Category Archives: Reading

Reading, Uncategorized

‘Weariness and water were our chief enemies…’

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The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it…. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boats with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscapes of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet—all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter XII)

I floundered for something to post tonight. Like so many Americans, I’m upset over a war strategy that seems both foolish and suicidal, with the fighting men (as always) paying the costs. Add to that that I’m reading a novel about the aftermath of World War I, the same sort of thing on a massive scale. So I settled on the excerpt from Surprised by Joy above, Lewis’s greatly softened public reminiscence of his war experience. (For a more candid view, see if you can find a copy of Jack’s Life, by Douglas Gresham, in which he relates what Jack told him in private about the war.)

I’d love to do a political rant, denouncing certain officials who shall remain nameless. But I haven’t the heart for it these days.

Fiction, Reading

Culling the Shelves of Bad Books

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Sometimes I browse a bookstore as I would other stores I visit while playing the tourist. I look at the many curious spines, letters, and colors, seeing the curiosity of one, the value of another, with little intension of buying either. Sometimes I go to a bookstore in hope of finding a few, specific titles or types of books or maybe anything by that guy who wrote those stories–you know the ones–about that cool thing, remember, and though I enter with hope, I must put it on a table somewhere to pick up something else, because I gradually despair of finding anything I want.

But there are times when I take a chance on a book I know nothing about. That’s when I run the risk of having my wife read it.

I’m a slow reader. If I wasn’t so good-looking, I’d be notably less successful than I am. My wife is fast reader, and I don’t mean by comparison to me. I can buy her a promising title from the used bookstore, and in two days, having read it through, she’ll ask me to take the trashy thing back.

I went to the used bookstore a couple weeks ago, carrying a mug of hope for reasons I don’t recall. Maybe it was our recent collection of trade-ins and having avoided the store for about a year. Inspired by Lars’s recent urban fantasy reviews, I wanted to find something fun and maybe good to try. So I went home with a steampunk novel, first of a series. Saying she needed to screen it for the kids, my wife read it immediately.

I think I read somewhere that nothing in steampunk was worth reading. It was all fan-fiction, heavily derivative. This book has to be step aside from that, because it was traditionally published by an author who has many other published books, but it isn’t good.

Getting all of this from my wife, the dialog is awful, particularly everything the heroine says. The plot is dragged down by her constantly wrestling over marrying someone instead of doing the adventure thing that you’d expect from a novel like this.

The devices and contraptions are interesting, even though they don’t move the story. The pirates are vile, needlessly dark, and disappear after their initial scuffle, which may be realistic but not fun. The zombie disease doesn’t make sense, and I don’t need to go on.

That’s the risk I run plucking a book off the shelf, being too kind to the cover art, and even reading the description or a random page. I’ve done that before to positive effect. More than that, I don’t need to buy books. I have many good ones on my shelves and more on that little Kindle thing that could spy on me if I didn’t put it to sleep with no wi-fi every day.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

A run of lackluster books and movies

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My reading of late has been oddly frustrating. After a beautiful Syttende Mai (the Norwegian Constitution Day, on which I had a couple actual human interactions, both of them surprisingly pleasant) I’ve come up against a string of bum books.

First there was a novel from a series I hadn’t revisited in a while. I didn’t get far into it before I remembered why I’d stopped reading the books; I saw some ugly stuff coming and sent the whole thing into the virtual rubbish bin. Then I started a Christian novel that looked intriguing. I have an idea the story might well be worth reading, but the prose was so awful I gave up on that one, too.

Now I’m reading a new book by a favorite author, which turns out on closer inspection to be a novella. A novella I’ve already read. Re-released under a new title. I’m still reading, because it’s pretty good, but I’m a little bitter too.

I’m in the habit of watching old movies on Amazon Prime in the afternoons. Yesterday I saw “High Voltage,” which stars William Boyd (before he was Hopalong Cassidy) and Carole Lombard (in her first major movie role, before she added the “e” to her first name). It was a highly moral melodrama about bus passengers caught in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevadas, and ends with a repentant Boyd on his way to jail in St. Paul.

