Still Hungry

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well. Of course she won the games, and managed to set a first ever record of having two winners, so the evil president hates her and wants her dead and all of that, causing her to fake a relationship that will turn into a real relationship (with the wrong guy), and a rebellion will start and I now know how the rest of the series will go but still am somehow in suspense.

More cautions keep coming the longer I keep reading: there is a sexual overtone to the books that is disquieting. The girl is seventeen and keeps being interested in first the one guy, then the other, but never is anything remotely akin to marriage even referenced, which is aggravating. Also, the violence is downright disturbing. So, again, not kids books.



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Kicking the Pansy Vampires Diamond Tushes

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well, first things first: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is infinitely superior to anything in the Twilight series: I blazed through Meyers due to the quality of the writing (if I spent more than fifteen or twenty seconds per page I began to feel an overwhelming urge to find the nearest Mormon and incontrovertibly demonstrate to him the falsity of his personal views on eschatology in a way that would have made the baby Jesus cry). I'm going through Collins at the same pace for the same reason, but on the other end of the spectrum: the woman can write. She uses humour. And the humour is funny. There is suspense, and it's downright suspenseful. It's a book written for children, by a modern author, and I would honestly choose reading this book over asking a father who loathes the very essence of my being for permission to court his only daughter. In fact, though intended for an older audience, these were on par with the best of the Harry Potter books.

That said, these are "children's books" in the same way that Saw V: 3D is a romantic comedy.

The basic premise is--and here I should give some sort of spoiler alert, but I have no intention of doing so as I probably detest you for having the gall to breathe and can't be bothered to waste words that could be spent belittling your meager existence--but the basic premise is as follows: in a dystopian future, the North American Continent has been divvied up into thirteen "Districts" ruled by a "Capitol." Due to a failed rebellion some three quarters of a century before, the Capitol exacts a tribute in children from each of the twelve surviving Districts (District Thirteen is believed to have been nuked off the face of the planet, but I don't think I believe her), one boy and one girl from each district for a total of twenty-four children, who have to compete in an extended, televised, gladitorial death-match. The battle can go on for weeks, and the one child to survive wins. Our story takes place in District Twelve, where the sixteen-year old Katniss Everdeen volunteers for the "Hunger Games" in place of her twelve-year old sister, Prim, who had been selected. Other characters of interest are her alcoholic mentor, her mother, the boy going to fight with her, and her friend and hunting partner that she should end up marrying but probably won't.

The book, as I said, is very well written. It is a thriller, and I kept forgetting to breathe throughout the book (even though I knew she'd survive, or the next two in the trilogy would be very boring). I was surprised at the method of her survival, and the ending of the first book might as well have been ended the way Thucydides ends for all the closure it gives us. An easy four stars, an easy R rating whenever it's converted into film.



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Alice Must Be Bored

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


An honest caution: I may be prejudiced due to the fact that Carroll was a suspected pedophile who had, at best, one seriously creepy relationship with the ten-year-old Alice. That said, here's my review.





Well, I finally did it. Mostly. Kinda. Not really, but enough to satisfy myself, and then another hour, at which point I decided that an acid trip from the point of view of a six year old really wasn't all that interesting. I was reminded of Chicken Run: "Me life flashed before me eyes... It was really boring." So, I went from Lewis Carroll to G. K. C. Ballad of the White Horse, to be precise, and I have to say that that there was a bit of a contrast.



Now here's a spoiler alert: I'm about to give away the entire plot of the book (or at least the first half). Alice is normal, then really short, then really tall, then really short, then gets a really long neck, then gets short, then gets normal, then gets huge, then gets normal, then gets tiny, and keeps talking to random animals and animated inanimate objects throughout, the most interesting characters being the Cheshire Cat and the decapitatomatic queen, and a couple bits of poetry are randomly scattered throughout. But even with the poetry: "Speak roughly to your little child, and beat him when he sneezes..." is kinda weak when placed right before "But while he moved like a massacre, he murmured as in sleep," and not just due to content: due to sheer aesthetic appeal.



