Ashtown Burials

This is a trailer for N. D. Wilson's next book, starring the Super 8 star Joel Courtney.

Enjoy.

And I the Lord Have Not Done it?

Death in the City by Francis A. Schaeffer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My favorite section in this book was a single throwaway paragraph in which he commented on Cantica Canticorum, the Song of Songs. Overall I was surprised with how readable he is: I was expecting more of an erudite, even an elitist tone, but he would have been perfectly intelligible to anyone. He speaks from a tremendous compassion, and there is in him a humility so vast that you almost don't recognize the depth of genius behind it. Almost. Yet for all of this, he has a simple, stark, prophetic view of our culture and its relation to God that is on the knife edge of desolation.

He would have been an astonishing man to know: to see so great a genius bent in such humility, in such tenderness lowered down to the most shattered of the lives God made. This was not a man who wrote from his ivory tower, but from the filthy, smoldering ruin; his arms bloody to the shoulders. "The hippies also speak of love, but they have made Haight-Ashbury a desert," and "Orthodoxy without compassion stinks to God."

As this is the first Schaeffer that I've read, I can't say with certainty, but I would guess this to be a decent introduction. It's comprised of lectures, and while it isn't Augustin's Confessions, it isn't like wading through deep mud either. I did very much like it, and am greatly looking forward to the next time I lift him off my shelf.

"How can we speak of judgment and yet not stand like the weeping prophet with tears?"



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Why Do the Heathen Nations Rage?

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith by Peter Hitchens

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Peter Hitchens can write. His prose in this autobiographical journey from atheism to faith is at times elegant, precise, poignant, poetic, mystical and melancholy, and is almost universally exquisite. This book was like candy. Yes, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly," but it's so refreshing to encounter someone that does it well. Here are a few samples of what I mean.


"It is my belief that passions as strong as his are more likely to be countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time."

"It was illustrated with soppy pictures of Christ looking--in C. S. Lewis's potent sneer at stained-glass sentimentality--"like a consumptive girl."

"Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue."

"There were other things too. During a short spell at a cathedral choir school (not as a choirboy, since I sing like a donkey) I had experienced the intense beauty of the ancient Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong... The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoing, haunted, impossibly old building are extraordinarily potent. If you welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort. If you suspect or mistrust them, they will alarm and repel you like a strong and unwanted magic, something to flee from before it takes hold."

"My own confirmation, by contrast, was a miserable modern-language affair with all the poetic force of a driving test..."

"Utopia can only ever be reached across a sea of blood."

"The delusion of revolutionary progress, and the ruthlessness it justifies, survives any amount of experience."


So yeah, I was fond of this book. But more than just his voice when writing, his organization and progression through his experience and his understanding of the surrounding events is clear and extremely insightful. It is, in a word, a delightful book: it is not often that a book on this type of topic this feels more like a reward than a duty, but this is that rare one, and I highly recommend it.



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Smart Cat Says Dumb

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is definitely a 3.4 star book. A very quick read: I finished it in a good bit less than an hour of actual reading, and it's easily worth ten times that. It is tremendously subversive, and in a very wholesome way.

The author, John Taylor Gatto, is a fairly big deal in the NY state school system--Teacher of the Year and all that jazz--and his thesis is that our school system actually hinders learning. One of the analogies that he uses is the difference between a painter and a sculptor: a painter puts something on a canvas, and we view education this way. A sculptor takes away the obstacles, as Michaelangelo reputedly said, a sculptor "liberates" what is within the stone, and this is how we should view education. A teacher's job is not to fill the student's head with facts, but rather to facilitate their desire and ability to learn.

Which, to a great extent is true. And he goes back further than this; he goes back to the seven things that all teachers teach children and what the ramifications of these things are, and he carries it out further than this; he carries it out to what needs to happen to actually change the school system as it is. And this is why it is closer to three stars than to four in my mind: while it is extremely insightful and absolutely essential for anyone interested in education to, at the very least, encounter, it is operating within the framework of the public school system.

