Baker’s Dozen: Best Nonfiction I Read in 2018

Old Friends by Tracy Kidder.

Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church by Lynn K. Wilder.

Heaven Without Her: A Desperate Daughter’s Search for the Heart of Her Mother’s Faith by Kitty Foth-Regner.

Educated by Tara Westover. Tara Westover, either bravely or contemptibly, tells the story of her struggle to educate herself in the face of her father’s seeming mental illness and her mother’s obliviousness to the truth as well as Tara’s horrific abuse at the hands of her older brother.

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. Female factory workers contract radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. This book tells the story of their struggle to survive and to obtain help and just compensation from the employers who knew the workers were being poisoned even as they generated large profits for the companies they served.

First Lady of the Theatre: Sarah Siddons by Molly Costain Haycraft. Ms. Siddons was “the best-known tragedienne of the 18th century.” This Messner biography tells the story of her life.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park. A harrowing story of escape from North Korea’s nationwide prison.

Sent to the River God Forgot by Jim and Janice Walton. Jim and Janice Walton translate the New Testament into the Muinane language in spite of many obstacles, both physical and cultural.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann. An informative and insightful attempt to remain objective in reporting on two very different visions for saving the world: scientism versus environmentalism. Although both ways have pieces of the truth, I think there is a third way that combines the best of both worlds without their blind spots.

A Passion for the Impossible: The Life of Lilias Trotter by Miriam Huffman Rockness. A fascinating look at a fascinating woman. With the opportunity, according to her friend and mentor John Ruskin, to become a great and celebrated artist, Lilias Trotter instead chose to serve those least able to appreciate her gifts, the native people of Algeria. Did she waste her life and her talent? Read about her life and decide for yourself.

I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel. Essays on the joys and trials of the reading life.

Proverbs by J. Vernon McGee. I like all of the commentaries in the Bible teaching series by Back to the Bible radio teacher, J. Vernon McGee.

Happy Birthday to JRR Tolkien, b. January 3, 1892

250px-Jrrt_1972_pipeI think Professor Tolkien was a genius and one of the best writers England ever produced. If you disagree, we won’t argue. I’ll just wait for you to come round to the truth.

I’ve blogged about Tolkien and his books many times here at Semicolon. Here are links to few of my thoughts on the professor and his hobbitish books.

Tolkien’s birthday, 2004
Happy Birthday, Professor Tolkien, 2005
Happy Birthday, Mr. Tolkien, 2010
Thoughts on The Silmarilllion
Poetry Friday: Goblin Feet by JRR Tolkien
Review of The Fellowship by Philip and Carol Zaleski.
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, Chapter 3, A Short Rest.
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, Chapter 4, Over Hill and Under Hill.
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 5: Riddles in the Dark
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 6: Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 7: Queer Lodgings

I only managed to get through chapter 7 in my blog posts on The Hobbit, although I’ve read the entire book many times. Maybe this year I’ll finish up this series.

Lists for your Christmas Book Joy

Use these lists for ideas of books to read for Christmas and books to give for Christmas.

Biblioguides: 15 Books to Read Aloud.

Biblioguides: 25 Picture Books to Read This Christmas. While you’re there, check out their trial membership offer. This website is, and will be for years to come, a great resource for bibliophiles everywhere.

Read-Aloud Revival: Our Favorite Christmas Picture Books. Includes a link to a free printable list.

Read-Aloud Revival: Christmas Short Stories and Novels to Read Aloud with the Whole Family. Listen to the podcast for more information on these suggested read-aloud stories for Christmas.

Read-Aloud Revival: Christmas Audiobooks for the Whole Family.

Redeemed Reader: Christmas Books for All Ages.

25 Christ-centered Christmas Books at Joyfully Thriving.

Top 20 Christmas Chapter Books at Well-Read Kid.

The Holiday Book Box at A Charlotte Mason Home.

Nowhere Boy by Katherine Marsh

Fourteen year old Ahmed Nasser, a Syrian refugee, is stranded in Brussels, Belgium, separated from his family, no papers, no money, and no plan. Thirteen year old Max Howard, an American diplomat’s son, is stranded, too, in a way. His parents have transported him to Brussels and enrolled him in a French-speaking school, all because they want to give him a “new start” after an unfortunate sixth grade school year back in Washington, D.C. Now, Max feels like a failure and a stranger, and his parents just want him to repeat sixth grade and learn French and get his act together.

It’s an unlikely story of how two misfit boys meet and find a way to help each other. The story itself is very pro-refugee and sympathetic to the plight of Syrian refugees in particular. And the boys do break the law in their attempts to safeguard and legitimize Ahmed. The lone spokesperson for law and order, Police Inspector Fontaine, is not very effective in his argument that “the law is important. Society cannot function without it.” (He reminds one a bit of Inspector Javert.)

Although it’s quite obvious where the author’s sympathies lie, I would not say that the book is didactic. The story is exciting and intriguing enough to keep the pages flipping, and the characters, even the ones who disagree with what Max and Ahmed are trying to do, are well-drawn and interesting, experiencing growth and development to some extent. Max’s parents seem a bit oblivious to the obvious, but they are likable and present and engaged in Max’s life.