Now, it is a kid's book, and maybe I would have enjoyed it when I was about six, but I think my attention span was even shorter then (if possible) than it is now, so I'm gonna go with a negative. It's the kind of book that's excellent for bedtime reading when you have several kids who fall to sleep at different times, cause you just keep reading till the last one's asleep, and the next night, when the others ask what they missed, you can honestly say "absolutely nothing" and just pick up where you left off with no one the wiser. Perhaps I'm being overly negative. I don't know: lot's of people seem to like it, but then, lots of people like the movie renditions of Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings; you know, the ones with High King Peter the Twit? Faramir the Insecure? Reepicheep the Gerbil on Crack? Orcs with the combat skills of unusually dense alfalfa?



But I digress. The point is, I don't know how this ended up being a classic. It's Modern, as in Original (all rise), but just because no one else was stupid enough to do something doesn't necessarily make you smart for being the first one. Yes, Picasso could draw like Rembrandt, but most of the time he didn't. Most of the time he drew like he had a bad case of Tourette's, and you can tell me it's brilliant all you want, I'll take a Durer or Vermeer or even Bosch (which is definitely original, but in a really different kind of way) anytime. Unless the Picasso or Kandinsky is worth more, in which case I'd sell it and buy kettle chips, pipe tobacco and beer, just to dispel the gnawing suspicion that I have artistic taste that goes beyond "pretty" verse "projectile vomit into an electric fan." I don't see what's so great about the new and novel, especially when it really sucks.



So, if Lewis Carroll is your idea of pleasure reading, have fun. I know tastes do differ, and as he is so vastly popular, mine appear very much in the minority. Maybe he took the British "nothing is allowed to happen for the first fifty pages" and decided that two hundred was more like it, and I quit just before it got good. Maybe. I'd honestly be willing to reconsider my opinion, and I'm going to give his Through the Looking-Glass a shot before I fully write him off. But it's going to be a from the hip shot that will be in grave danger of hitting my foot while I reach for a soothing draught of Chesterton.





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From Wilson

A man walked into a bar with a dog, and told the men at the bar that he was willing to bet them a round of drinks that his dog was actually a talking dog.

"You're on," one of the men said.

The man turned to his dog and said, "What is on the top of a house?"

"Roof!" the dog said.

"What is sandpaper like?" That was the second question.

"Ruff!"

"And who was the greatest ball player who ever lived?"

"Ruth!"

And with that, the assembled men looked at each other, one of them grabbed this gentleman where the pants hang loose, and two others took him by each arm, and they frogmarched him to the door. Another one got the dog, and the man and his dog soon found themselves lying at the base of a parking meter. The man looked at the dog with disgust, and the dog looked back at him.

"DiMaggio?" he said.

Eugenics

Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State by G.K. Chesterton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I write down commonplaces as I read books: little items worthy, as N. D. Wilson said, of imitation and remembrance. I have several of these empty, unlined notebooks filled, and have broken tradition with Chesterton in not actually keeping track. With Tolkien, I devoted an entire commonplace book. With Chesterton, I'm not even going to bother trying. His complete works are contained in 37 (or more) large volumes put out by Ignatius Press, and I will just have to allow that to be my Chesterton commonplace book, though I will continue adding in some of his best.

This book, Eugenics and Other Evils, is about what it says it's about, which is odd enough, as Chesterton stays remarkably and uncharacteristically on topic. I think having a target to dismantle has something to do with it, but not really a whole lot, as he proves the impossibility of Eugenics in a single sentence somewhere towards the middle of the book. The other possibility is that his topic is a large enough cage for his mind to momentarily content itself within its confines, which seems more realistic.

