Clarice Bean has mysterious things happening all around her, and just like her utterly favorite detective Ruby Redfort (secret agent, undercover detective, and mystery solver) she is trying to solve them. The first thing is that when Clarice Bean gets to the pegs in her class room, the pegs had been moved around and it takes utterly a very long time till she finds her jacket. Second thing, when Clarice Bean gets home she notices something very utterly odd in the living room: the TV is not on and Grandad isn’t in his chair and she hears a strange yelping noise and it isn’t her dog Cement, because he is siting right next to her, chewing the message pad. He is about to eat a message and Clarice Bean is trying to grab it from him, but all she can read is “didn’t have time to tell you, but going to Rus…”. That was very utterly odd. The thing is that Clarice Bean’s friend Betty Moody has not been coming to school, and Clarice Bean doesn’t know what to do. Clarice Bean is doing all sorts of things, and you can never tell what she wil do next. If you like Clarice Bean then you will like this book. Please read Utterly Me, Clarice Bean right now!
Archive | February 2008
Life Links
I’m hoping to make this a weekly feature when I return from my blog break because I fully believe that we will ultimately end the scourge of abortion by changing hearts, not laws. Yes, I believe that the law needs to change, too. But many people will not obey a law that is not written on their hearts. So, “life links” is my small way of telling everyone who comes to this blog that God is the Creator and Sustainer of every single human life, that our lives and the lives of our children are gifts from His hand, and that we as children of the Heavenly Father cannot continue to devalue the lives of others by tolerating abortion in our country or in our world.
I found this old post from 2005 at the Common Room. It’s about a time when the Headmistress was feeling very poor and very frightened. I’ve copied an excerpt, but you should really read the entire story.
I cried myself to sleep many nights, wishing I wasn’t pregnant. Even typing those words tonight, two decades later, I feel sick at the thought. ‘Ending the pregnancy’ was never, ever, not for one second something I even considered- but wishing God would end it for me— well.
I was so blind. So blind. Because I could see no light at the end of our tunnel, I thought there was only darkness ahead. But I could not see the light because I had lived too long in darkness and my eyes were not accustomed to seeing things through faith. I was a Christian. I believed. I loved my Heavenly Father. But I did not yet have enough faith to comfort me in what I foolishly thought was a fiery trial.”
I got lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: to dehumanize the enemy. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendencies to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize the fellow human beings who are on the other side of the lines in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized the enemy of sex.
It was when I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s view of sex, marriage and contraception that everything changed.”
True Lent
Hold a true Lent in your souls, while you sorrow over your hardness of heart. Do not stop at sorrow! Remember where you first received salvation. Go at once to the cross. . . this will bring back to us our first love; this will restore the simplicity of our faith, and the tenderness of our heart.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
A Door Near Here by Heather Quarles
I gave this book to Dancer Daughter and to Organizer Daughter to read after I finished it because I liked it so much. They read the blurb on the back of the book and informed me that they weren’t interested in a book about an alcoholic family nor in a book about a little girl who tries to enter Narnia. I tried to tell them that the book wasn’t really about either of those topics, even though it contains those elements. I’ll try again here.
A Door Near Here is the story of Katherine, Douglas, Tracey and Alisa. Katherine is only fifteen years old, but since her mother went to bed with a bottle, literally, Katherine is the only one left to hold the family together. The four children can’t turn to their estranged and remarried dad because:
a) he has a new family now and doesn’t want to know that the family he abandoned is in trouble. Dad just pays his child support and stays far away.
b) Alisa, the youngest and most vulnerable of the children, isn’t Dad’s child. She was born after Dad left, and he’s not interested in her at all.
So Katherine knows that if she wants to keep the family together, if she wants to protect her mother, if she wants to take care of Alisa, she must be the adult and, above all, keep her mother’s alcoholic breakdown a secret. It’s obvious from the beginning that this forced foray into responsible adulthood will never work. Even kids, reading how Katherine tries to figure out how to make the food stretch and keep the bills paid and get the kids and herself to school everyday and keep it all a secret, will realize that the plot is doomed. Superwoman couldn’t pull it off. But Katherine tries, and it’s morbidly fascinating to read and see how, whether, they will pull themselves out of this mess.