And he understands this system: he goes back to Horace Mann and he truly and profoundly knows what he's dealing with, but he thinks it can be saved, while I think it's invention was a catastrophic event the likes of which the American world will never see again. It is the single damning weakness of our nation: it has created a generational gap, ripping (indeed, aborting, as it were) the children from the wombs of their parents long before they were ready to be on their own, thus depriving them of all of the wisdom and truth that their parents possessed. And to fill the void that is created? What is it that replaces the discipline and culture of a family? A lowest common denominator cookie-cutter classroom run by teachers that typically look at our children as the one thing standing between them and a couple stiff martinis (you know the ones I mean, straight out of a Pink Floyd song). So we foster this mental infanticide, and the most influential thing that many a mother will ever say to her son is "I'll see you after school, honey," and all of this simply because we live within the failed experiment and view it as the natural state of affairs.

But in any case, Gatto sees the failure of the system in a way that very few people do. This book is a necessary read to understand how the government schools fail our children.



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Thanks to the Valkyrie

Jane Austen by Peter J. Leithart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was fascinating, and in some ways kind of an exposé. I'm actually quite delighted by the fact that the far-inferior Bronte's really didn't like Austen at all. Especially as I know several people that always mix up who wrote what, which is simply inconceivable to me. It's like asking who wrote King Lear: Edward de Vere as Shakespeare or Stephanie Meyer.



What I chiefly had not known was the depth of her religious conviction. If you read the books, you get glimpses of it. Very little of that survives the screenwriters (if any), and it's typically forgotten. But this is a woman whose last words were "God grant me patience. Pray for me, oh pray for me."



She was delightful, flippant, lively, witty and at times downright savage in her prose. Consider a few examples. When a woman gave birth, or 'was brought to bed' untimely due to a fright, Austen speculated "I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband." Or in a letter to her sister, she commented "Expect a most agreeable Letter for not being overburdened with subject--(having nothing at all to say)--I shall have no check to my Genius from beginning to end." In what ended up being one of my favorite sections of Leithart's book, he quotes her as having said that she (and I quote): "attended the theater to see Don Juan, 'whom we left in Hell at 1/2 past 11.' One home was full of 'modern Elegancies,' but lacked an air of seriousness: 'if it had not been for some naked Cupids over the Mantlepiece, which must be a fine study for Girls, one should never have Smelt Instruction.' "



Not exactly the Austen that most people describe: far more vivacious, far less Victorian prudishness, let alone Edwardian weirdness that has been attributed to her as of late. She was a good deal more like Eliza Bennett than we typically seem to think, delighted and amused by the folly of others, and not the first person you'd want to cross swords with in the dinner-time chatter.



So this was a great book, an especially fine read after just going through her novels. Also, I was called in to arbitrate as to which was better: Persuasion or Northanger Abbey. In an attempt to avoid being slain by a very diminutive, Chesterton loving girl, I shall gladly (and nervously) say that Persuasion is Austen's finest serious novel, but of all her books (which is to say, of all her heroines), the one I'll return to most often out of a simple, childlike affection will be the lovely Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.



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My New Diet

I'm now adopting a strict diet--a very strict diet in fact. I'm limiting myself to food. Here's how.

Smirking

From Wilson (the older than two generations below him and younger than one above): "And as for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution? Ah, t'would be glory. To borrow a line from somebody (I forget who), once the debate started, we would have the special treat of watching all the big spenders of Congress standing in front of microphones, cameras rolling, and all of them sweating like Mike Tyson at a spelling bee. After that, the Lord could take me home anytime. I will have lived a full life."

Bunter the Beloved

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers by Dorothy L. Sayers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well this was a jolly little romp. A great deal of Bunter, which always makes me happy, and Wimsey got a nice Folio Dante, which makes me jealous. All in all a rather typical (and therefore pleasant) little mystery by Sayers. Great fun.



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The George Shall Smile

Wicked Bugs by Amy Stewart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I feel like the wine taster at the wedding in Cana: the best was saved for last. The best, in this case, being zombie bugs, bugs that take over an unwilling host (such as a cockroach, grasshopper, snail, etc) and use it for their own nefarious purposes, such as turning its antennae iridescent colours and waving them around to attract the nearby Nazgul, or perhaps causing grasshoppers, drunk with vino del mar, to fall violently in love with a particular passing fish. Alas, leaping to the water like Jean Valjean does not preserve them from perishing in it like Agamemmnon: they can't swim, and die in a bliss of ardent, wet-gilled fervour, doubtlessly delivering poignant love poems with their last breaths. Of particular warm and fuzzy feelings for me, who have peeled back ceilings and watched them scurry away, opened ovens to the sight of cockroaches two inches deep, and found the scientific way (trial and error) that a roach's head is entirely unnecessary to the survival of the rest of the roach (for a few days, anyway: plenty of time to reproduce) is the delightful insect that stings a roach, then inserts its stinger into the temporarily immobilized roach's brain, and then, steering via the antennae, walks the now docile behemoth back to its own home like it was leading an elephant, where it lays its larvae on the roach's abdomen. They proceed to eat the roach from the inside out, turning it into a disposable incubator, and I applaud them.