Chesterton is always sheer delight to read, always fun, always unbelievably brilliant and flippant and enormous, but I had rarely encountered him with an axe in his hand, and he proves Lewis right: for the child with an axe, the joy is in chopping. This book has a great deal of writing against government interference in the private sphere, and is written defending the old ways, the noble and chivalrous ways over and against the new ways, the stainless steel and minds too close to Saruman's in their obsession with wheels and machines. The eugenist desires to improve the overall quality of life in the same way that Nietschze did, simply a bit earlier. Instead of letting the diseased and weak die, the eugenist just ensures that they aren't ever born by preventing those genetically prone to weakness and disease from breeding, which was a staggeringly popular idea.

Indeed, it was the single driving influence in the life of the one person whose effect in our century alone has outweighed Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot and every other dictator we've seen. This person has caused more deaths than all of our enlightened genocides and all of the the Medieaval plagues. Combined. Eugenics was the inspiration of that madonna of death, Margaret Sanger. And we think eugenics is a bad joke. In reality, it was a very good joke, an evil joke, but skillful, and we are the punchline, though it turned out to be more indiscriminate than was originally intended.

Perhaps I've read too much Chesterton: I'm acquiring his habits without the skill. Or perhaps I've been up too long. A book review has turned into a tirade against Planned Parenthood. Blame it on whatever you like; I'll rectify it here: the book was magnificent, and I'm going to bed.



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Blonde Bond = Best Bond

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well. I was very hesitant to read this one until I read a few reviews of it, just because of Bond's reputation with the womenfolk. However, there was very little of this, and it was (fairly) tastefully dealt with. There was also some language, and of course the violence inherent in such a story.

Suffice to say, I was astonished at how similar the new Casino Royale movie (Daniel Craig, Eva Green) stuck to the book. The primary differences are that M is a man in the book, a few significant plot points are altered, and the movie fleshes out the characters as best it can without the assistance of the omniscient narrator. And, truth be told, I preferred the movie to the book, and it was primarily due to the revision of the lead female. I thoroughly enjoyed Eva Green's more forward, prickly, quick-witted and intriguing character. I liked the verbal sparring: "How was the lamb?" "Skewered. One sympathizes;" I liked the tragic ending in the movie far more than the suicide in the book, and I liked Bond's more human reaction in the movie to the instant dehumanization that takes place in the book.

The basic plot: a Russian operative loses a great deal of money that was merely lent to him by his government, and attempts to recover it by gambling before the assassins from his government catch up to him. The British have discovered his predicament, and stake an agent of their own to play against him and prevent him from winning, thus forcing him to the absolute end of his means, hoping to either turn him or destroy him. Their plan succeeds through the skills of the British agent, who of course is James Bond. Part of Bond's cover includes the lovely woman that his government provides for him, with whom he falls in love, only to discover (after preparing to turn his back on the entire MI-5 life) that she had become a traitor to save an old boyfriend, but ended up loving Bond and sacrificing herself for his sake as a result. He reacts somewhat poorly, and hence Bond, James Bond is born.



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Guthrum Sits on a Hero's Throne, and Asks if He is Dead

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I rated this book as world-class, and allow me to qualify: it is probably only world-class to me. After all, the hero dies in the end. Oops. But he's depressed, which makes me love him. He takes a semi-pessimistic view of the world, a la Eliza Bennett's "The more I know of the world the more I am dissatisfied with it" (or whatever she says to Jane that's similar to that). And he complains that his wisdom is only of all the wrong things, so I cannot help but love him. His personality, of all of Chesterton's characters (excluding villains), is most akin to mine, or at least I think it is. Perhaps Brooke or Becky know better (and yes, I know it's misspelled, it's that way on purpose).



It's another selection of short stories that I would recommend to anyone. Not quite so flippant as Father Brown, nor so absurd as Queer Trades, but still vintage Chesterton, from a rare and dusty barrel.



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Hark Twain Once

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Well. Going from Chesterton to Twain? Not exactly the smoothest of segues, kinda like skateboarding when you see a pretty girl and (therefore) not the curb.