Today it was “The Naked Hills,” with David Wayne and Denver Pyle. This was a western with aspirations. Instead of the standard shoot-em-up, it’s a story about how greed destroys a man’s life. David Wayne, in a rare starring role, plays a man who grows obsessed with finding a fortune, in the 1849 Gold Rush and after. The message was commendable, but the story was one-dimensional, and the resolution anticlimactic.

What surprised me was the theme song. It’s a number called “The Four Seasons,” by Herschel Burke Gilbert and Bob Russell. I knew this song from before. I have blogged here previously about my fondness for the old “Yancy Derringer” TV series. During the series’ original run, it had its own title song, “The Ballad of Yancy Derringer.” But when it went into syndication, for some reason (probably having to do with copyrights) they changed it to an instrumental theme. And that theme was this same “The Four Seasons” melody. Only without the verses they use in the movie.

There are even lyrics, which somebody sings at the beginning. As best I remember, they go something like this:

We have four seasons, four seasons  
To make our dreams come true.  
God gives a man four seasons, that’s all that he can do.

I don’t know if that last “he” refers to God or the man.

Kind of depressing, actually. But I have an ear worm now.

And if you have to have an ear worm, it might as well be a song you like.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

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{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Fiction, Reading, Religion, Reviews

Dune: Cynical and Yet Pro-Life

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[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 4: A couple observations on what I’ve read so far.

Paul Atriedes and Lady Jessica, son and mother, are both highly trained in the Bene Gesserit order. Jessica was a nun (if that’s the right word for her position) before being sold to Duke Leto as a concubine. You can see in that statement why nun doesn’t seem like the precise word for her. Others call her a witch and call the Eastern mystical quality of Bene Gesserit ways witchcraft. But what they do doesn’t look like magic at all. It looks like highly accurate intuition, mental processing power, and even kung fu.

At the same time, Jessica frequently criticizes signs of manipulative indoctrination she finds on the desert planet. There’s no indication of universal truths or God Almighty who calls people on every planet to himself. They never speak of faith, only of training. It seems somewhat, but not entirely, secularized.

Contrasted with this is faith of the Fremen, which Jessica would say has been delivered to them by emissaries of the Missionaria Protectiva. This part of the Bene Gesserit order is defined in the glossary as being “charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation.” Paul looks at the honest faith of the Fremen as a seedbed for jihad.

If the Atriedes would speak of universal moral truths or spiritual realities just once, it could remove the cynical smear of every other characterization of faith. But I don’t think they will.

Despite their jaded religious training, they take a remarkably pro-life stance on Jessica’s unborn child. Several times Jessica’s pregnancy has come up, never in the bizarrely clinical way some people talk today, and at a point when she feels compelled to risk her life for the greater good, Jessica asks herself if she has the right to risk the life of her child as well. In 2021 A.D. America, that’s an incredible statement!

I’m a little worried matriarchs of the Bene Gesserit order will emerge to play the part of Big Organized Religion Bent on Evil. Maybe they won’t in this book.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

‘People Overact, Take it Too Far’

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[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 3: I recently read the scene in which Paul sees one of the giant worms rise from the sand before him. They have this scene in the trailer for the upcoming film. Remembering that got me wondering if they had the same scene in the 1984 movie.

I know I said I didn’t want to see any more of that movie, but I don’t think the worms were the bad part. I found a WatchMojo video of ten reasons people hate Dune (1984), and now I really have seen as much as I need to see of it. Yeah, there are spoilers, but this movie doesn’t stick close to the book, so it’s matters less. And no worm rising from the sand–maybe that was the good part.

One main complaint is overacting. I remember catching an old sci-fi flick Solar Crisis somewhere in the middle. I think I started watching when Charlton Heston was on screen. After a few minutes, I thought, “Heston is the only good actor in this movie.” At least, he was the only believable figure walking around. Cut to a scene in a spaceship, and I wondered if these were the people who had been looking for clerical and janitorial work when all the real astronauts were deciding who would draw the short straws.

