Saturday Review of Books: April 13, 2013

Apr12

â€œRemember, it is not hasty reading, but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that makes them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the beeâ€™s touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest, and strongest Christian.â€ ~Thomas Brooks

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™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 youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1. Susan@ Reading World (Middlemarch)
2. Becky (Disappearance of God)
3. Becky (Les Miserables)
4. Becky (Little House in the Big Woods)
5. Becky (Little House on the Prairie)
6. Becky (Invention of Hugo Cabret)
7. Becky (Whatever After: Fairest of All)
8. Becky (Rainbow Valley)
9. Susan@ Reading World (Soulless)
10. Susan@ Reading World (Z.A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald)
11. Susan @ Reading World (Going Vintage)
12. Thoughts of Joy (Out of the Easy)
13. Thoughts of Joy (The Thing Around Your Neck)
14. Thoughts of Joy (Tuesday’s Gone)
15. Barbara H. (Joni and Ken: An Untold Love Story)
16. GuiltlessReading – The Prisoner of Heaven
17. JoAnne @ The Fairytale Nerd (Ink by Amanda Sun ARC)

18. JoAnne @ The Fairytale Nerd (Love Unscripted by Tina Reber)
19. JoAnne @ The Fairytale Nerd (Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare)
20. JoAnne @ The Fairytale Nerd (The Collector by Victoria Scott ARC)
21. JoAnne @ The Fairytale Nerd (The Crimson Crown by Cinda Williams Chima)
22. Girl Detective (How to Be a Woman)
23. Girl Detective (The Unwritten v7 GN)
24. the Ink Slinger (Humble Orthodoxy)
25. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (Envy the Night)
26. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (Blessed Are Those Who Thirst)
27. Beth@Weavings (The Reb and the Redcoats)
28. Seth@Collateral Bloggage (The Gate Thief)
29. Carol in Oregon (Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed)
30. Yvann @ Reading With Tea (Unwanted)
31. Yvann @ Reading With Tea (The Etymologicon)
32. Hope (Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment)
33. Peaches for monsieur le Cure (Lucybird’s book blog)
34. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Stress Test)

35. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Angel Falls)
36. Beckie @ ByTheBook (One for The Books)
37. Monkey and Rabbit Together (Lucybird’s Book Blog}
38. Helene@Maidservantsofchrist (God’s Mighty Acts of Salvation)
39. Lazygal (Game)
40. Lazygal (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea)
41. Lazygal (Golden Boy)
42. Lazygal (I’ll Be Seeing You)
43. Lazygal (Last Summer of the Camperdowns)
44. Lazygal (Another Little Piece)
45. Lazygal (Otis Dooda)
46. Lazygal (Sky on Fire)
47. Sharon @ Leaning Into LIfe
48. a barmy bookworm (Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
49. A Cast of Stones

Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker

Apr7

Living a Lie Comes With a Price.

This thriller is book with a moral, but it didn’t feel preachy to me, just real. Three teens–Cooper, Hiro, and Gordy—witness a robbery and attempted murder. Because Cooper and his family are threatened by the robbers and because they have reason to believe that at least one of the robbers might be a bad cop, the three decide on a”code of silence.” They won’t tell anyone about what they saw: not their parents, not their teachers, not their other friends, and not the police.

The rest of the story show the outworking and results of this decision. Although the moral of the story is “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, it’s never presented as an easy option. The truth is that it’s not always easy to tell the truth. And our motives for many of our decisions are often mixed at best. If I lie to protect myself and others, is it mostly for myself or the others? If I tell one lie, will it become easier and easier to tell more lies? Why do people lie, and how hard is it to disentangle oneself from a web of lies? What do lies told to others do to the trust between the friends who share in the deception?

Hiro is a little too hard on Cooper sometimes throughout the book. She rails at him over and over to end the code of silence before it destroys their friendship and puts them in the very danger they’re trying to avoid. But she agreed to the code in the first place, and she can end it anytime. Instead, she blames Cooper and tries to make him feel totally responsible for the trio’s joint decision. That aspect of the relationships in the novel felt wrong to me, somehow.

But overall, Code of Silence was an exciting middle grade novel that asked all the right questions—and gave some solid answers.

Sunday Salon: Books Read in March, 2013

Apr7

Children’s and Young Adult Fiction:
There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones.
The Drowned Vault by N.D. Wilson. Sequel to The Dragon’s Tooth in the Ashtown Burials series.
Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker.
Things I Can’t Forget by Miranda Kenneally. Ten drama/romance. Here’s my review at Breakpoint: Youth Reads.
The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle by Christopher Healy. I read an ARC of this hilarious sequel to The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. This second book is even more fun than the first. Look for my review closer to the publication date in late April.

Adult Fiction:
No Wind of Blame by Georgette Heyer.
Reinventing Rachel by Allison Strobel.

