Yes, Buzzfeed is an ugly site, but they occasionally have good lists, like this one on beautifully designed book. They say, “Not only have e-books not killed print books yet, they’ve actually made them better by pushing publishers to give readers a reason to buy print over digital.”
So, here’s nineteen examples. This one of Dickinson’s envelope poems, The Gorgeous Nothings, looks wonderfully inspiring.
I was in the embarrassing situation of having Larry Correia as a Facebook friend but never having read any of his stuff, even though he seemed to have his head on pretty straight. So I remedied that by downloading Hard Magic, Book One of the Grimnoir Chronicles series. It’s pretty good.
The story is set in the 1930s, in an alternate universe where people with magical powers (known as Actives) starting appearing spontaneously among the population sometime in the mid-1800s. This led to some changes in the world – primarily in the balance of power. World War I was ended by the Peace Ray, an invention of Tesla’s, resulting in the virtual annihilation of Berlin, which became a miserable city of zombies. Russia was defeated magically in the Russo-Japanese War, making Japan the dominant power in the east. It’s known now as the Imperium, and is effectively controlled by a ruthless magician.
In the atmosphere of complacency permitted by the Peace Ray, only a small order of Actives, the Grimnoir Knights, carries on an asymmetrical resistance under the leadership of Gen. Pershing, John Moses Browning, and others. This book centers on two new recruits – Jake Sullivan, an ex-con who worked for the FBI for a while but was cheated by J. Edgar Hoover, and Faye Vierra, an adopted child raised by a secret Grimnoir Knight on a farm in the San Fernando Valley of California. Jake and Faye are two of the most talented Actives in the world, and all their powers will be needed when the Imperium makes its sneak attack.
The characters were very good, very believable in relation to the supernatural situations. In general the values were good as well (Correia is a Mormon), although there is some rough language. Lots of violence.
I look forward to reading the second novel in the series, Spellbound.
“Do we wish to seek our life except in God?” – Calvin
Sissel singing a beautiful Swedish Christmas hymn from her first big breakthrough album in Norway. Gives me goosebumps still.
A blessed Christmas to one and all.
The main takeaway that I take away from watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, second in Peter Jackson’s very fat movie adaptation of a fairly thin book, is that I have no interest in buying the DVDs. I want to see the movies in theaters, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t find in my heart any desire to buy them and watch them again.
The main reason, I think, is that there’s too much Peter Jackson here. The mix works out to about 50% Tolkien’s story, 50% Jackson’s special effects indulgences. He promised us a Hobbit fleshed out with material from the Silmarillion and other Tolkienian sources. But in fact most of the added stuff is just fluff – improbable chases, a Rube Goldberg strategem for fighting the dragon (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, and wonderful to see in itself), and an entirely implausible romantic subplot. Also a fighting female elf, unknown in the original material.
As with the first film, it’s visually wonderful. Glorious, beautiful, dazzling. But I kept getting pulled out of the story by Jackson’s self-indulgences. I don’t think he trusts the material. In the classic moviemakers’ tradition, he wants to do the story the immense favor of improving it in his own image.
I kept wanting to tell him to sit down, shut up, and let Tolkien talk.
My movie companion thought it was better than the first one. He may be right. But I continue to feel that great opportunities were lost here.
Cautions for frightening scenes and fantasy violence. OK for kids above, oh, eight, I’d say.
Oh yes, I wanted to mention that the wise old dwarf Balin is played by Ken Stott, who played Inspector Rebus in the second Rebus TV series, reviewed here.
Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image and Slant Books, writes about the idea that strong Catholic writers can’t be found today. He is responded to a piece by Dana Gioia, which lists many Catholics in letters from several years ago, but none working today. Wolfe disagrees:
To take just one example, in arguing that few contemporary writers take on the fundamental question of belief versus unbelief, Elie dismisses Alice McDermott’s fiction as being merely about Irish Catholic New Yorkers from the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an oddly literal and obtuse reading of, say, Charming Billy
. True, the novel is set in that earlier time period, but the novel is told from the point of view of a younger woman—a disaffected, lapsed Catholic—whose exploration of her Uncle Billy’s life slowly and quietly brings her back to faith. Billy the alcoholic protagonist is a mess, and yet he is a loving soul, a kind of saint—a man of boundless faith in spite of his woundedness.
Then, in an unexpectedly poignant turn of events, the novelist Oscar Hijuelos wrote to the Times in response to Elie, citing his own novel, Mr. Ives’ Christmas
, just days before his sudden death of a heart attack. Like Charming Billy, Mr. Ives’ Christmas is another whispered tale of a wounded saint, a man of deep Catholic faith whose seminarian son is senselessly murdered. These novels by McDermott and Hijuelos are meditations on sainthood in the same vein as Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but instead of a protagonist as priest hunted by totalitarian thugs, they show us New Yorkers as unlikely saints: an advertising executive and a worker for Con Edison.
I have been dilatory in my responsibility to provide you with Sissel Christmas videos on this blog. Here is the greatest singer in the world in concert in Iceland, doing what I believe is her favorite song, a Swedish Christmas hymn called “Mitt Hjerte Altid Vanker” (My Heart Always Wanders).
A bit of the story behind “Do You Hear What I Hear?” It involves warfare and missiles in Cuba.
Nick Harrison offers these wonderful quotes and testimonies to discourage the writer in your family. Rejection. Loneliness. Struggle.
Merry Christmas.