Scott Lamb has started up conversation on the NY Times list of best book from 2009.
Also, in case you missed it, the winner of the Best of the National Book Award winners for fiction is The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, as it should be.
Category Archives: Reading
Douglas Wilson on Deep Reading
The men I am most indebted to philosophically are: C.S. Lewis, Cornelius Van Til, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Calvin, Richard Weaver, the early Rushdoony, Augustine, John Knox, Gary North, J.I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, G.K. Chesterton, Paul Johnson, John Stott, Christopher Dawson, H.L. Mencken, William Buckley, David Wells, R.L. Dabney, E. Michael Jones, P.G. Wodehouse, Greg Bahnsen, and Peter Leithart. And after a diet of such books for twenty-six years, I have to say that reading an emergent book by Brian McLaren is like watching a six-year-old do card tricks.
“This is what warriors did.”
I’d meant to review Dean Koontz’ Your Heart Belongs to Me tonight, but it’s Veterans Day, and instead I’ll share a short excerpt from Grossman and Frankowski’s The Two-Space War, which I reviewed not long ago.
Across the countless centuries warriors have taken their cues from the “Old Sarge.” There was always an Old Sarge. He was the veteran of twenty battles, and he was calm. Weeping and becoming emotional at the memory of combat was not acceptable because, across the centuries, warriors found that the way to continue performing the desperate, wretched, debasing, dirty job of combat was by controlling your emotions, dividing your pain, and making friends with the memories. Every night, around the campfire, or over hot food with their messmates, this age-old process continued.
In these sessions the men also sorted out what had actually happened. In Alexis Artwohl’s twenty-first century law enforcement research, almost a quarter of the combat veterans she interviewed had memory distortions. They actually “remembered,” sometimes with vivid intensity, something that did not happen. And half of these veterans had experienced memory loss, with significant gaps in the memory of what happened. Left to their own devices, there was a tendency to “fill in the gaps” with guilt-laden acceptance of responsibility, sometimes even with a greatly exaggerated sense of guilt. “It’s all my fault.” “I let my buddies down.” “I was a failure.” These were the kinds of responses felt by many men after combat. Only their mates, the ones who shared the event with them, could help them fill in the holes accurately. And only their friends, their comrades who had shared the searing experience of combat, only they could give understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness of the events that had occurred.
Every day, day after day, this is what occurred. This is what warriors did.
Disney to Refund “Baby Einstein” Buyers
The buyers of “Baby Einstein” videos were told their children would get a leg up on brain development by watching the DVDs, but no one has seen the benefits yet. Disney is now offering a refund spanning the last five years. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against allowing two year olds watch TV, and research has shown that reading with your child helps the child develop language skills quite a bit. Texting with your baby is even better!
Ok, I made the last part up. But I’m sure listening to Mozart in the drivethru at McDonald’s or while going to sleep builds the brain. I mean, if it worked for Mozart . . .
Also on that post from the School Library Journal is a link to a list of ten good kid-lit bloggers.
Christian Authors Show, A Christmas Carol, and Kaminsky
I did a webcast radio interview on Saturday, with an operation called The Author’s Show. (You go to this site and then click on The Christian Author’s Show on the tool bar.) Supposedly my segment has been posted now, and you should be able to select it from the menu. But I can’t make it work. Maybe you can. Maybe it’s just my computer.
Dr. Ted Baehr (with whom I apparently have some distant connection, through my publisher) loves the new animated A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carey. I guess I’ll have to see it. If I love it too, it’ll mean I’ll have four different versions to keep on DVD and watch each Christmas. I’m not sure I can carry (or Carey) all those Carols.
Noodling around the internet, I discovered the shocking news that Stuart M. Kaminsky died, just about a month ago. I’m bereaved.
Kaminsky was one of the best, inadequately appreciated, mystery writers in America. He won awards and all, but he never really broke out as I would have wished for him. Instead of writing creepy thrillers full of gore and psychopaths and cannibalism, he wrote old-fashioned whodunnits, frequently brightened by his wit and always lightened by his human compassion.
As it happens, I just found several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the bookstore, and am almost finished with them. I was planning to write an appreciation when I finished the last one—maybe tomorrow.
I haven’t made up my mind entirely whether I prefer his Toby Peters stories (Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, with our shabby detective pulling a succession of big movie stars out of the soup) or his Lou Fonesca stories (about a sad sack Sarasota process server who mostly gets around on a bike). I’ve read one of his Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novels, set in Soviet Moscow, but it struck me as kind of claustrophobic and depressing. His Abe Lieberman books were good, but not as good (in my opinion) as the Peters and Fonesca stories.
We’ve lost a true professional, and someone I suspect I would have liked if I’d met him. Rest in peace, Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Kindle Under Fire from iPhone Apps
eReader apps for the iPhone are surging in popularity, according to a marketing research firm. The firm suggests Amazon’s Kindle may become a remainder to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, which has 57,000,000 users.
The Internet is Infinite, and So Am I
Carrie Frye talks about how the Internet has made her a terrible reader and worse, “an overly inflated sense of my own ability to learn and appreciate new things.”
On Fairy Tales
Chesterton on the Benefit of Fairy Tales for Children. The world is not nice, and the monsters must meet their just ends.
Is Canada Still Civilized?
According to a study by The Canadian Council on Learning, “Literacy rate levels for adult Canadians are at a national rate of 48 per cent. Montreal and Toronto have 50 per cent literacy levels and the best results come from the west in Victoria and Regina.”
I’m not sure this report should be taken at face value, but maybe other reports giving Canada a higher literacy rate are weaker than this one. I can’t tell at this distance. But I have to ask the question in my headline. How illiterate can a people be before they are considered uncivilized, or does literacy have much to do with being civilized?
Educated Outside the System
Thomas Jodziewicz writes about Frederick Douglas’ education into freedom. “Our popular culture promotes the injurious fiction,” he says, “that the world is all about me, myself, and my ephemeral needs, a temptation that American culture has confronted for a long time. But a true liberal arts education can provide an escape from such alienation and loneliness—and boredom. A true liberal education is a way to discover that you are not alone.”