Nonfiction:
The Duck Commander Family: How Faith, Family, and Dicks Built a Dynasty by Willie and Korie Robertson, with Mark Schlabach.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan.
Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger’s Love Story by Jerry and Mary Newport, with Johnny Dodd.

There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones

Apr6

The INSPY Awards are blogger-initiated book awards for fictional literature that grapples with expressions of the Christian faith. The awards were given in several categories in 2011, including the category of “literature for young people”, and I got to be judge in that category. The INSPY Awards took a break in 2012, but they’re back this year. And the list below is the “long list” of nominated books in the Literature for Young People category for this time around:

Wreath by Judy Christie
With a Name Like Love by Tess Hilmo. Semicolon review here.
Thundersnow by Sheila Hollinghead
Dead Manâ€™s Hand by Eddie Jones
There Youâ€™ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones
Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan. Semicolon review here.
Cake â€“ Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar by Joyce Magnin
Right Where I Belong by Krista McGee
The Embittered Ruby by Nicole Oâ€™Dell
The Shadowed Onyx by Nicole Oâ€™Dell
Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker
Addison Blakely: Confessions of a PK by Betsy St. Amant
Temptation: Solitary Tales No. 3 by Travis Thrasher
How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

Three of the books on the list I’ve already read and reviewed, as indicated. Actually, I read How To Save a Life by Sara Zarr, and I thought I reviewed it but can’t find the review anywhere. I liked all three very much. I read a couple more of the books on this long list this past week: There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones and Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker (review coming soon).

Ms. Jones is a rather prolific author of teen romances for Christian girls. Her books were all over Lifeway last time I was there. I rad one of her other books a year or two ago and thought it was just “meh.” This one was fairly low on the scale, too, and would have received a complete pan, were it not for the setting: Ireland.

Finley Sinclair, daughter of a wealthy hotel magnate, and sister to Will whose death in a terrorist incident has put Finley’s life in a tailspin of grief, is headed for Ireland to spend a year studying and trying to reconnect with God. Will came to love and know God when he studied in Ireland, and Finley hopes to follow in his footsteps, literally by visiting all of the places Will wrote about in his travel journal. Color Finley grey: grief-stricken, questioning, recovering from a mental breakdown, and lost.

Enter Beckett Rush, teen heart-throb, Hollywood player and bad boy, and star of a series of vampire movies. He’s in Ireland to film the latest movie in the Steel Markov vampire franchise. Beckett and Finley meet on the plane, clash, and hope never to see one another again. Alas, predictably, they are destined to meet again, clash again, and eventually fall in love and live happily ever after.

OK, it’s not quite that cliche. Take away the “live happily ever after.” Beckett and especially Finley are dealing with way too many issues to have a traditional happy ending. Beckett has a pushy dad who doubles as his greedy manager. Finley has mental health issues, a grouchy school assignment, and the loss of her faith, as well as the afore-mentioned grief and Beckett to keep her busy and confused.

As I think about it, this book would have made a good K-drama: Finley falls asleep on Beckett’s shoulder and drools, the two feud but are thrown together in spite of themselves, there’s a group of nasty, jealous girls at school, Finley has a sidekick, Erin, whom she mentors, lots of K-drama tropes. An awkward kiss or two, change the nationalities and the setting of the novel, take out the God-talk, and it would work on Korean TV just fine. In fact, it would work better on screen and with some editing.

I probably wouldn’t have made it through this one, though, if it hadn’t been set in Ireland. Give me a vivid setting, and I’ll follow you anywhere. And I got to read parts of the dialogue with an Irish lilt inside my head. A good plot and some engaging characters would have helped the journey, however.

Other reviews in which the blogger thought it was just peachy (I may be in the minority on this one): Edgy Inspirational Romance, YA Books Central, Christian Novels, Tree Swing Reading, etc.

Saturday Review of Books: April 6, 2013

Apr5

One reads at one’s own speed, in short snatches on the subway or in long, voluptuous withdrawals from the world. One proceeds through a big, complex novel. . . .like an exceptionally well-heeled tourist in a foreign landscape, going slowly or fast depending on the roads, on one’s own mood and on the attractions along the way. If one loses something, one can always go back to pick it up. ~Vincent Canby

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky 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.

