Reading

15 Books

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(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?

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Speling styll maturs

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If you don’t think spelling matters, you’d still better watch it when you’re programming your GPS. This couple in Italy misspelled “Capri” and ended up driving 400 miles in the wrong direction.

Poetry

When the World Ends

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I’m not sure what all Czeslaw Milosz is thinking about in his poem, “A Song On the End of the World,” but the closing seems to speak to those who could take up a higher call, but do not because they are too busy.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

No other end of the world will there be,

No other end of the world will there be.

No other end of the world will we anticipate, because we have today’s simple worries to occupy us. No high calling is on us than to clothe and feed ourselves. Some of us could be prophets, teachers, leaders, or encouragers, but we aren’t because we’re too busy or maybe too distracted. Maybe we’re blogging too much.

I suppose the first step out of this is prayer.

Writing

Back When Everyone Read His Grammar Book

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Where are you in the grammar debate/squabble over singular third person pronouns? When anybody is opening a door, should we write that anybody is opening his door, his or her door, or their door? I’ll state upfront that using his or her is just a waste of words and speedbump in your sentence. The issue is really whether we should use the singular his or the plural their, becoming comfortable with their being used for one person.

Until today, I thought his was the singular, gender neutral pronoun, and unless you’re talking about girls (like I am when I talk about the little people in my home), then you should say things like everyone should use his napkin, not his shirt. This afternoon, I read in an NYT article that they has been used for individuals for centuries, and a grammarian named Anne Fisher changed it.

Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes. . . . Meanwhile, many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians.

Well, if Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, et al used it, I’m not going to complain ever again.

Fiction, Reading, Writing

How is Reading for ‘Escape’ a Bad Thing?

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Suitcase near antique wooden doorway on beach 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.

Publishing, Writing

Are there ghost-writers in the sky?

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Alisa Harris, at the World Magazine blog, writes about the ethical question of pastors cribbing sermon outlines—sometimes whole homilies—from online sermon caches.

As an aside, she links to an article from bnet, about the use of ghostwriters in Christian publishing.

Such things are common in the industry. When my first novel, Erling’s Word (fair warning—you don’t need to buy that book if you have The Year of the Warrior. TYOTW incorporates it entirely in a double volume) was published by Baen, it came out the same month as the “first novel” by an actor who’d worked in a very famous science fiction TV series. Everybody knew, I think, that this actor hadn’t really written the book. Probably hadn’t even contributed much. A fledgeling author was listed as co-author, but it was understood that she’d done the real work, while the actor had contributed the considerable market value of his name. Continue reading Are there ghost-writers in the sky? →

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Jars of Clay on Love for Coffee

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Charlie Lowell of the band Jars of Clay talks about coffee (shout out to Crema in Nashville) and a little about the band’s mission work, Blood:Water.

Q: You guys do a lot of work in Africa with Blood:Water. Do you ever think about how some of the coffees you drink, obviously the ones from Africa, are impacted by the work you do getting clean water wells and HIV medication to a lot of those villages that include coffee farmers?

CL: Yes, that’s quite a connection. We watched the documentary “Black Gold” a couple years ago on our bus, and it was crazy how things trickle down- little decisions we make day in and out do affect others around the globe. It is simply amazing to see how village/community life changes with the addition of a clean-water well. Kids are in school instead of fetching dirty water, women can work on micro-finance, and general health is improved greatly.

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Twitter on Words

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The Editor at Large for Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski, is tweeting on word searches. He notes there have been many requests for the definition of “stupidly,” due to President Obama’s press conference last week. Do the citizens of the Interweb not know what “stupidly” means? Looking up “nefarious” I can understand and “avuncular” got a boost from talk on W. Cronkite, but “stupidly”?