Other, more well-adjusted humans will probably loathe this book. But those of us that delight in the misery of others, or at least those who can find admiration for their creative methods of dying--seriously, how many autopsies come back with "caterpillar" filled in under "cause of death?" That's impressive--those humans like me, in other words, will greatly enjoy this book. In fact, we'll probably convince our roommates to bathe in raid and never leave the home (safe save for bedbugs, the lice that killed half of Napoleon's army, the black-widow's kiss of death, and numerous other delights).

As it is a dictionary of types, it's not the smoothest read. But who cares? It's not a novel, it's a catalogue of ants whose bites resemble gunshot wounds, of black flies that kill animals by the tens of thousands, of parasites that through itching inspire suicide, of bugs that shoot acid at the rate of a heavy machine-gun, even of a super-society of Argentine ants stretching from San Diego to Eureka, Ca. And as such it is awesome. Enough to raise up a new generation of entomologists, who can then write more books like this one, inspiring the Jesse to heights of ecstasy as yet uninspired by aught but bugs.



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Oh, Udolfo...

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My one complaint about this book would have to be its length: there's not nearly enough of it. But, I'd often wondered exactly what a book written from Jane Bennet's perspective would be like, and now I think I have have a fairly decent idea.



Catherine is a sweet, naive girl who tends to believe too much in the innate goodness of all people that she loves, and too much in the necessity of the villains of her Gothic novels. But she is only seventeen, after all, though she turns eighteen somewhere in the book.



This read almost like Austen was simply idly amusing herself in the writing of it. I was two chapters from the end and wondering how she was going to tie it all together when out of the blue the omniscient narrator suddenly begins a conversation with the reader.



Most of the book was lighter and more flippant than her others, but of all her heroes, I have to say I've now put Henry Tilney right toward the top of the list, and of her heroines, I kind of like Catherine. She's a bit of a ditz, but such a sweet, dewy eyed ditz that you can't help but feel a bit protective of her, like you want to cloister her away from the big bad world so she can remain a naive seventeen year old forever.



Anyway, great fun, and more overtly fun than any of her others to date.

Also, it's just delightful to have an Austen heroine reading a Bronte novel, and thus to get a rather hilarious book review by Austen herself...



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Wildebeest and Eagle

When this baby wildebeest becomes a grandfather, he's going to be the most annoying grandfather in the world, always going on about the time that he got attacked by lions and crocodiles at the same time. But I think he's earned it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM


And then of course, my favorite bird on earth, just because of what it can do: the Golden Eagle.


First, it can kill a goat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XafAdkZIYKA


But the way it brings down a deer is simply unreal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAsXtDKdU0Q&feature=related


Enjoy.

Pretty Much Sums it Up.

http://www.tobyjsumpter.com/a-cautionary-tale/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HavingTwoLegs+%28Having+Two+Legs%29

Rachel Jankovic via Piper

Rachel Jankovic is Doug Wilson's youngest daughter, and she wrote a magnificent piece on motherhood that is posted on Piper's website.

Enjoy.


Motherhood Is a Calling (And Where Your Children Rank)
July 14, 2011 | by: Rachel Jankovic | Category: Commentary
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A few years ago, when I just had four children and when the oldest was still three, I loaded them all up to go on a walk. After the final sippy cup had found a place and we were ready to go, my two-year-old turned to me and said, “Wow! You have your hands full!”

She could have just as well said, “Don’t you know what causes that?” or “Are they all yours?!”

Everywhere you go, people want to talk about your children. Why you shouldn’t have had them, how you could have prevented them, and why they would never do what you have done. They want to make sure you know that you won’t be smiling anymore when they are teenagers. All this at the grocery store, in line, while your children listen.

A Rock-Bottom Job?

The truth is that years ago, before this generation of mothers was even born, our society decided where children rank in the list of important things. When abortion was legalized, we wrote it into law.

Children rank way below college. Below world travel for sure. Below the ability to go out at night at your leisure. Below honing your body at the gym. Below any job you may have or hope to get. In fact, children rate below your desire to sit around and pick your toes, if that is what you want to do. Below everything. Children are the last thing you should ever spend your time doing.