1. Harvee
2. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown)
3. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series)
4. Amy @ Hope Is the Word (The Princess and the Goblin)
5. Becky (Insanity of God)
6. Becky (Altar Ego)
7. Becky (The Wall)
8. Becky (Sever)
9. Becky (Dash of Magic)
10. Becky (Bliss)
11. Becky (Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop)
12. Becky (Anne’s House of Dreams)
13. SuziQoregon @Whimpulsive (Fractured)
14. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (The Silver Linings Playbook)
15. the Ink Slinger (Easy Chairs, Hard Words)
16. Barbara H. (The Victory Club)
17. Barbara H. (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
18. Reading World (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)

19. Beth@Weavings (Eight Cousins)
20. Melissa (Let me be a woman) Elizabeth Elliot
21. Lazygal (The Testing)
22. Lazygal (A Spear of Summer Grass)
23. Lazygal (The Black Country)
24. Lazygal (The Circle)
25. Lazygal (The Eternity Cure)
26. Lazygal (Good Riddance)
27. Lazygal (My Summer of Pink and Green)
28. Lazygal (Riptide)
29. Lazygal (The 5th Wave)
30. Janet (The Scent of Water)
31. Yvann @ Reading With Tea (Constance Harding’s Rather Startling Year)
32. Annie Kate (Crucifying Morality)
33. Thoughts of Joy (With or Without You)
34. Thoughts of Joy (A Faint Cold Fear)
35. Thoughts of Joy (Helsinki Blood)
36. Janie (Ireland, part 2)

37. Harvee (Rocamora)
38. Nicola (Bone Quest for the Spark Book Three)
39. Nicola (The Bedlam Detective by Stephen Gallagher)
40. Nicola (Killer Charm: The Double Lives of Psychopaths by Linda Fairstein)
41. Nicola (The Devil by Leo Tolstoy)
42. Nicola (The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov)
43. Nicola (Night’s Child by Maureen Jennings)
44. Nicola (Curses! Foiled Again by Jane Yolen)
45. Girl Detective (May We Be Forgiven)
46. Girl Detective (Beautiful Ruins)
47. Girl Detective (Building Stories)
48. Girl Detective (Bleak House)
49. Girl Detective (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk)
50. Little Willow (Magic Zero by Christopher Golden and Thomas E. Sniegoski )
51. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Two Crosses)
52. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Darkness Before Dawn)
53. Beckie @ ByTheBook (Scorned Justice)
54. Beckie @ ByTheBook (The House That Love Built)

Poetry Friday: Discovering Poems

Apr5

W.H. Auden: “if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it.”

Detective Story by W.H. Auden.

If you’ve read the article and the poem and returned to get my take on it, I must say I don’t know what the poem really means. I can make a stab at it.

Who cannot . . . “mark the spot where the body of his happiness was first discovered?” I take this to mean that we all know when and where we lost our innocence or our sense of innocence.

“Someone must pay for our loss of happiness, our happiness itself.” So the murderer of our happiness is someone else, someone who must pay? And what is that lingering doubt and that smile all about? I smile at the ending of the detective story because . . . I am the murderer of my own happiness? Because I know that the murderer in the story is not so very different from me? And I wonder about the justice of the verdict because . . . I don’t want to admit that I am guilty?

“But time is always killed.”

I can never figure out the who the murderer is in most detective stories either.

The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield

Apr4

Ah, yes, complex, multi-layered, “faith-informed” fiction. I speeded through this book, recommended to me by the blogger at Thoughts of Joy, because I really, really loved the characters and wanted to know what would happen to each of them. So, let’s start with the characters, almost of whom could be described as “central characters” in the book:

Swan Lake, an eleven year old, rather precocious, and full of mischief.
Bienville and Noble, Swan’s older brothers.
Samuel Lake, Swan’s Methodist preacher daddy. Samuel is about to go through a crisis that will test his faith, his commitment to his life’s work , his marriage, and his sense of who he is.
Willadee Moses Lake, Swan’s mama. Willadee makes good biscuits, likes for her children to run free as much as possible, and loves Samuel Lake extravagantly.
Calla and John Moses, Willadee’s parents. Calla runs a general store out of the front of the house during the day, and John runs an all-night bar called “Never Closes” out of the back.
Toy Moses, Swan’s uncle. Toy likes hunting and fishing in the woods, and he doesn’t talk much. He lost a leg in the war, and the rumor is that he killed a man after he returned from the war.
Berniece Moses, Toy’s wife who thinks that she is in love with Samuel Lake.
Ras Ballenger, neighbor to the Moses family. Ras trains horses and terrifies his wife and children.
Blade Ballenger, Ras Ballenger’s oldest son and Swan’s new friend.

I wish I could give you a feel for this novel. That list sounds sort of prosaic and humdrum, but the book is anything but. Jenny Wingfield captured the culture of the south that I grew up in just perfectly. These are real people, and I enjoyed reading about them. Well, mostly I enjoyed. I must warn sensitive readers that there are violent deaths, more than one, in the novel, and there is a very difficult scene toward the end of the book that could trigger emotional distress in some readers.

