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.”
Category Archives: Reading
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.”
In the Secret
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.”).
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?