Amazon.com has a list of reading material for boys; at least, that’s what my email told me. I see know the list mixes boy and girl interests.
Category Archives: Reading
Who’s the greatest Christian fiction writer?
In case you don’t monitor The Thinklings blog, you may want to contribute to Bird’s post asking who is the greatest Christian fiction writer.
Dean Koontz’ full range
Tonight, another episode in my ongoing engagement with the works of Dean Koontz. Not a review, exactly, but an appreciation and evaluation.
I’m going through Koontz alphabetically, picking up his books left to right across the bookstore shelf. This results in some odd juxtapositions, such as when I read Night Chills (published 1976) immediately followed by One Door Away From Heaven (published 2001). Having made it more than half way through the corpus, I think I can say that those two books represent something like the full range of Koontz’ work—from the creppiest early stuff to the most sublime of the recent.
Night Chills is barely recognizable as a Koontz book, in the sense I’ve come to know them. It’s a pretty standard thriller with a cutting-edge (for the time) scientific premise. But the way Koontz handles the material seems to reveal an immature artist, unsure of himself and trying to emulate established writers.
Which is probably why there’s so much sex in the book, and why it’s so (relatively) explicit, and… frankly, creepy. Continue reading Dean Koontz’ full range
Reading for the Fourth
Interesting how the Fourth of July comes around the same time every year.
Veteran newspaper man Frank Wilson talks about saving, if possible, newspapers. He says if newspapers are meant to keep We, the People, informed, then it isn’t terrible for that service to move to another medium.
Still Life
Coffee and Poetry by Marc Iserman of Somerset, England.
Did They Read to Ender When He Was a Child?
Last weekend, I finished listening to a great audio edition of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. I wish I could link you to a sample. The voices were great, and in a commentary at the end of the book, Card says he prefers audiobook to other mediums of delivering story, particularly his stories. The listener can’t skip or skim through a story and miss things, diminishing his experience. In another recording I have through Audible.com, Card says he is glad he listened to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, because he believes he would have skipped parts of it near the beginning and not enjoyed it as much as he did at the end. His family still reads books to each other, like people used to do before TV.
Ender’s Game was a great story. Because I loved it and knowing so many others loved it too, I wonder if one of the heartstrings of humanity is dedicated to stories of brilliant children who face great peril–or to put it more broadly, thinking of The Hobbit and LOTR, stories of the humble, the small or weak, facing insurmountable evil or overcoming persecution. Why do we love those stories? It’s David vs. Goliath in as many settings and circumstances as possible.
Rereading Old Favorites
Frank is talking about rereading books you used to love. Do you still love them? I should reread The Count of Monte Cristo to see if I still enjoy it.
The sub-saga of Saul
In the comments on my post yesterday, I was reminded of the story of King Saul of Israel. And I thought I’d talk a little about him as an example of a story antagonist.
“Antagonist” is the right word for the role played by Saul in the Saga of David. Saul isn’t a villain. In fact, for a large part of the story, he’s a hero. But he fails where David succeeds, and his choices put him on a collision course with his former protégé. Like a character in a Greek tragedy, he’s brought down by his fatal flaw, but throughout the story he continues to have his sympathetic moments. Continue reading The sub-saga of Saul
Heroic fiction: Building bridges
Here’s something I meant to include in my recent review of Poul Anderson’s Mother of Kings, but left out because the thing was long enough. This way I can make another whole post out of it, which saves me thinking up a new idea.
(By the way, it just occurred to me, how come it’s “Poul Anderson” and not “Poul Andersen?” He was Danish, and the standard ending for Danish patronymics is “sen.” I suppose it can be traced back to some culturally insensitive immigration official, like the one who made the Kvalevaags into Walkers).
Anyway, I wrote that I found Mother of Kings kind of dull. I gave a couple reasons, but left one out. It involves what I consider a common problem in novels about Vikings and in heroic fantasy in general.
The book was clunky. Continue reading Heroic fiction: Building bridges
Koontz on stories
Today is Sissel Kyrkjebø’s birthday.
And no, I didn’t send her a present. She didn’t send me anything last year, and I do have some pride.
I’m currently reading Dean Koontz’ Mr. Murder, which I’m finding even more excruciatingly suspenseful than his usual stuff. Koontz has adopted the wise policy in recent books of making his heroes blue-collar workers, a tactic that’s both fresh and realistic, and I salute it. In this older book, though, he falls back on the conventional author’s timesaver of making the main character a fellow author (saves research). But it gives him the opportunity to make some dramatically appropriate comments on the idea of Story Itself. Here the hero, Martin Stillwater, talks about it with his wife:
He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because… because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”
“Medicine?”
“Life is so d*mned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naïve, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”