Then, there’s Alisa. Eight year old Alisa copes with the breakdown of her family by writing letters to C.S. Lewis. By reading the Narnia books over and over and over. By trying to find a door into Narnia where she believes she can find a cure for mom. Of course, Katherine knows Narnia is a fantasy, and she’s fairly sure C.S. Lewis is dead. But how do you deal with a beloved little sister who believes, who needs to believe?
This book is well worth finding. It was published in 2000 by Delacorte as the winner of its prize for a first YA novel. Unfortunately, it also appears to be Ms. Quarles’s last novel. I can’t find that she’s had anything else published since 2000.
TadMack at Finding Wonderland: “It is a powerful and heartfelt book which, for reasons of its authentic voice and timeless truths, cracked my heart when I first read it in 2001. The MFA thesis of author Heather Quarles, this book combines a family story and an exploration of belief to create a book painful in its clarity.”
Dona Patrick at Revish: “The book, A Door Near Here, is not the light fiction/fantasy I was expecting. It is a very heavy story about alcoholism that resulted in child neglect. It is about four siblings who stuck together and survived a very nasty part of their lives.”
Julie Berry: “Exceptional realism grappling with parental abandonment and neglect, and a haunting, lovely tribute to Lewis and his legacy. Strongly recommended.”
Saturday Review of Books: February 9, 2008
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.”
Gilbert Highet
Welcome to this week’s Saturday Review of Books. Here’s how it works. Find a review on your blog posted sometime this week of a book you’re reading or a book you’ve read. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.
Now post a link here to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.
Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.
To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 8th
John Ruskin, b. 1819. Known as a literary and art critic, Ruskin lived a rather tragic life. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne, and his wife left him and married the painter Millais. He fell in love with a young Irish girl, but she would not marry him and she later died. He lost his faith in Christianity, suffered from mental illness, and finally re-embraced the Christian faith of his youth, although he refused to believe in hell. Maybe this rejection had something to do with the fact that during episodes of mental illness he had horrendous visions of himself battling with Satan.
Henry Walter Bates, b. 1825. Naturalist, entomologist, and evolutionist. He wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863. Has anybody out there read it?
If you’d like to know more about this pioneer in entomology, here’s a good article from The New Yorker, August 22, 1988, about Bates’s life and travels along the Amazon.
Jules Verne, b. 1828. In a letter: “I must be slightly off my head. I get caught up in all the extraordinary adventures of my heroes.”
Digby Mackworth Dolben, b. 1848. English poet, he was rather a character. He wrote love poetry to another (male) student at Eton and then considered conversion to Roman Catholicism and went around wearing a Benedictine monk’s habit. He drowned in a rather mysterious accident at the age of nineteen before he could go up to Oxford.
Kate Chopin, b. 1851. American author of The Awakening.
Martin Buber, b. 1878. Jewish philosopher and teacher. In 1938 he left Germany and went to live in Jerusalem. He wrote the book, I and Thou about the relationships of people to people and persons to God. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”
John Grisham, b. 1955. OK, I’m not really terribly intellectual at all. Of all the authors who have birthdays today, the only two I’ve read are Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days and John Grisham. Which Grisham novel do you like best? Do you agree with me that his novels have not gotten better but rather the opposite? I did enjoy The Firm and The Client and, my favorite, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read his latest yet, but I’ve seen it in all the stores.
Edited slightly and reposted from February 8, 2006.
Poetry Friday: Abraham Lincoln
Tuesday is Lincoln’s Birthday. So I’m leaving you with a couple of Lincoln elegies.
O Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman
O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Lincoln by John Gould Fletcher
(an excerpt, go here for the entire poem.)
There was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow darkness,
Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter;
A darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards into the earth 15
Towards old things;
Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke with God,
Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what, and found their goal at last;
Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all seemed lost,
Many bitter winters of defeat; 20
Down to the granite of patience
These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking,
And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it
The red sap to carry upwards to the sun.
Not proud, but humble,
Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through service;
For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that bring not forth good fruit
Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire.
To This Great Stage of Fools: Born February 7th
A great day for another LOST episode:
Sir Thomas More, b. 1478 More’s Utopia is a novel which “describes the political arrangements of the imaginary island nation of Utopia (a play on the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place”, and eu-topos, meaning “good place”). Wow, if that’s not related to LOST island, the noplace/good place . . .
Samuel Butler, b. 1612. Butler was a nineteenth century author whose masterpiece was a novel called Erewhon (“nowhere” backwards). Erewhon was an imaginary country, neither utopia nor dystopia, but rather ambiguously satirical of the British Empire at the time. Is LOST a utopia or a dystopia, and can we tell the difference?
