loser, working as a studio script reader. All that really distinguishes him is his dysfunctional background – neglectful academic parents who ignored him and his little sister but heaped attention on his golden boy older brother. Only recently has he learned the full extent of their betrayal – they are part of a world-wide conspiracy organized by a power-hungry multibillionaire, Serge Orosgo.

But Austin has chanced to get a look at a rare manuscript, a book called Another Kingdom, which Orosgo will go to any lengths to get his hands on. Austin’s brief reading of it somehow bestows on him the power to pass through portals into a medieval world called Galiana. In Galiana, Austin has become a knight and been sent on a quest to deliver a plea for aid to the distant Emperor. On the way he must fight monsters and magicians and sinister illusions (interrupted, of course, by unexpected forays back into our own world, generally just at the moment someone is trying to kill him). In our own world, after somehow eluding multiple assassination attempts, Austin comes face to face with Orosgo himself, and draws closer to locating his sister, who is in hiding with the manuscript.

Andrew Klavan is a past master at plotting an exciting story – readers of The Nightmare Feast will need to make time to catch their breath, because the author gives them none. Granted, as a fantasy snob who approves very few authors besides Tolkien, Howard, and myself, I found the fantasy elements just a little thin, though at least the horse gets a rubdown this time out. Anyway, stuff keeps happening so fast, who has time to nitpick details?

I got a kick out of The Nightmare Feast, and eagerly await the next volume. Not for younger kids.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightmare City,’ by Andrew Klavan

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Though I am not least among Andrew Klavan’s fanboys, I’m not a huge fan of Young Adult fiction, being a serious grownup and stuff. So I skipped Nightmare City when it came out. Now I find it on sale on Kindle, so I gave it a shot. I’ve got to say, it’s some ride.

Tom Jordan is a high school student, a reporter on his school paper. Along with his mother he’s still mourning the death of his brother, who died in service in the Middle East.

Then one morning he awakens to a world right out of a horror movie. His home is empty, his mother has disappeared, and the house is surrounded by a strange white fog, in which malevolent, zombie-like creatures wander. They attack Tom when he goes outside, but seem to be restrained from entering his house – at first.

A message from Tom’s dead brother is broadcast from a television set. There’s something he’s supposed to do, but he doesn’t understand. Then his girlfriend appears, urging him to go to an old ruined monastery above the town. There’s also a voice he hears from time to time, which he learns – almost at the cost of his life – not to trust.

His searching will take him out into the fog, to his school, and to the old monastery. Along the way he’ll realize that he’s dreaming – but it’s a serious dream. The choices he makes here will have life and death consequences. There’s a story to be reported, and only Tom can report it.

I wasn’t sure what to think of Nightmare City at first. The beginning read like a standard teenagers vs. zombies movie script – lots of scares and chases and gore, not a lot of substance. But that was just the hook. The story got deeper and deeper as it proceeded, and in the end it was profound and deeply moving.

Reviewers compare Nightmare City to Stephen King, but I’d say it’s more like Dean Koontz. And that’s a good thing. I highly recommend Nightmare City, for teens and adults both.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Another Kingdom,’ by Andrew Klavan

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I’d been told that Hollywood was where you went if you wanted to sell your soul to make movies. I went, but I never sold my soul. No one would buy it. I just got tired of carrying it around.

As a fantasy writer myself, I resent the way an interloper, like thriller writer Andrew Klavan, can just waltz in and write a compelling fantasy without (apparently) breaking a sweat or learning the secret handshake.

I comfort myself by finding a few nitpicks in my generally enthusiastic reception.

The hero of Another Kingdom is Austin Lively, a lowly Hollywood “story analyst.” A story analyst reads unsolicited scripts, and novels under consideration for script development, for Hollywood studios. Austin wrote a very good script once, but it died in development purgatory. Now he just gets by, a Hollywood drone, the despair of his high-achieving family.

But one day he has an impulse to re-read a book he “analyzed” a while back. The author withdrew it from consideration, but it stuck in his mind. He can’t find it on Amazon, and no bookseller seems to have it. On his way to check out another possibility, he walks through a doorway…

And finds himself in a tall castle window, teetering over the edge. He has a bloody dagger in his hand, and a beautiful woman lies dead, stabbed to death, on the floor behind him. Armed men break in and arrest him, dragging him off to a dungeon. There he nearly loses his mind with fear, until the guards come to take him away for torture. As he passes through the door again, he is transported back to Los Angeles…

Where he soon finds himself being hunted by a sexually ambiguous hit man, who works for a billionaire – who just happens to be the man who employs his father, his mother, and his brother. Who also owns the studio where Austin works.

Somebody will be killed, and Austin will be blamed. And all the while, at uncontrollable intervals, when he least expects it, Austin will be dropped back into the world of Another Kingdom, where he is now part of the resistance to a tyrannical government, fighting to bring back the rightful queen.

Each time he passes into Another Kingdom, he learns something – something that helps him survive in the “real world” of Los Angeles. And gradually he matures, becoming the man he always wanted to be, but never believed he could be.

Because this is Klavan, I assume Another Kingdom is Christian fantasy. But it’s not like your ordinary Christian fantasy (not even mine). There’s foul language, and sex scenes without any reference to Christian morality. I’m expecting the lessons to be deeper, and to become apparent later in the trilogy.

I had a few quibbles, as I mentioned. The medieval fantasy world of Another Kingdom seems to me pretty much pro forma, a city boy’s imagination. It lacked verisimilitude, for me. I don’t expect a medieval manor house to have glass doors (too expensive and fragile). A horse is lent to the hero, and all he does with it is ride it – he doesn’t feed it or unsaddle it or rub it down or check its feet. It’s just there for his use, like a car.

But the trademark Klavan storytelling delights are all here – the action never lets up, and one deadly peril follows the other in breathtaking style. This book will not bore you, not for one moment. I recommend it (with cautions for adult stuff) and look forward to the rest of the trilogy.