'Mad River' by John Sandford

“He sort of looked mean, but in a hygienic, Minnesota way.”

Just recently I reviewed John Sandford’s more recent Virgil Flowers novel, Storm Front, and noted that that book’s light tone, and the fact that nobody got killed in it, typified the less serious quality of the Flowers books, as compared to Sandford’s hugely successful Prey novels.

After reading

Thanksgiving 2013



“Home to Thanksgiving” by Currier & Ives, 1867

“He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire. Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient.” (W.J. Cameron)

I’ve used that quotation for Thanksgiving before, but it was a long time ago. On the old web site, I think. Anyway, I like it.

It occurred to me today how closely thankfulness is connected to faith. One of the most common hindrances to faith—at least in my experience—is worry about the future. “Things are all right just now,” I say to myself, “but what about tomorrow? Being thankful feels too much like complacency. I have to keep my eye out for what’s coming down the road.”

This is one reason, I suppose, why Jesus tells us to cast no thought upon the morrow. Worry kills thankfulness, and lack of thankfulness destroys our spiritual perspective.

So have a blessed Thanksgiving. I hope you spend it with people you love. Or, alternatively, that you love the people you’re spending it with.

Get Rich By Reading Fiction

And eating sweet rolls, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs. Just watch your fingers on those pages.

Jeremy Olshan gives us advice on making money found in great novels. “Don’t expect, however, to find explicit tips on spending, saving and investing baked into the texts like messages in fortune cookies. Novelists and dramatists seem suspicious if not disdainful of those who dole out advice about money — which is perhaps why, when they do offer worthwhile personal-finance counsel, the words tend to be put into the mouths of imbeciles.”

Here are his gleanings:

  1. Read Defoe to understand money. In Robinson Crusoe, the narrator finds a drawer full of gold while searching his ship’s wreckage. “I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee; e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.’ However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.”
  2. Read Trollope and Dickens to spot the next Bernie Madoff. “Rereading these Victorian novels,” Olshan writes, “I’ve been struck, in a way that never occurred to me in high school or college, by how often the plots turn on bad financial decisions.”
  3. Read Eliot and Flaubert before swiping that credit card. “Emma Bovary isn’t brought down by cheating on her doctor husband but by racking up ruinous amounts of debt.”
  4. Read Dickens to learn the difference between saving and hoarding.
  5. Read Tolstoy before heading to the car dealership. “The old poker player’s adage that if, after a few minutes at the table, you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you, is more or less true in every financial transaction.”

Photos: How Books Are Made

Irene Gallo, an art director with Tor Books, went to their press building in Gettysburg, PA, to see A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time, Book 14) being printed and bound. “The whole process looked like a marvelous bit of Suessian-magic to me, with long conveyer belts that doubled up and looped around,” she says. (via Loren Eaton)

Speaking of Mr. Eaton, his 2013 Advent Ghost Storytelling is up.

'The Spirit Well' by Stephen Lawhead


“Okay,” she agreed, turning her eyes to the valley, lost in a blue haze of morning mist. “I don’t know about you, but my life has ceased to have linear chronology.”

This is the book I’m so proud of — the first book I borrowed electronically from the public library for my Kindle, thus dragging myself, kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century. The Spirit Well by Stephen Lawhead, third in his ongoing Bright Empires series. I’ve enjoyed the previous books, and I enjoyed this one, once I’d acclimated myself to it. Which is a bit of a challenge. It’s hard enough picking up a sequel to a book you read a year ago; it’s worse when the book purposely messes with time lines and has a large (and growing) cast of characters.

The central character of the series is Kit Livingstone, who was initiated by his late uncle into the art of jumping around in space and time (and alternate universes) through the use of “ley lines” – geographical locations that focus cosmic forces (or something like that). There are also the adventures of his former girlfriend Mina, who got stranded in 16th Century Prague but did quite well for herself, thank you very much, as well as various descendants of Arthur Flinders-Petrie, an archaeologist who had a map of the ley lines tattooed onto his torso, which is now preserved in what is called the Skin Map, for which good guys and bad guys are desperately searching.

