Sherry writes about secret places in stories. I enjoy these places too. I’ve always loved the idea of a secret room in a large house. Of course, I’d want to go into it often–the kids would too–so the secret or secluded part of being in the room would wear out soon. But true stories like this one of a man finding a hidden room while renovating a 120-year-old house are so cool–unless you balance them with stories about hidden rooms with notes (“I owned this house for a short while, and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem.”).
Category Archives: Reading
In Time For Banned Books Week
“Banned Books Week,” episode 743
I hesitate to call Dennis Ingolfsland, of The Recliner Commentaries, a “fellow librarian,” since he’s the real thing and I’m an on-the-job-trained poseur. But I know enough to recommend this piece about the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week.”
The fact is that there are no banned books in America. Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall seeing any articles in the Library Journal or American Libraries protesting that other religion and those other countries which really do ban books.
(Picture credit: Jupiter Images)
15 Books
(This is a meme from Facebook. I figured I’d cross-post it.)
Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
1. The Bible. Obvious, but also true.
2. The Screwtape Letters. The first book that told me that reason was of God, and that God approves of pleasure. Seemed too good to be true at the time.
3. That Hideous Strength. A difficult book that’s worth wrestling with. The inspiration for Wolf Time.
4. The Lord of the Rings. I’ll never forget my first reading of the Mines of Moria scenes, and the charge of the Riders of Rohan.
5. Heimskringla. The essential text for all my novels.
6. Mere Christianity. It all seems so elementary today, but on my first reading I struggled with every page.
7. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. Almost a perfect book.
8. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. A friend mentioned my name to him personally, recently! I made squealing noises like a teenage girl.
9. Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish. An obscure, but extremely fine, adult fantasy that was very inspirational to me before I got published.
10. The God Who is There, by Francis Schaeffer. Actually, any number of his early works could be mentioned here.
11. Moby Dick. I waited until I was an adult to read it, and so had the privilege of actually enjoying it.
12. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare. The first Shakespeare play I read.
13. Conan the Adventurer, by Robert E. Howard. First gave me the idea that I could write heroic fantasy myself.
14. The Bishop/Weiss trilogy by Andrew Klavan. A hard-boiled detective story on an entirely higher plane.
15. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Who can forget his first Sherlock Holmes?
How is Reading for ‘Escape’ a Bad Thing?
Travis Prinzi writes about fantasy in literature, leaning on Tolkien’s Fairy Stories essay. He asks why do many readers assume authors are just writing for the fun of it, not crafting an artwork to one degree or another.
The real “gnosticism” in this discussion is not the artist who builds a story on an imaginative key, but one who thinks that books provide some “escape” from the “real world,” and that this escape is a good thing. Tolkien wrote,
Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
For Tolkien, the pejorative use of “escapism” was married to the false belief that current trends define Real Life – the electric street lamp, for example, is nowhere near as permanent as Lightning. But most of us know more about the lamp, because it’s more relevant to our daily existence. The fairy-tale takes us to the lightning, the “more permanent thing.”
More permanent things–that’s what I want to write about.
A Reading List for Your Consideration
Looking for a good post-mostdern, most-pdoern . . . post-modern novel? Looking for one of those, are you? No? Well, the L.A. Times has a list for you none the least–none the less–called The Essential 61 Postmodern Reads. It includes Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter . . . what the?
Our Technology is Shaping Our Minds
“Superficial reading nearly always leads to superficial thinking. And we have increasingly become a society that does not read so much as browse. Though the Internet moves vast amounts of facts to our fingertips, it doesn’t teach us to analyze them and create a comprehensive thought—so we often confuse facts with wisdom and understanding.” (Hat tip: Lars)
Should Christians Read Fiction?
I mean, aren’t there more productive things to do than read novels or short stories?
50 Manly Fiction Options
This just in: The Essential Man’s Library: 50 Fictional Adventure Books Edition. Hey, where’s G.A. Henty on that list? And I have to say up front, She and Ayesha are just not going to make my read-in-this-lifetime list. Maybe I’m missing out, but I think I’d rather read Patrick O’Brian and Wodehouse again.
Hey! Where’s O’Brian on that list?
But They Might Make Me Read Gatsby
Patrick Kurp talks about our culture a bit and students and teachers who hate the cultural atmosphere they breathe.
When Bill writes “the Western cultural heritage that we can’t throw away fast enough,” I confess I thought first of the high-school students I worked with on Monday (rather than their intellectual enablers). Their ignorance of our inheritance is exceeded only by their eagerness to avoid it. I eavesdropped on a conversation between a soon-to-graduate senior and a staff member. The girl had spent much of the day making a collage of images of under-dressed females clipped from women’s magazines (image a boy working on the same project). With a straight face she described herself as “a conceptual artist,” and told the teacher she might enroll at a nearby community college but was reluctant because she might have to read The Great Gatsby. “I hear ya,” the teacher said.
I don’t, the blogger opined. I cannot relate.