Charles Dickens, b. 1812. Of course, Dickens is Desmond’s favorite novelist, and he’s read all of DIckens’ novels except for the one he’s saving to read just before he dies, Our Mutual Friend. Here’s my post on LOST and Our Mutual Friend.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, b. 1867. Sawyer says he watched Little House on the Prairie when he was a kid. Can’t you just picture little James watching Laura and Mary on Little House?
Sinclair Lewis, b. 1885. Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith is about a brilliant but self-involved doctor named Martin Arrowsmith who moves from swmall town practice to large hospitals to research and eventually works to contain an outbreak of the bubonic plague that kills his beloved wife. After the loss of his wife, Dr. Arrowsmith becomes lost to himself and his principles and deserts his second wife. I’m not sure exactly how this plot relates to Jack Shepard, dedicated doctor who becomes an alcoholic and a druggie, but surely there’s a parallel there.
Everything relates in some way to LOST, right?
Other Dickensian posts:
Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley
Mere Comments on Dickens’ Christianity.
Dickens Dissed:
Anthony Trollope: “Of Dicken’s style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical and created by himself in defiance of rules … No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.”
Oscar Wilde on Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
So as not to end on a sourly laughing note, let me say that I didn’t laugh when Little Nell died, although I do hiss audibly when Madame Defarge enters the story in A Tale of Two Cities, and I admit to feeling not too much sympathy for Little Em’ly. And I would love to think it within my abilities to imitate Dickens, The Inimitable.
Books for Lent to Lead You into Resurrection
Lent begins very early this year, on Wednesday, February 6th. Here a few book suggestions and blog links to add to your Lenten journey.
The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy Wright. Wendy is a lay person who writes beautifully about the sacredness of ordinary experience.
Bread And Wine: Readings For Lent And Easter is a collection of 72 essays from a variety of writers like Dorothy Day, Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Frederick Buechner.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. If you’re just now exploring the Christian faith, or if you’re trying to come to a deeper understanding of the faith you already profess, you can’t go wrong with Lewis’s classic exposition of the basics of what Christians believe.
Living Lent: Meditations for These Forty Days by Barbara Cawthorne.
Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner. Semicolon review here.
Pilgrim Road: A Benedictine Journey Through Lent by Albert Holtz. A Benedictine monk travels through fifteen countries and contmplates the spiritual journey that we all undertake.
Our read aloud books for the Lenten season are Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair all by C.S. Lewis and The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare.
Fro my personal devotional reading, I’m reading the books of Ruth in the Bible for the month of February and the latter eight chapters of Mark in March. I’m also reading Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans.
Blog Links for Lent:
Lenten Links collected by iMonk, Michael Spencer.
And an Anglican Family Lenten Carnival with lots more links.
Lenten Thoughts from 2005 at Semicolon.
Aside from reading, I’m observing Lent by taking a blog break. You might not notice too much difference at first because I’ve pre-posted and scheduled quite a bit of stuff for the next few weeks. Saturday review posts will appear on Saturday as usual. However, I took a Lent break last year and actually enjoyed it quite a bit, and so I’m taking off again this year. I hope to have a couple of guest bloggers come in take up the slack, but however that goes, I’ll see you all back on or about March 23rd, Resurrection Sunday.
May the Lord bless you and keep you, may He cause his face to shine upon you, and give you peace.
More New Books in 2008
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about some of the new books I’m looking forward to reading in 2008. Here are a few more:
C.J. Sansom, Winter in Madrid, Viking, January 2008. It’s a spy thriller set in 1940s Spain. I liked Sansom’s mysteries set i the time of Henry VIII, so I think I’d like to give this one a try, too.
Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well: And All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well, Pantheon, January 2008. This novel is about the life of a modern medieval re-enactor who moves between time periods, continents, and histories both real and re-enacted. Sounds intriguing. I like the title.
Kate Morton, The House at Riverton, Atria, April 2008. I saw a link to a revew of this book by Wendy at caribousmom at the Saturday Review. And here’s another by The Random Wonderer.
And doesn’t this one sound . . . wild? Nicola Upson, An Expert in Murder, HarperCollins, June 2008. Mystery writer Josephine Tey, on a train journey from Scotland to London in 1934, investigates the death of a young woman.
I gleaned all of these titles from the Historical Novel Society’s Forthcoming Fiction page.