Good stuff. I’m not sure whether I recommend reading these books now, though, or waiting for all five to be published so you can read them in a string and reduce continuity difficulties. Whatever you do, read them in sequence.

I note that Lawhead includes several positive Roman Catholic characters here, so he seems to have gotten over the contemptuous anti-Catholicism that was apparent in some of his earlier books. I also noted, with surprise, some problems in word choice – at one point he uses the word “approbation” to mean the opposite of what it really means. He also has a male character speak of “humankind” rather than “mankind” in a scene in the early 20th Century. This isn’t impossible, but it seems anachronistic.

Still, good stuff, and I think Lawhead is better in this sort of genre than in epic fantasy. Recommended.

Art as Investigation In Which Facts Are Created, Changed

The trouble is that modern art in various ways abandoned imitation, representation, naturalism, and it now has to make out a case for its products’ still being truth. This is where science—certain aspects of science—are seized upon, assimilated, or sometimes simply plagiarized in decorative words, so as to bolster up art’s claim to cognitive value. One such use—and it is a curious reversal of Aristotle—is the boast of factuality: the work of the artist is said to be research; his creations are findings.

—Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (1971)

Maureen Mullarkey expounds on this remarkable idea in one contemporary art exhibit series, WeakForce.

Film review: 'Thor: The Dark World'

I saw the new Thor movie, Thor: The Dark World, this weekend, and I suppose I ought to review it. I find it hard to express an opinion, because I can’t find much handhold. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – I had a good time. I was well entertained. But I’m left without any strong impression. Lots of action, lots of CGI, lots of interesting visuals (some locations shot in Norway’s Lofoten Islands), but I came away with no great emotional response.

One problem is the clearly contrived nature of the central problem of the plot. Long ago, the Dark Elves (who, I must admit, look more like elves than the Jotuns looked like jotuns in the first movie) fought a great war against the Aesir gods, and were ready to unleash their doomsday weapon, called Aether, which is supposed to have the power to destroy the whole universe. But the gods forestalled them by some stratagem I didn’t quite understand, and now the Aether is locked away in a secret place. But a dark elf named Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) has recently re-awakened, and is plotting to reclaim the Aether, in a plan that comes to involve Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Thor’s (Christ Hemsworth’s) love interest from the last movie. There’s a big attack on Asgard, and Thor defies his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) in a desperate gamble to defeat Malekith.

One part I did enjoy was how the sibling rivalry issues were portrayed in Thor’s relationship with his adopted brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is first of all a prisoner, but then enters into a desperate alliance with Thor. I was troubled by the killing off of a couple important characters, which messes with the source material (both mythical and comic book).

When all was said and done, I didn’t come away with any feeling that the movie had transcended its sources, as I did with the first movie.

So I recommend it, but not in the highest terms. Cautions for lots and lots of comic book violence.

The Bay Psalm Book

In my American Literature class, professor Ruth Kantzer instilled in me a love for the Bay Psalm Book. I could hear the music, like you can below, but the words, translated for singing, captured me. At first, I believe the congregations and families sang without instruments, so what we have below came many decades later.

One of the 11 original copies of the first book printed in America will be up for auction tomorrow at Sotheby’s. The video above will give you some details. You can buy your own copy here: Bay Psalm Book

I am the cutting edge

Today I used my Kindle Fire HD with the Overdrive app to borrow and download, for the very first time, a book from the Hennepin County Library (one of Lawhead’s, if you care). I’m a student of library and information science, you know, and this is how I stay on the cutting edge.

What have I learned in my class so far? The most disturbing thing is that all that stuff we’re digitalizing to “preserve it?” It’s all crumbling to dust. CDs, DVDs, floppies, tape, every single digital medium deteriorates over time. As I recall they give the average CD-ROM a little over 20 years.

The most stable media for preserving data remain, for the time being, archival quality paper and microform.

Just to give you something to worry about tonight.