I just stumbled upon this site dedicated to All Quiet On the Western Front. That’s one of those books on my Meaning to Get to Soon list for a long time. I hope it’s still at the library when I go to look for it.
Also, this site with a long list of books about coffee.
I was chatting with a friend online last night, and the subject of favorite fairy tales came up. For some reason I forgot to mention “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen. Somebody (I forget who) wrote a book a long time ago, saying that our favorite fairy tales reveal a lot about our basic desires and strategies for life. Girls who like “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, seem to always own a red coat, and have a tendency to get into relationships with big bad wolves.
“The Ugly Duckling” is actually a pretty uncharacteristic story for Andersen. It has a happy ending, and he didn’t write those often. Sorry to drop a spoiler on you here, but if you only know “The Little Mermaid” from the Disney movie, the original version doesn’t end the same way at all. Not at all
An excerpt (not the conclusion of the story):
The little mermaid could not help thinking of her first rising out of the sea… and she joined in the dance, poised herself in the air as a swallow when he pursues his prey, and all present cheered her with wonder. She had never danced so elegantly before. Her tender feet felt as if cut with sharp knives, but she cared not for it; a sharper pang had pierced through her heart. She knew this was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she had given up her beautiful voice, and suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it. This was the last evening that she would breathe the same air with him, or gaze on the starry sky and the deep sea; an eternal night, without a thought or dream, awaited her; she had no soul and now she could never win one….
Andersen was a writer of tragedy. He wrote tragedies for children, which seems perverse to us. But Andersen was a lonely, shy man who had little experience of happy endings. He’d grown up in poverty and been rejected by every woman he ever fell in love with (he was not, despite what the activists will try to tell you, a homosexual). He was only comfortable with children; remained a child himself in many ways. But the message he had for children was not the one we like to give them—“Hold on, keep hopeful, and everything will turn out all right.” His message, forged out of his own experience in a world where lots and lots of children never grew up, was, “You may fail. You may die. But death doesn’t have to be the end, and the way you die can make your life beautiful.”
I wrote about something like this the other day, in regard to the story about the widow in the smoky house. Our ancestors lived in a harder world than ours, and they had wisdom we can’t begin to comprehend, wisdom that allowed them to endure suffering we can’t imagine and retain their sanity. Afraid to look closely at such holy things, we, the descendents, malign them and label them “morbid.”
Just now, on his radio show, Hugh Hewitt made the following spit-take inducing statement: “That’s why I’m repeating the first hour of this program, though I don’t often do that.”
Hugh, you know what happens to little boys who tell fibs, don’t you?
By way of Paul McCain’s Cyberbrethren blog, this incredible Bible map site. Extremely cool.
Our IT guy came to my office to replace my two side-by-side computer monitors (I use two computers at work. One’s dedicated to cataloging) with a wonderful new big-screen monitor today, plus adding a nifty switch that toggles back and forth between the two, clearing one monitor’s footprint from my desk. More room for clutter!
He told me about a woman he’d talked to recently. She’d grown disillusioned with the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless. She’d been involved in some sort of planned giving commitment, and she’d finally come to the end of that. She sent them a final check, in the amount of $10.00.
Someone from HQ called her and asked her what the ten buck check was for.
“I’d like you to take that ten dollars and buy a Bible with it,” she told them. “I don’t think you have one up there.”
I’m sure location is almost everything to running a successful bookstore. At least, that’s my conclusion from Frank’s comments about his store on this thread. But after location, adaptation may be the next big piece to running a successful store.
Tudor Book Shop and Cafe in Kingston, Penn., is celebrating 30 years, and they don’t sell books alone. The cafe started 10 years ago and now makes up 20% of their sales. A store partner says, “Throughout November, we held trunk shows to create some excitement; one featured Folkmanis puppets, and another, jewelry. We need to offer different things than the chain stores”–things like hand-made jewelry, crafts, and stationery.
In case you don’t see this in the lists of last year’s news, here’s a reminder of the good ol’ days.
Some writers spend decades trying to break into the biz, and even then, they often can’t make ends meet. For legitimate writers, an unproven teenager landing a $500,000 deal to write two books adds insult to the obvious injury of plagiarism.
This comes from industry news that young writer Kaavya Viswanathan received a $500,000 two-book deal from Little, Brown. Still just as heart-warming now as it was then. The writer asks, “Given how the Internet and digital content have highlighted the limitations of old-school media, stories like this one suggest that the publishing industry should take a long, hard look at where it’s directing its financial resources, and why.”
Maybe we should let illegal immigrants do the work in publishing houses that otherwise decent citizens don’t want to do–fact-checking, editing, maybe marketing.
One line review of A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin: “I give up.”
I say that with great regret. In my view there’s only one contemporary fantasy author who bears comparison with J.R.R. Tolkien in any meaningful way, and that’s Martin. No other author in the field today comes close to him in combining fully realized worldbuilding with skillful prose and insightful character development. There’s no other contender in that weight category.
Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is loosely based on (or perhaps “suggested by” would be a better combination) the English Wars of the Roses. But Martin’s wars are bigger affairs. Britain has become Westeros, a full-fledged continent, home to a dozen kingdoms, as culturally diverse as the European Scandinavia-to-the-Mediterranean range. All are under the overlordship of the Iron Throne, but the death of the king in the first volume set off a rash of dynastic wars. The wars are big. The passions are big. The treachery would put the Borgias to shame. The crimes are appalling, the heroism…
Well, no. There isn’t any real heroism in these books, which is a major part of my problem with them. People who aspire to chivalry in these books generally get cut off pretty promptly, and those who survive mostly do so by lies, murder and betrayal. The only fighters Martin seems to admire much are the female ones, of which I counted about four (it’s hard to remember) in this book.