That’s something I’ve appreciated in what I’ve read of Dune so far. The characters, at least the good ones, aren’t peevish and bratty. Actually, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is not only evil, he’s full of bile. He probably wakes up every morning with a leer, but he gets little lime light in Book One, so he doesn’t weigh it down. Duke Leto, the Sean Bean character in this part of the story, has flaws, which Paul notes, but is predominately an admirable man. One of the native politicians feels pressed to like the Duke against his better judgement because he naturally commands loyalty. He inspires fidelity with his passion and generosity.

The overacting, what there may be of it, comes across as cutthroat politics. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is quoted as saying, “Politics is like bad cinema — people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, ‘Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.'”

I hope I don’t get much of it in the rest of Dune. It would ruin the whole experience.

Image by Parker_West from Pixabay

Reading, Uncategorized

Faith among the ruins

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Kristofer and Gry Molvaer Hivju. Photo credit: NRK

I have some dislocated thoughts I’m going to try to coordinate in this post tonight. Just subjective responses to a couple recent entertainment experiences. They may or may not mean anything to you.

The picture above is of Kristofer Hivju, a Norwegian actor who’s attained high visibility since appearing in the Game Of Thrones miniseries. Beside him is his wife, Gry Molvær Hivju, who is a documentary film maker. They constitute, as you’ll note, a striking couple.

I heard about a documentary series they made together, and watched it recently on the Norwegian NRK network feed, using a VPN. I don’t know if it will ever be offered outside Norway. The series is called simply “Olav,” and it relates a personal quest to find the historical truth about Norway’s patron saint, Olav (or Olaf. Best known, of course, as a character in my novel, The Elder King) Haraldsson. We learn that Kristofer first learned of Olav as a boy, when his father, also an actor, played Olav in the annual Olav play presented (most years) near Trondheim, Norway. He tells us that Olav has been his hero all his life – the Viking who became a Christian king, and converted his country.

I’m not sure how seriously to take the dramatic arc of the series. Hivju may be playing a role as he presents himself as a lot like a little boy, shivering with excitement to go where his hero went and see all the evidence of his life. His disappointment is palpable as he travels to England, France, and Russia and finds – generally – that evidence for Olav’s life (outside the Icelandic sagas) is pretty sparse. Judging by the evidence, Olav was a fairly minor player on the European scene until after his death, when Norwegian churchmen and chieftains promoted him and his saga for political reasons. (I note that no mention whatever is made of the work of Prof. Torgrim Titlestad, whose book, Viking Legacy, I translated. They even report that a Norwegian translation of the Icelandic Flatøybok has recently been released, but they don’t mention its publisher, Saga Bok, Prof. Titlestad’s publishing house, or even let us see a copy).

The final resolution of the whole thing (and I’d have bet my house that this would be the case) is that they conclude that history and faith are different things, and each is important in its own realm. I reject that principle in terms of the central affirmations of Christianity, though I don’t doubt that many false stories have been told of saints and holy men over the years. I wondered about Hivju’s own faith, which he never really explains. Does his faith include Olav’s God, or only Olav as a hero? None of my business, I suppose.

 Around the same time, I was reading a couple books by Blake Banner, whose Cobra series of thrillers I’ve enjoyed very much. So I picked up a couple from his Dead Cold Case series, which I’d started and given up on for some reason. Reading again, I remembered why.  I’ve never encountered a more God-bothered series of books, and in a bad way. In each of these books (as far as I could tell) the author felt it necessary to insert a few Awful Christians. Judgmental, repressed, joyless, hypocritical, and often criminal. His knowledge of Christianity seems to come primarily from a bad experience of Roman Catholicism – when he describes an American Methodist Church, he assumes that they cross themselves when they enter the church, call their services masses, and reject sexual pleasure as sin. I feel sorry for whatever bad experience the author must have had, but I couldn’t take much of it.

We live among the ruins of shattered faith today. Those who believe, generally believe in a subjective way that has little to do with the real world. Those who don’t believe seem furious at God for not existing. We who hold onto Christianity have lots of work to do. It may be illegal work, before long. But that’s how Christianity started, after all.