Near the end of the book, in a clear reference to our current American president, someone tells Ahmed, “America is only accepting ten thousand Syrians. There is even a candidate for president who wants to ban all Muslim immigrants.” In the first ten months of 2018, the United States admitted only fifty-six Syrian refugees.

Strange Star by Emma Carroll

This book features the Shelleys, Percy Byshe and Mary Godwin, and Mary’s half-sister Claire, and Lord Byron, and as soon as I realized that little fact, I knew that I would be somewhat ambivalent about the book. The Shelleys and their coterie, especially Percy and Byron, but really all of them, were not very good people. In fact, Percy Shelley was a predator who took advantage of at least two teenage girls and drove one of them to suicide. And Byron was even worse in the womanizing department. The tale of these two poets and their harem/community/obsessive fanbase is a sordid one.

And yet . . . The story, especially the famous story of the Villa Diodati and how the group challenged each other to write a ghost or horror story, and how Mary Godwin Shelley produced the tale of Frankenstein’s monster as a result of that challenge, has a particular and peculiar fascination. Just as the book Frankenstein is repellant and yet strangely fascinating at the same time, its origin story has inspired many an author to embroider and fill in the gaps in the Shelleys’ journey to Romantic fame.

“Yet I’ve also tried to make my story echo Mary Shelley’s in certain ways. Felix, Agatha, Elizabeth (Lizzie), Mr. Walton, and Moritz are all names taken from Frankenstein. Strange Star is about scientific ambition: Miss Stine experiments with electricity regardless of the consequences, just as Victor Frankenstein does in Shelley’s original. There is a blind character in Frankenstein who doesn’t judge people by their appearance. Many of the characters in Strange Star face prejudice because of how they look or who they are.
For me, Frankenstein is a great story, and Mary Shelley an inspirational woman. I really hope reading Strange Star will make you want to discover more about both for yourself.”

Well, not really. I think I know enough already. However, I did find that Strange Star, while rather a strange story itself, neither appeals to prurient interest by emphasizing the nasty details of the Shelleys lives not does it whitewash them and make them into kind, honorable people. The Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron in this book are portrayed as just the selfish, careless people that they most likely were without the author’s giving too much information for a middle grade or young adult audience.

Strange Star itself is a little dark, but it ends on a good note. As another author with a bad reputation once wrote, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” I daresay I like my Romantic poets fictionalized to some extent to take away the rough edges.

A Dastardly Plot by Christopher Healy

A Perilous Journey of Danger and Mayhem: A Dastardly Plot by Christopher Healy.

A new series beginner by the author of The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom is something to look forward to with anticipation, and A Dastardly Plot lives up to my expectations. The book is set in 1883, the Age of Invention, and features appearances by great inventors such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, and George Eastman, to name a few of the many men who made the age of invention, inventive.

But where were all the women? Well, according to this fantastical version of history, the women were shut out of the Inventor’s Guild and out of the World’s Fair, disregarded, patronized, and ignored. It’s definitely a feminist take on madcap inventors who are out to save the world, but it never gets didactic or overbearing. Molly Pepper, daughter of the not-so-famous inventor, Cassandra Pepper, lives with her mother behind their pickle shop and helps with the inventing. However, Molly doesn’t really have the inventing bug, not does she want to be an inventor when she grows up. And right now, at age twelve, Molly is too busy trying to keep her mother alive, solvent, and following her dream of exhibiting her inventions at the World’s Fair, to worry too much about growing up or about what she will do if and when she does. It’s Molly’s new friend Emmett Lee who has the gift for new ideas and inventions, but it’s Molly who must save the day with her practicality and persistence when villains want to destroy the Worlds Fair and take over the government of the entire country.

A Dastardly Plot is a detective adventure fantasy with lots of chases and explosions and hairbreadth escapes and and mysterious disguises and twists and turns as well as a growing friendship between Molly Pepper and Emmett Lee and a mother/daughter relationship that is characterized by dysfunction and growth, too. Readers of all ages can enjoy this story with its humor and heart, and I predict that most of those readers will be looking forward to the next installment in the story of the Peppers and Emmett Lee and the inventors of New York.

By the way, there is an afterword in which Mr. Healy tells his readers “what’s real and what’s not in A Dastardly Plot.” Such information is definitely needed, since most of the book falls in the “not” category. Still it may inspire young readers to research for themselves and find out more about Edison, Bell, Tesla, Eastman, Nellie Bly, Sarah Goode, Hertha Marks, Josephine Cochrane, Margaret Knight, Mary Walton, and other inventors and luminaries of the late nineteenth century. Also featured in the story are the Brooklyn Bridge, President Chester Arthur, Ulysses S. Grant, Menlo Park, and the National Geographic Society. Lots of jumping-off places for more learning and adventure. (I want to read more about all those female inventors for myself.)