That said, I think the violence and abuse in the novel were described in a tasteful manner while not minimizing the horror of what happens to several of the characters. I also thought Samuel Lake’s perplexities and inner confusion were handled quite well. Lake is a man with a deep faith in God, and that faith isn’t ridiculed as it could easily have been. Nor is Lake’s faith cheapened by making it facile and shallow. He has to struggle with some very difficult questions, and in the end (which some people didn’t like) the answers God gives Samuel Lake are satisfying but not really complete. It’s a realistic ending, and one one that I did like.

More reviews:
USA Today: “But it’s Wingfield’s ability to set the stage, to transport her readers back to rural Arkansas of the 1950s, that takes this novel to another level.”
Book Snob: “The Homecoming of Samuel Lake will break your heart, make you leap for joy, and bring tears to your eyes. You will fall in love with the Lake and Moses family and become a believer in miracles.”
Literary Hoarders: “There are parts of this novel that are difficult. Youâ€™ll want to holler â€œwatch out!â€ at critical moments. Youâ€™ll want to hold the hurt, and will want to save the helpless. Luckily, youâ€™ll have Swan on your side. Sheâ€™s eleven years old, and you will be eternally grateful that she has no patience for injustice.”

In April by Rainer Maria Rilke

Apr3

“Poets help us by discovering and uncovering the world-its history, culture, arifacts, and ecology, as well as our identities and relationships.” ~Wallace Stevens

Again the woods are odorous, the lark
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

After long rainy afternoons an hour
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings
Them at the windows in a radiant shower,
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

FROM AN APRIL
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Austrian poet and writer, from a new translation of his poems by Edward Snow

Again the woods smell sweet.
The soaring larks lift up with them
the sky, which weighed so heavily on our shoulders;
through bare branches one still saw the day standing empty â€”
but after long rain-filled afternoons
come the golden sun-drenched
newer hours,
before which, on distant housefronts,
all the wounded
windows flee fearful with beating wings.

Then it goes still. Even the rain runs softer
over the stonesâ€™ quietly darkening glow.
All noises slip entirely away
into the brushwoodâ€™s glimmering buds.

Poems are notoriously difficult to translate. Poetry depends so much on the sound and meaning of a particular language, in this case German. I don’t speak or read German, so I can’t read Rilke’s poems in their original form. I like pieces of each of these translations: “The woods smell sweet” is better than “odorous”. However, I like the shafts of light flinging themselves at the windows and the raindrops beating the “panes like timorous wings.” “The rain runs softer”, but “the stones are crooned to sleep.” “And cradled in the branches, hidden deep in each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.”

Beautiful imagery, but I can’t help but think I might be better able to capture the essence of the poem if I could read German.

Reading T.S. Eliot

Apr2

For twenty years Iâ€™ve stared my level best
To see if eveningâ€”any eveningâ€”would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasnâ€™t able . . .
~C.S. Lewis

I learned from a friend in college many years ago that you don’t read Eliot and other twentieth century poets the same way you read Tennyson or even The Odyssey. When I I first read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Wasteland, I wanted the poems to tell a straightforward story, a narrative. Prufrock does sort of tell the story of a man who is trapped by his own ineffectualness and lack of confidence. But that poem and especially the other famous poems by Eliot, The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets all have to be read the same way I have to listen to contemporary song lyrics: pick out the lines and images that speak to you and don’t try too hard to make sense of the whole.

So, my favorite lines from T.S. Eliot:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
~The Hollow Men

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
~Ash Wednesday

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agÃ¨d eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessÃ¨d face
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.
~Ash Wednesday

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
~Four Quartets

Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man,
Of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire;
Who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted;
Who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God;
Who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal,
Less than we fear the love of God.
~Murder in the Cathedral

On the Resurrection

Apr1

I’m still celebrating, still stuck on the resurrection of Jesus because that one event makes every day a celebration.

“A Jewish revolutionary whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest himself, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have evidence of people doing both.

Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.” ~Who Was Jesus? by N.T. Wright.

“Let us band together to invent all the miracles and resurrection appearances which we never saw and let us carry the sham even to death! Why not die for nothing? Why dislike torture and whipping inflicted for no good reason? Let us go out to all nations and overthrow their institutions and denounce their gods! And even if we donâ€™t convince anybody, at least we’ll have the satisfaction of drawing down on ourselves the punishment for out own deceit.” ~Eusebius, 263-339 AD

“I went to a psychologist friend and said if 500 people claimed to see Jesus after he died, it was just a hallucination. He said hallucinations are an individual event. If 500 people have the same hallucination, that’s a bigger miracle than the resurrection.” ~Lee Strobel.

“The Gospels do not explain the Resurrection; the Resurrection explains the Gospels. Belief in the Resurrection is not an appendage to the Christian faith; it is the Christian faith.” ~John S. Whale

'Resurrection!' photo (c) 2010, chicagogeek - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

â€œIf Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.â€ ~The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller