We got more snow today. I’m not sure how much. Three inches, maybe. It looks likely to be one of those ol’ fashun winters, like we used to have when I was a kid, back in the Later Pleistocene. One of my earliest memories is of going out of the house with Mom and my brother Moloch, through snow about waist high (considering that I was about three feet tall at the time), to my Dad’s old, World War II-era car. Might have been a Studebaker. He had one at some point along there.

The only thing is, that isn’t a real memory. Or rather, it’s a memory, not of the actual event, but of the film of it that Dad was taking with his Brownie movie camera that day. I’ve seen the movie enough times that, in my mind, I think I actually remember being there. But it’s all a construct.

Memory fascinates me. Especially my early memories. I have this idea (probably picked up from that quack, Freud) that if I could just pull the right memory up into God’s light, I’d solve all my problems.

Well, not the problem of making it through another winter, but other problems.

This weekend I read two books which follow up other books I recently reviewed, so what follows isn’t really meant to be a couple of reviews, just reader’s impressions.

Odd Thomas is the first of the three Odd Thomas books by Dean Koontz published to date. It was a hard read in a way, because I already knew (from Brother Odd) how it was going to end.

Nevertheless, Koontz completely blindsided me with the climax. And thinking back, I realize he telegraphed it from the beginning.

Well done!



Dragons From the Sea is a sequel to Judson Roberts’ Viking Warrior. Both are extremely well-written Young Adults about a young man in 9th Century Denmark who rises from slavery to become a warrior, and gets drawn into a grim drama of murder and revenge.

I enjoyed this volume almost as much as the first one. My only reservation is that in this episode Halfdan, the hero, joins a major Viking attack on France. Although the leaders justify the action as a necessary preemptive strike (I don’t think Roberts has a contemporary political message in mind here; he’s following history pretty closely), the realities of the thing are pretty brutal, and Halfdan does things it’s hard to root for.

(I pretty much dodged this problem in my Erling books. I sent Erling on one raid, but had it happen off-stage. Generally I kept him busy with politics and magical enemies.)

I still recommend Dragons From the Sea. It might not be for the more sensitive of the younger readers, though. (The violence isn’t gratuitous, and there’s no sex.) Good book.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Not just long, long ago, though. I think of Christina Rossetti’s poem every time Christmas approaches and the temperature tumbles. I even used to think of it when I lived in Florida, when Christmas approached and the temperature plunged to something we’d call “brisk” up here. The snow hasn’t fallen, snow on snow, yet, but the spike has been driven down into the bone.

The liturgical question for times like these is, “Cold enough for ya?” to which the liturgical response is… puzzlement. There’s no good answer to “Cold enough for ya?” If you say “Yes,” it’s lame, and if you say “No,” you’re obviously insane. Most of us twist our mouths up (which hurts, because our lips are paralyzed) and try to figure out some kind of clever response. But there is none. Nobody has ever gotten off a good answer to that question. The guy who asked the question has swept all the points. He may be spouting clichés, but at least he hasn’t been struck dumb like you, you poor sap.

Thus do we torment one another on the frozen steppes.



What follows is not a book review. I am not qualified to review this book.

I re-read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer out of desperation. It was early Sunday evening, and I’d just finished Koontz’ Brother Odd, and had no new books in the house. So I went to the shelf and pulled out The Moviegoer. I’m not a Percy fanatic, for reasons that shall be made clear, but I approve of him in principle, and I very much enjoyed The Thanatos Syndrome, his last novel, in which he condescended to write a thriller for common folk like me, and did a bang-up job.



The Moviegoer is the kind of book that makes me feel like Bertie Wooster, when he assumed that Jeeves’ pocket Spinoza was a murder mystery. The book exists on a level far above my poor powers of comprehension. I think I understand it a little better now than I did the first time I read it, but that’s not saying a whole lot.

The story, set around 1960, concerns Binx Bolling, the narrator, who is a scion of an old Louisiana family. He makes his living selling stocks and bonds, and everyone agrees he was designed for better things. Binx isn’t sure of that, and a career isn’t really his primary concern. What he worries about is what he calls the “malaise” which dogs him. He’s a veteran of the Korean War, and the only time he can remember when he felt really alive was the time just after he was wounded. He goes to movies regularly, not because he wants life to be a movie or can’t tell the difference between the two, but because they distract him from the malaise.

Love seems to be his best hope, but he’s gone through several girlfriends (all of them his secretaries; they were more tolerant of that sort of thing in those days), and although they excite him we can tell he’s not genuinely engaged with them. More serious are his feelings for his distant cousin, Kate, who’s more messed up than Binx is. She takes pills and is suicidal. Eventually Binx runs off with her to Chicago, which sets off a crisis that finally decides how he will live out the rest of his life.

How we’re supposed to feel about that ending, I haven’t a clue.

But people I admire say it’s a great book, and I trust them.

“What are the consequences if America becomes ‘a nation in which reading is a minority activity?‘” National Endowment for the Arts Chair Dana Gioia asks this question out of a concern that our country is discouraging reader among teenagers and young adults. He says,

We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life.

The Hartford Courant reports: “‘Is this a cultural apocalypse? No,’ Gioia said, but noted a paradox — while the number of books published is increasing annually, reading for pleasure is declining.”

The report appears to be weak on data for online reading, and some publishers are critical of it for that reason. If people are reading a good bit online, it may offset the study’s results. I’m interested in hearing how much we all read online too, but I don’t think that point of data would change the answer to the survey question asking how much time you spend reading anything for fun. The report claims “15-to-24-year-olds spent just 7 to 10 minutes a day voluntarily reading anything at all” in 2006, according to the Washington Post. That ain’t too good. How much texting did they do?

Reading foreign novels help us understand foreign writers, says Israeli novelist Amos Oz upon winning the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. This appears to come naturally from this upbringing. In his memoir, he says, “Books filled our home. My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages and could speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight… Out of cultural considerations they mostly read books in German or English, and presumably they dreamed in Yiddish. But the only language they taught me was Hebrew.”

Stephen King has been seen reading at a baseball game, so Mickey Mclean asks, “Where’s the strangest place you’ve seen someone pull out a book?”

I’ve wanted to take my book or magazine into the shower with me, but I have a stronger grip on reality than that. I wish I could read while walking, but I have taken to audiobooks for that. Now I just want to write another sentence which ends with that. Success!

Speaking of grip on reality, Athol Dickson points to an essay John Piper wrote about imagination and the fact that God is not boring.

PC World has listed 100 sites which they call “new or under-the-radar sites of 2007.” Ninja Words, “a really fast dictionary,” is one of them. I just tried it–gives results almost instantly. The magazine also lists sites in a reading section. Looks interesting.