The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle by Christina Uss

Bicycle, a foundling who has grown up at the Mostly Silent monastery in Washington, D.C., is now twelve years old, a lover of cycling, and in need of a good friend. But she’s not likely to find a real friend either at the monastery where the monks are limited in their speech to only eight sacred words, used infrequently and only when necessary, or at the Friendship Factory, a camp where she is guaranteed to make three friends or else. So, Bicycle sets off on her own, with her trusty bicycle, to make her own friends in her own way.

This story of a girl and her cross-country bicycle trip from Washington, D.C. to California is enlivened by the appearance of unexpected characters along the way: a Civil War ghost who decides to haunt Bicycle’s bicycle (named Clunk), a bike-loving horse named Cannibal, a frustrated restauranteur, Estrella and her bike-crushing herd of pigs, The Cookie Lady, and Jeremiah, the Fried Pie seller—and that’s just in the first half of the trip before Bicycle reaches the Continental Divide. Bicycle is a determined and honest girl with a mission: she wants to make friends with her cycling hero, Zbigniew Sienkiewicz, aka Zbig (for obvious “pronouncibility” reasons), who is coming to San Francisco for The Blessing of the Bicycles. The only way she can get to meet Zbig is be there for the event, and Bicycle is going to make it by bicycling all the way across the United States.

The story does require some suspension of disbelief, and a certain appreciation or at least tolerance for the quirky and off-beat. However, the author, Christina Uss, “has ridden her own beloved bicycle across the United States, once widthwise and once lengthwise.” That familiarity with cross-country bicycling and U.S. geography shows up in the details of the story as Bicycle pedals through miles and miles of Kansas sunflowers or through more miles and miles of Nevada desert. Just as Bicycle has people and events that cross her path and help get her through those long miles, the book never slows down too much without a new place to see a friend to meet, or without something happening to enliven Bicycle’s journey and keep the pages/pedals turning.

The book could be classified in the “magical realism” genre, with a bit of science fiction thrown in. However, it’s mostly a story about a girl who learns to persevere and make friends, who has a little luck and a lot of pluck, and who loves bicycling. If any of those themes and ideas pique your interest, you should check it out.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Christmas in South Africa, c. 2001

Niki Daly’s series of picture books about a little girl named Jamela are a perfect introduction to South African culture, and they are just good stories.

What’s Cooking, Jamela? deals with the advent of Christmas, South African style as Jamela helps Mama fatten up a chicken for Christmas dinner.

“When Gogo left, Mama said, ‘Come, Jamela, let’s go to Mrs. Zibi and buy one of her young chickens. If we feed it well, it will be nice and fat for Christmas.’

Mama let Jamela choose the chicken–a beautiful red one. Mrs. Zibi gave them a bag of mielies.

‘We can call her Christmas,’ said Jamela. Mama laughed. ‘That’s a good name for a Christmas chicken, Jamela.'”

Other Jamela books:

Jamela’s Dress
Happy Birthday, Jamela!
Where’s Jamela?
A Song for Jamela

Several of these are also available in Spanish.

Christmas in Philadelphia, PA, c.1962

Carolyn Haywood’s Betsy books and her other books about Little Eddie and other children growing up in mid-twentieth century America are a breath of fresh air and a lovely look at the kind of childhood that I actually experienced back in the 1960’s.

In this excerpt from Snowbound with Betsy, Betsy and her friends decide to make a Christmas tree for feeding the birds:

“This is a good place for it,’ said Susan, “because we’ll be able to see it from the window.”

“Yes,” said Betsy. “We’ll be able to see the birds eating the peanut butter.”

“Lucky birds!” said Neddie. “They all get the peanut butter.”

“I love peanut butter,” said Star, longingly.

Susan and Betsy hung the orange cups on the branches of the tree. Neddie helped to hang the apple parings. Finally Betsy and Susan draped several garlands of popcorn from branch to branch, all the way from the top to the bottom of the tree.When they were finished, the children were pleased with the birds’ Christmas tree. They stood and admired it. The bright orange cups against the dark green branches made the tree very gay.

“It looks like a real Christmas tree,” said Susan.

Christmas at Notre Dame, France, c.1300

The Little Juggler, adapted from an old French Legend and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.

From the same source story as yesterday’s selection, The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola, The Little Juggler is a bit longer and more detailed, set in France this time, and with a different, somewhat happier, ending. The juggler in this story is named Barnaby, and he is said in the end to “continue to ply his craft for the Christ Child and His Mother. Cheerfully did he tumble and cheerfully did he serve.”

I love Barbara Cooney’s three color illustrations–red, white, and black. And the story in the introduction to her version of this tale of how she named her son after the little juggler and then later dedicated her book to “Barnaby and his son” adds an extra fillip of joy to the telling. Ms. Cooney says that this book, published in 1961, is her “contribution to the Christmas season.”

“The next night, on Christmas Eve, the monks came to the little chapel with the beautiful gifts for the Christ Child and His Mother. Barnaby, with a sad heart, watched as each of the brothers laid his offering at the feet of the statue.

‘Ah, sweet Lady,’ he sighed, ‘if only I could match the splendor of their gifts. Alas, I cannot.'”

Compare Ms. Cooney’s version of the story with Mr. dePaola’s retelling, and then, perhaps look up the short story by French author Anatole France, Our Lady’s Juggler.