I forgot how judgmental Mr. Clemens tends to be. I knew I wasn't going to be all that fond of this particular book of his, what with me being all romantic-ish and whatnot, but I thought it would be enjoyable, not like a poorly presented sermon. And don't get me wrong--it had some hilarious spots, as it is Twain--just not enough to justify it in my mind. I would recommend reading it once, but not twice, and perhaps--dare I say it?--as if you want to say "current" with a clear conscience, but you already know that the quiz doesn't include this particular selection.



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The Final Chesterton (For a Moment)

Tremendous Trifles by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is simply essential reading for any fan of Chesterton. It's vintage. A collection of essays on all sorts of topics: lying in bed, forgetting white chalk, being expelled from a Hansom Cab against his will, Picking his own pockets, robbing a French restauranteur, and all sorts of typical Chesterton absent-minded brilliance. His prose here tends to be more playful than in his fiction, making him the essay writer that is the exception to Lewis' rule in Horse and His Boy.

I still cannot comprehend exactly how he does what he does with words. It isn't forced or strained, as he produced a staggering amount of material, he just sees the world in a wholly different way than anyone else. He knew of his reputation for paradox, but seemed somewhat exasperated by it, as he comments that he isn't the one that made the world stand on its head.

He really is a chap that I would have loved to have met, to have simply followed around, or to have been able to record what his brain did and where his imagination took him in the course of any given hour. As it is, I'm surfacing for air and reminding myself that other authors exist (paltry and pasty beings though they be after the ferocious life and blinding colour of the Fat Catholic), and then I shall dive again when my lungs can sustain me longer. Perhaps one day I shall find--and this is an eternal dream of mine--than not only have I become a good man, but a Chestertonian one: one who knows, loves and lives the absurdities of our Triune God.



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The Kitchens of a Lord

Lord Kitchener by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Yet one more time, reviewing Chesterton seems entirely pointless. Still, I shall make an attempt.

This book is, you may have foreseen, about a man named Lord Kitchener. He was a military man that was a contemporary of Chesterton's, and he seems to have practiced war in much the same way that Edward the First of England did upon Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, or Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of Wales if you prefer (sorry Brits, I side with the consonantally enriched): that of superior force and minimal risk, entrenching every victory before moving an inch beyond the ground that was conquered, his army seemingly shoved on from behind by the impetus of his supply train. Slow yet inexorable, Chesterton compares him to a giant snail threatening the lightning Arabs that he was attacking. In his later years, he was involved in the Great War.

More than anything else, this book is fascinating in the fascination that Chesterton had with Lord Kitchener, primarily as a unique individual and secondarily as a sample of the English race as a whole. It is another example of Lewis' maxim that love bestows loveliness: in Chesterton's exuberant praise and hesitant censure, we find ourselves unable to resist developing a similar affection for the man that otherwise would have been largely or entirely unknown to us.

I have long read Chesterton with a certain awe, the type of awe I feel in Ivanhoe when Christopher Lee's paralyzing voice commands "Pray!" or when listening to Joss Ackland read The Screwtape Letters or when watching Anderson Silva deliver a flying knee, and I have come to the conviction that Chesterton never spent a great deal of time revising what he wrote. Not because it is poor, but quite the opposite: it is of such a uniform magnificence that it seems impossible to me that it is the result of "many hours of labour or nights devoid of ease:" there would be a greater variance in it. No, I think he simply wrote in his great, childish wonder, bemused by the absurdity of the world and in imitation of the Mind from which so great an offense to reason as a hippopotamus could proceed, and then, even as his creation was on to the printer he was on to the next item that happened to catch his enormous eye that viewed the world with the mind at once of a philosopher and a child. After all, "philosophers ask the most important questions, save only children." I feel that he is the type of man that one could never quite catch: even as you would grasp one point, he would have made the next three and then gone on to the next topic.

Whether or not this is true I shan't know for some time yet (at least two months, judging from the size of my bag of oatmeal), but I am quite certain that he didn't spend more than an hour or two on this little book. I tend to read fast, though not as fast as N.T. Wright can write, but I think that most Chesterton enthusiasts would find this book entirely suitable for a single pipe and no more than a finger or two of rum, as in "I don't care where the water runs if it doesn't run into the rum."