If you grew up in this culture, it is very hard to get a biblical perspective on motherhood, to think like a free Christian woman about your life, your children. How much have we listened to partial truths and half lies? Do we believe that we want children because there is some biological urge, or the phantom “baby itch”? Are we really in this because of cute little clothes and photo opportunities? Is motherhood a rock-bottom job for those who can’t do more, or those who are satisfied with drudgery? If so, what were we thinking?

It's Not a Hobby

Motherhood is not a hobby, it is a calling. You do not collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It is not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It is what God gave you time for.

Christian mothers carry their children in hostile territory. When you are in public with them, you are standing with, and defending, the objects of cultural dislike. You are publicly testifying that you value what God values, and that you refuse to value what the world values. You stand with the defenseless and in front of the needy. You represent everything that our culture hates, because you represent laying down your life for another—and laying down your life for another represents the gospel.

Our culture is simply afraid of death. Laying down your own life, in any way, is terrifying. Strangely, it is that fear that drives the abortion industry: fear that your dreams will die, that your future will die, that your freedom will die—and trying to escape that death by running into the arms of death.

Run to the Cross

But a Christian should have a different paradigm. We should run to to the cross. To death. So lay down your hopes. Lay down your future. Lay down your petty annoyances. Lay down your desire to be recognized. Lay down your fussiness at your children. Lay down your perfectly clean house. Lay down your grievances about the life you are living. Lay down the imaginary life you could have had by yourself. Let it go.

Death to yourself is not the end of the story. We, of all people, ought to know what follows death. The Christian life is resurrection life, life that cannot be contained by death, the kind of life that is only possible when you have been to the cross and back.

The Bible is clear about the value of children. Jesus loved them, and we are commanded to love them, to bring them up in the nurture of the Lord. We are to imitate God and take pleasure in our children.

The Question Is How

The question here is not whether you are representing the gospel, it is how you are representing it. Have you given your life to your children resentfully? Do you tally every thing you do for them like a loan shark tallies debts? Or do you give them life the way God gave it to us—freely?

It isn’t enough to pretend. You might fool a few people. That person in line at the store might believe you when you plaster on a fake smile, but your children won’t. They know exactly where they stand with you. They know the things that you rate above them. They know everything you resent and hold against them. They know that you faked a cheerful answer to that lady, only to whisper threats or bark at them in the car.

Children know the difference between a mother who is saving face to a stranger and a mother who defends their life and their worth with her smile, her love, and her absolute loyalty.

Hands Full of Good Things

When my little girl told me, “Your hands are full!” I was so thankful that she already knew what my answer would be. It was the same one that I always gave: “Yes they are—full of good things!”

Live the gospel in the things that no one sees. Sacrifice for your children in places that only they will know about. Put their value ahead of yours. Grow them up in the clean air of gospel living. Your testimony to the gospel in the little details of your life is more valuable to them than you can imagine. If you tell them the gospel, but live to yourself, they will never believe it. Give your life for theirs every day, joyfully. Lay down pettiness. Lay down fussiness. Lay down resentment about the dishes, about the laundry, about how no one knows how hard you work.

Stop clinging to yourself and cling to the cross. There is more joy and more life and more laughter on the other side of death than you can possibly carry alone.

Rachel Jankovic is a wife, homemaker, and mother. She is the author of "Loving the Little Years" and blogs at Femina. Her husband is Luke, and they have five children: Evangeline (5), Daphne (4), Chloe (2), Titus (2), and Blaire (5 months).

Bell and Sampson

Here is a movie made by Rob Bell (thank you Anonymous), and here is a spoof done by Canon Press (starring Stephen Sampson). Then, Wilson responds to all the questions you're about to ask here.

Blessings,
Jesse Broussard

Judge the Judges

so that by the Judges we shall be judged.

My house (Boniface Hill) will be starting a Bible study on the book of Judges soon, and not just by Aslan's definition. As a result of this, I'll have regular posting fodder, which I'll probably write, revise, re-revise, read, question God's wisdom in perpetuating my existence, and use the posting fodder to "put Watts in 'em, boys" or some such not-necessarily-productive-but-definitely-entertaining thing (large bangs and primary colors appeal to the young). But, one post in a hundred will probably make it past the gauntlet of semi-sentience that is my mind, and this is the first of those, in my typical sophisticated and highly technical writing style of "somewhat like a list or something."