“It’s hard to remember” is something you’ll hear a lot from Martin’s readers. His method is not to put a few sympathetic characters on stage and follow them over time and geography, in Tolkien’s manner. Martin sets out dozens of characters (all of them admirably fleshed out) in hundreds of locations, and leaves it to the reader to keep them straight (with the help of character indexes in back, without which reading these books would be impossible for anyone not blessed with a photographic memory).
And that’s only the half of it. Martin explains in a note at the end of this volume that he’s left out half the characters and action in this section of the plot, and that he’ll provide those in the next volume. Just be patient. And keep your notes at hand.
And that’s the other part of my problem with Martin. He seems to have allowed his grand scheme to run away with him. His desire to populate his books with a cast of thousands is admirable in its way, but it’s taxing for the reader. I could probably hang on to the end (whenever that comes—Martin is coy on the projected length of the series) if I thought the payoff would be one I’d appreciate.
But Martin doesn’t appear to be preparing us for any Tolkienesque “eucatastrophe.” His message, judging from what we’ve seen so far, would seem to be the old, tired (and false) one that goes, “War never solves anything.” To drive that message home, he employs the device of regularly killing off characters we’ve started to root for, and in the most unpleasant ways he can think of.
So sorry, George. I’m not going to invest the effort you demand of me just so I can watch you kill off the rest of your viewpoint characters and hear you sing, “Give peace a chance.”
It’s been a good effort. But I have other things to do with my life.
A relative recently sent me a copy of some pages from an old “kalender,” (actually more like what we’d call an annual) published in 1932 by Augsburg Publishing House in Minneapolis. These pages contained an essay by a pastor (identified only by the initials “Th. F.”), concerning his memories of a particular aged widow he’d known when he was a young schoolteacher in Norway. The article was of interest to me because this widow was one of my ancestors. Her name was Sophie, which was also the name of my grandmother, a descendent of hers—also in her own turn a godly widow.
The essay is called “Den gamle enke i røkstuen,” which means, “The old widow in the smoky house.” A røkstue was a kind of cottage once very common among the poorer classes in Norway. It was a single-roomed house with a plastered fireplace in one corner for heating and cooking. Such fireplaces had no chimneys. The smoke filled the room, then escaped through a hole in the roof. They were sooty and unpleasant places, and Sophie’s living in one was evidence of her poverty.
The author remembered Sophie as a simple, quiet, loving soul who devoted her life to prayer. One time she went down to the river to wash some clothes, and felt compelled to spend some time with God. Because she didn’t like to “pray to be seen of men,” she went further along the river to a quiet spot where she wouldn’t be seen. But just as she knelt down, a stone rolled over on her foot and crushed it, pinning her. She had to call for help to get free, and she was crippled for the rest of her life. She often wondered, the pastor recalled, why God would allow such a thing to happen while she was “approaching the throne of grace,” but she finally decided it was for God to understand and for her to accept.
The pastor felt he knew why. He believed that if the accident hadn’t happened, no one would have known about her secret prayers. He felt the sight of her limping (like Jacob’s limp in Genesis) was a constant testimony to God’s presence in her life.
Such thinking seems insane (not to mention heartless) to us today. But I wonder if it’s possible that we, with our love of ease and comfort, have simply grown unable to understand things that were clear to earlier, tougher generations who took daily suffering for granted.
Or maybe not. I’m not drawing conclusions here. I’m just wondering.
I’ll translate a little from a passage near the end:
And she was not one of those who, while listening to God’s Word, sit and (in their thoughts) share the message generously with others; she applied it to herself, and so brought rich blessings home with her. One time, when the pastor at the altar said, “Let us all pray,” she began to think that obviously not everyone there in church was praying along. How could so-and-so pray, being such-and-such, etc.? And just as she sat and thought that way about others, she realized that she, precisely because of such thoughts about others, was herself neglecting to follow along with the prayer. “I was both grieved and ashamed that the devil should deceive me so,” she said. But after that she was always vigilant in guarding against that temptation….”
We think of our forebears as unenlightened compared with our educated selves. I suspect God doesn’t see it that way.
After reading these articles on independent bookstores closing their doors, I’m wondering if small towns are not the best place for small box booksellers.
Via Books, Inq., New York City’s Coliseum Books is closing: Competition is killing independent U.S. bookstores. The owner says, “Chain-store sales and the Internet are far more practical. People will go to places closer to them. Places like Barnes & Noble.”
Can you blame anyone for doing that?
Also in New York City, the landlord raised the rent on Murder Ink, “the oldest mystery-themed bookstore in the world,” and has forced it out. The owner, Jay Pearsall, says, “I was a little outraged that a well-run bookstore couldn’t make it in the best book-buying neighborhood in the world, but there’s no business model that can work.”
I wonder what the blogosphere’s role in small business America is. Do we generally support or undermine high-service, select-quantity booksellers? I know of two new independent bookstores in my area, both downtown though in different towns. Are they fools waiting for a pit to fall into?
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was born January 3rd and will be toasted by devotees around the world at 9:00 p.m. (local time) on that day. The Tolkien Society of the United Kingdom is coordinating the toast. Will you join in?
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was born January 3rd and will be toasted by devotees around the world at 9:00 p.m. (local time) on that day. The Tolkien Society of the United Kingdom is coordinating the toast. Will you join in?