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In Defense of Lent

"...Postmillenialism is one theological name to describe the basic gospel proclamation that Jesus wins and everyone might as well come along cheerfully."

Bifurcum Spirans Mammale

Manalive by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Similar to Thursday, but very excellent. So queer and living a man.



#3). I have to say, I really am fully convinced that Chesterton was married to a redhead. There's no other reason for all of his heroines to have red hair. I would also like to take this opportunity to laugh at Brooke--if Chesterton married a redhead, then redheads are obviously superior to every other hair colour.



This book is vintage Chesterton: characters that you meet every day with one that no one but he could dream up. The man is a fool, a genius, a man of tremendous size and athleticism, yet of childlike simplicity. Indeed, "childlike" is perhaps the only accurate way to describe him.



I don't really want to give too much away, in case there's anyone out there mentally deranged enough to read me before he reads Chesterton, but it's an extremely worthwhile read. About half of it takes place in an unofficial trial of the main character, Innocent Smith. Just a great book, light, frivolous, full of commonplaces (In short, he undoubtedly had brains; and perhaps it was not his fault if they were the kind of brains that most men desire to analyze with a poker), and very quick. It really is a very fun book, and this is my third (?) time through it.



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But Other Than That, How Was the Play Mrs. Lincoln?

At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


How the hell? I have never been so deeply, so brutally betrayed. "Almost thou persuadest me to nihilistic despair."

"All these were rosy visions of delight,
The loveliness and wisdom feigned of old,
But now we wake. The East is pale and cold;
No hope is in the dawn, and no delight."

Or how about:

"Roland is dead, Cuchulain's crest is low,
The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust,
And Helen's eyes and Iseult's lips are dust
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon."

Or maybe even:

"It's vainly we are praying. We cannot, cannot check
The Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.

It's truth they tell, Despoina, none hears the heart's complaining
For Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear,
Yet I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining
And lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear
The curse wherewith I cursed Him because the Good was dead.
But lo! I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts
Have made a phantom called the Good, while a few years have sped
Over a little planet. And what should the great Lord know of it
Who tosses the dust of chaos and gives the suns their parts?
Hither and thither he moves them; for an hour we see the show of it:
Only a little hour, and the life of the race is done.
And here he builds a nebula, and there he slays a sun
And works his own fierce pleasure. All things he shall fulfill,
And O, my poor Despoina, do you think he ever hears
The wail of hearts he has broken, the sound of human ill?
He cares not for our virtues, our little hopes and fears,
And how could it all go on, love, if he knew of laughter and tears?"




Honestly? Give me thirty-seven chapters of the magnificent, lovely, wholly beautiful deep comedy, comedy in the ancient sense, and then finish it off with the most desolate tragedy that could have taken place? How is this a children's book? Is Notes From the Underground a children's book? "Oh, as soon as you finish watching Disney's Sleeping Beauty we'll go ahead and start Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet? But this was worse: we've given Sleeping Beauty, but when the Prince kisses her, her lips are poisoned, so he dies, and she, waking and seeing him dead, kills herself. At the last moment, our magnificent dream is turned to a nightmare. Aslan returns, and He Is Tash. As Jewel (or was it Tirian? I think it was Jewel) says, it is as if you go to take a drink of water, and it is dry water. At least in The Last Battle we are given page after page of tremendous, heart-breaking glory which leaves us unable to mourn; in this we are left dumb and devastated next to the family members waiting on the platform (which Lewis doesn't even mention).

Perhaps I would not be so angry had Diamond not become so dear to me. Had I loved him less, I could far more easily abide his creator killing him. But the final injustice that so infuriated me, that of Jim and Nanny so fully rejecting Diamond as to condescendingly pity him, is never resolved, only has quick-crete poured on it, and then to fix it Diamond dies alone and unjustified, more horribly and unforgivably misunderstood by those whom he so deeply loves as he ever had been. Why could he not have been accepted? Why must there be this heart-breaking isolation? Why can there not be a final union, where Diamond is no longer the outsider but a true member, accepted as he is for who he is?

In my eyes, the only justification for this ending is if MacDonald wrote the book as a tribute to some child, quite possibly mentally damaged, that he deeply loved until their early death. If so, the tremendous tragedy is justifiable, although to put it in a children's book? I understand that he was attempting to remove the fear and horror of death with his last sentence, but he utterly failed, and he shouldn't have attempted it. Death is a horrible, unfair desolation. It cannot be made right. It cannot be made right with a lifetime, it cannot be so much as slightly mitigated with an offhand phrase.

Yet, this gives not a moment to the simple fact that this was one of the loveliest books I have ever read. The final disappointment was so tremendous only because it was set up for so great a glory. It was reminiscent (yes, only to my twisted, or should we call it unique? mind) of Pan's Labyrinth in how close it came to offering a glorious, true resolution--true the way that the dawn is true, the way a salt-wind rolls up a river and hits your face like a passing semi is true, that a niece upon each shoulder is true, that an arbor draped in clematis and rose is true--and how impotently I raged at the lie that was substituted in its place. It could have been the greatest ending I had read since Tolkien, Lewis, or Dunnett, but it ended up being the worst since Bierce.



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Club of Queer Trades

The Club Of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


How even to review this? And what exactly is the point? For that matter, what was the point of it being written? It certainly wasn't a necessary book. I don't believe the great Catholic ever sat down and said, "How to save England and the rest of the world? Ah, this will do the trick." And if I'm mistaken, if he did utter such a phrase, it wasn't about this book. Perhaps he simply needed to stretch the legs of his mind--indeed, I shall take that as the excuse (it will serve as well as any other), and now, allow me to invite you to accompany him in his hike, for the air has the smell of salt, yet there are mountains, valleys, dark close woods and expansive vistas unfolding as vast as the very designs of God.

How does one take words--I dare say he employed none that I am not on intimate terms with--and craft such glories as this book with them? I love words (and use them interminably), but they do not perform for me the way they do for him. I would give all I own to be able to see the world with the eyes of Chesterton—wait: no, this isn't true. I would not. Were I to receive his vision it would terrify me, and I would probably give all I own to be restored to my blind state. Indeed, what would a man give to restore the roof of the sky if it were at a moment rent away?

It is no wonder that we build house-boxes to enclose our souls so that the four corners of the world do not tear them apart. We build fences and post signs and do all we can to make the world a safe, a soft place, when there is nothing quite so suddenly savage or terrible as a dandelion or a daffodil, and a dragon is no more awesome (though grown somewhat less common) than a dragonfly. Yet we seek to finally and fully conquer nature through knowledge: we seek to tame the world with science.

But Chesterton did not. He wanted the world to be wild, and he rebelled at the tired, grey apathy of sin that disguises itself in the guise of respectability and wisdom. So, he carried a brace of loaded pistols, a dagger, a sword cane and a cape, and he laughed as loudly and often as a child. For the world was not a safe place, and he was not a safe man.

Indeed, Chesterton was a man, who, with N. D. Wilson, would not be afraid that he would fall off a cliff, but that he would jump.

(And the book was good too.)



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The Wise Man Builds His House of Wode

A Wodehouse Miscellany by P.G. Wodehouse

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This collection I found to be hit and miss. However, Wodehouse is hard for me to judge, rather the same way that I would have difficulty distinguishing between Zoltan Kocsis and Lang Lang (may God and Mr. Appel forgive me for mentioning them in the same breath): I haven't yet fully developed the taste for Rachmaninov that I shall one day have, and therefore I don't have sufficient authority, either as a professional or as a lover, to intelligently discern betwixt the magnificent and the technically correct.