Reading, Writing

Expository weight

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Photo credit: Sergey Zolkin @szolkin, Unsplash

Once again tonight, I have nothing to review for you. This book I’m reading, which I mentioned yesterday, continues a slow read. I’ve figured out the reason – it’s longer than a federal regulation. I bought it assuming it was an ordinary World War II thriller, but it turns out to be more than 500 pages long – an epic. And although I remain interested in the events, I don’t think there’s enough story here to support that much expository weight.

It’s also a reproach to me as a writer. Because as I continue working on the new Erling book (still haven’t come up with a title), my word count is lower than I think it should be – like butter spread over not enough bread, as Bilbo would say. People expect epic fantasy books to run at least 80,000 words or so nowadays, and I’m not sure I can make it that long. I don’t want to just pad the story, but I’d rather not disappoint the reader either.

I have the idea my prose used to take up more space. Maybe I’m a victim of my own efficiency.

Reading, The Press

Why Read the News? Seriously, Why?

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Gary Furnell notes Sturgeon’s Law in his review of Rolf Dobelli’s book, Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life, saying the news fits in that law too.

“Sturgeon’s Law” is named after sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon who, when needled by a patronising critic complaining that 90 per cent of science fiction was rubbish, replied that 90 per cent of everything published was rubbish.

Furnell agreed with the premise before he picked up the book. He notes Dobelli chapter titles to show the rationale. News works against your creativity. It gives you the illusion of empathy and obscures the big picture. It create artificial fame.

Dobelli admits that when he was a young man he was constantly reading newspapers, fearful of not knowing what was happening in the world. He describes himself as an addict, a news-aholic. He doesn’t quote Kierkegaard, but I will: “What we need is a Pythagorean silence. There is far greater need for total-abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol.”

This is probably the advice we all need. Stop Reading the News (Bookshop link) (via Prufrock News)

Fiction, Reading

Reader’s report: ‘The Return of the King’: The Scouring of the Shire

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‘We’re not allowed to,’ said Robin.

‘If I hear not allowed much oftener,’ said Sam, ‘I’m going to get angry.’

Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings, final installment from The Return of the King.

I have come to the end of the story. For each reader of The Lord of the Rings hereafter, I expect, one of the final impressions of reading the saga must be the Scouring of the Shire, made conspicuous by its absence from the Peter Jackson movies.

I’m not going to look back and check, but I’ll bet the last time I did this pilgrimage on this blog, I remarked on this very subject. I can see why, for dramatic reasons, a filmmaker might leave the Scouring out the story. It makes for a substantial anticlimax, which might detract from the eucatastrophe of the defeat of Sauron.

But I have an idea there might be other reasons.

Moviemakers today, it would be redundant to say, are generally leftists. The Scouring is highly problematic for leftists, particularly in these times. The same people who read the books as Hippies in the ‘60s, and cheered when Merry, Pippin, and Sam tear down all the signs posted by the Chief’s men, are now Woke leftists. There’s nothing Woke leftists today love more than lots of cautionary signs – No Smoking, No Firearms, No Automobiles (Tolkien wouldn’t have minded that one), No Pets, Please Recycle, Masks Must Be Worn.

There’s a quotation making the rounds in which Tolkien says that his political views tend toward Anarchism. He didn’t mean 19th Century, bomb-throwing Anarchism, of course. Those guys assassinated kings, and Tolkien loved kings. He meant something more like what we call Libertarianism today (I’m not a Libertarian myself, so I have my own issues here). The fans of the movies, who often believe (I suspect) that it’s all about environmentalism, probably don’t enjoy reading about the hobbits tearing signs down and smoking all over the place (in the movie they suggest that pipeweed is really marijuana, but they’re wrong). But Tolkien’s environmentalism is different from that of today’s left. The professor loved trees, but he didn’t love wilderness as such. In the time of the King, he writes:

…the evil things will be driven out of the waste-lands. Indeed the waste in time will be waste no longer, and there will be people and fields where once there was wilderness.

Tolkien’s ideal world is a world of villages, solidly middle-class and bourgeois.

One other point is even more delicate. The Shire needs scouring because Saruman has filled it with foreigners. Men of low character who bully the hobbits and have no respect for their property or traditions.

For today’s England, and for most of the West, that’s a subject best left alone.