All this aside, Wodehouse is hilarious. He can't help but be hilarious. When he describes his ears as being large and "attached at right angles" and his overall appearance as tending toward the ailing piscine, I have a very justifiable reason to giggle at the image. When he describes the seventh of his nine holes of indoor golf, I lose a solid half-pound in burned calories and discover exactly what new colours appear after abstaining from air for forty seconds. (Leave it to Psmith is still my all time favorite comic work, particularly the application of socialist principles to an especially fine umbrella.) So, perhaps my taste is still developing and I shall look back on this as one of his greater works. Also, the application of wax to a floor is not particularly conducive to the appreciation of nuanced dry humour, but I still fear that this collection was not exactly his greatest.

Still, even with my lack of palate, I cannot overemphasize the playful joy of his prose: "Moths had nested in his wallet and raised large families," or, "he was a tubby chap, who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say when," or, "he looked ever more like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow." Wodehouse is a necessary ingredient for a happy life. Just take care if you are reading him at the breakfast table that you take bites between sentences, and not in the midst of them, for his jokes be not of ruth and they enter the scenes as silently as Jeeves.



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Cause He Was In The Great Divorce

This is a picture of George MacDonald, which I find sheerly delightful.










The Day Boy and the Night Girl by George MacDonald

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Now this was just plain fun. An evil witch, good king (with a bit part), "orphaned" children, beautiful girl with giant eyes and strong, naive twit of a boy. After reading the first chapter, you know the plot of every other one, but it is such a delight to simply allow yourself to get whisked away and lost in MacDonald's mellifluous voice.

Simple plot overview: a wicked(ish) witch, about whom MacDonald has some delightful opinions, manages to acquire a boy to be raised only in light, never seeing the night, and a girl to be raised only in the darkness (underground), never seeing day. Obviously, they each are everything lovely and pure, meet and fall in love, et cetera res bonus, minus a prophecy, but then it's a short book: when I was three quarters of the way through, I was convinced that it must be a part of a series. So, read and enjoy it; very good for family readings, especially for groups of kids under the age of ninety.



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The Manlius Man That Ever Was Seen

The Consolation of Philosophy: Revised Edition by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


How absolutely delightful: an honest use for Philosophy. Never again will I agree with Edward de Vere that there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently: here is a man who endured a dungeon and finally an unjust death. Here is yet another example of the proof that "Wisdom infinite must form the best" world; if it took the torment of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius to create his magnum opus, which of us would deny that, if he must die, as he must, this method of his death was by far the best? If it took such a fire to create so pure a gold, who could judge the suffering as needless? Who among us could have known that a penalty that must be paid could be put to such an use as this?

Lightly drifting from poetry into prose, carrying on a dialogue with Madame Philosophy, who appeared, as Dante's Virgil, to lead him through the darkened paths of his mind and reveal to him the causes of his torment, beginning with two: he had forgotten the end aim of all things, and he had forgotten what man truly is. The journey is well worth taking, and I would venture to say that it's essential. As a delightful aside: one of the earliest English translations of this book (which has been translated into every European tongue), if not the earliest, was a paraphrase by none other than Chesterton's White Horse King, King Alfred the Great.

I have read Philosophers, and have often thought little of them. I like Hume, as he manages to cut off not only everyone else's feet but his own also. I feel badly for Nietschze, who, proclaiming loudly that pity was a vice, that the weak should be allowed to perish so as to improve the overall quality of life for all men, ended his own life as a madman confined to a wheelchair, being fed soup from another's hand. I have read Philosophers as a man pores through an abandoned mine shaft for the treasure so often found, but I have rarely enjoyed the search, and often feel as Eustace or Pole emerging from the underworld, as I emerge to once again breathe the free air of Donne, Tolkien or Chesterton. This is the first time that I have found so great a quantity of wealth so beautifully arranged under a moonlit sky, and I am basking in the glory of it all. Philosophy is truly a gift from God, and one of His greatest.

This book is magnificent, and truly worth any price. Which is good, as Boethius paid a great one for it.



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Before He Killed the Turk

Don Juan by George Gordon Byron

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well, this feels like a guilty pleasure. Nothing too serious, nothing too deep, wry, British, inappropriate humour that's always enjoyable in a Monty Python's "Castle Anthrax" sort of way. If you know what I'm talking about, you just earned another hundred years in Purgatory. Find an Anglican (Catholic Light: a third less ritual with half the guilt) to bless you and try not to think the phrase "You're probably gay."



Anyway, it was fun, but nothing to spend much more than a couple hours on. Lots and lots of commonplaces, but I still prefer Alexander Pope.



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Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father--

an act which made a deep impression on me at the time.
--Opening Sentence of An Imperfect Conflagration, The Parenticide Club.






The Parenticide Club by Ambrose Bierce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ambrose Bierce once gave a review which I would here apply to his The Parenticide Club: "The covers of this book are entirely too far apart." Yet, in a way, I loved it. It is truly horrific and appalling. The title says all you need to know: it's a collection of stories in which children murder their parents; Bierce's dry, lightly whimsical, journalistic prose starkly outlined against the backdrop of a gruesome, vicious celebration of murder after murder. Never, ever read it. But, in a way, I did love it.

To understand my four star review of a book that I shelved as appalling, a book in which half of my half-hour reading was spent rereading sentences in appalled disbelief, a bit of background may be necessary. I read a good bit, and have for some time. When I was in high school, my class was assigned Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in which Bierce describes in his always exquisite, deeply gothic prose, dry as the only sherry I'll drink, the botched hanging of a Civil War spy and his subsequent escape. Then, when he is almost safely in the home he is longing to reach, he feels a tremendous pressure on his neck and sees a blinding flash of light. The hanging hadn't failed, and he never escaped: the entire episode was in his head.

I had read stories where the protagonist dies, but I had never before encountered one in which the protagonist was nonexistent, or a real story arc in which there was no real conflict--I hadn't known it was allowed. Bierce gave us a hero, then revealed that while we were rooting for him, dodging bullets with him, feeling the exhaustion he was feeling, this entire time our hero was falling off a bridge with a noose under his left ear. Well, I loved his prose, and was fascinated with his ability to take nihilism to an entirely new level, so I got his Devil's Dictionary (he wanted to title it the Cynic's Word Book), and he now holds a special place in my heart as one of the most quotable authors on the planet (Chesterton is obviously greater than the rest, in several senses).

So, this book, this collection of short stories was what I expected. I was braced, and I bookended him with Bach to avoid the "slit carotid artery and do push-ups in the bathtub" impulse that he inevitably seems able to inspire. The most astonishing achievement is his ability to make such horrific villains, such truly amoral bastards as the main characters of these stories seem almost sympathetic.



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Even His Name Is Forgettable

The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have, at this point, gone through the first nine of this collection of twelve stories, and I am now fully convinced that Chesterton was not only a man of a brilliant mind, but of a very singular mind. His paradox is well known, his way of looking at things in an entirely novel light, his self-deprecation, his humor and wit and sheer genius are all legendary, but these stories are a glimpse into the workings of his mind when he decided to amuse himself with a train of thought, and are fascinating.



They are mysteries, a la Sherlock Holmes, but the protagonist is a small, unremarkable priest with a tremendous knowledge of the depths of human nature and an almost obtuse optimism that, combined with the sacred and private nature of confession, allows him not only to solve the crime but to save the criminal. As character studies, they are astonishing. I once commented of a Cormac McCarthy novel that I had met half of his characters. The same and often more is true of these: not only have I met these characters, these lovable cynics, tunnel-visioned atheists and abstruse agnostics, but I have been and am them more often than I would care to admit.



And the crimes? The crimes committed are fantastic, impossible; crimes that defy every imagination's attempts to reconcile them with reality save that singular mind of Chesterton's which can see in reality nothing but the fantastic and impossible, and thusly marries the two with uncanny ease. This has several times caused me to utter ejaculations with a sound, as Wodehouse puts it, of Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin, due to the incurably shy simplicity that would reveal itself to none but the silent, forgotten Priest who courts truth as a lover.



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