1. Judah is the royal tribe of Israel (read the blessing in Genesis something or other), so it's not surprising that they're sent in first. What is surprising is that they ask Simeon, one of the two tribes cursed for using the sign of the covenant (circumcision) as a weapon against members of the covenant (the freshly circumcised). The result of this curse was that they didn't have a parcel of land for their own; theirs was taken out of Judah's.

2. Adoni-Bezek: literally, 'Lord of the Lighning flash' or 'Lord of the Sunrise.' In either case, this Adoni is not too hard to see as a representation of Satan, the ruler of the world: he is a Jovian figure (lightning or sunrise) who dominated the seventy nations. (In Genesis nine or ten, the seventy nations of the world are listed; when seventy nations are mentioned here it's an obvious reference to the world. Therefore, Adoni-Bezek is the "ruler of the world.") It's significant that he's the first to fall. The rest of the book is the mop-up job that we botch (much as today, the war is over, but we keep losing battles), but our sin is used to demonstrate the fact that it can't stop the Grace of God, and we'll end up winning in spite of our best efforts. So quit whining, barbeque the tri-tip, raise your glass to God and sing something, blessit (inverted profanity).

3. Big toes and thumbs: not a clue, except for the obvious military ramifications (ever thrown a spear without a thumb? I thought not). Somehow it's more significant than just this, but I don't really know how; it's like the places of the body that the blood is rubbed on. So if you know, tell me, and if it's convincing, I'll add you as an admin to my blog and try to get in on your book royalties.

4. Ten-thousand: obviously a round number, but surprising in that it's four tens instead of just three.

5. Kirjath-Arba: Kiriath means city, and Arba means four, so this is plausibly four cities that merged. However, far more interesting is that Arba was the name of the father of Anak, and therefore of the Anakim (the giants with a fondness for digital sextets that terrified the Israelites so that their bodies were scattered in the desert), so this is also plausibly a city founded by him. In any case, it's occupied by giants, and Judah kills them all; one of the reasons there are so few left today.

6. Note the five kings of the Philistines, and endure typology: the fifth day of creation is when the fishies and the cheep-cheeps were made, and the fish typically represent the gentiles (hence, we're fishers of men, and in the OT fish are almost never mentioned and are absolutely never eaten, and then Jesus comes and suddenly we didn't know that other animals were made out of food). So, the five rulers of the Philistines represent the Gentile world as a whole, and anytime you see five kings, you're fully justified in thinking "uh-oh." This becomes big with Sampson, and is huge in Revelation and anything else that John wrote.

7. And finally, they start out so gloriously... Here's the pattern:

1. Creation
2. Fall
3. Decline
4. Judgment
5. Re-creation

The chief three?

1. Adam to Noah,
2. Noah to David and Ezra,
3. Daniel and Ezra to Christ and the Church.



That's all for now.

Blessings,
Jesse Broussard

The Emperor Exhumed

Defending Constantine by Peter J. Leithart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Wow. This is the first time I've decided to intentionally wait over two months before reviewing a book.

To get all the boring yet essential stuff out of the way: Leithart is brilliant. This is not really news to any of my classmates; it's like saying "Obama is president." Yeah. We know that. But to those of you who haven't had the privilege of taking Theology from the guy who was being published in theological journals before I was born and would still manage to smoke me in basketball, allow me to inform you: Leithart is brilliant. Secondly, he's not lazy, and not only has he written about as many books as I've read, but he reads a few thousand per week and never forgets a word of them. This is the only explanation. I think he's a vampire. Or at least the Count of Monte Cristo.

I distinctly remember one all-night study group that I had in which we, foolish delinquents that we were, walked past Leithart's office to go get coffee at midnight. He was sitting there instructing his computer on the finer points of supra vs. infralapsarianism and its effects upon the reconciliation of the soteriological and ecclesiological disparities in Augustin's De Trinitate and City of God (or playing minesweeper; it's really hard to say), and, when our study group finally realized that we had no hope of remembering which route was taken by Darius and which by Xerxes and had settled for the somewhat less productive task of drawing a fleet of planes bombing the very accurately detailed (hail Everardus) British Isles, we decided to go for a walk to clear our heads. This was about two am, and Leithart was still in his office, either in the running for the theological equivalent of the nobel prize or setting a new record time for the "experienced" category. When we walked by his office again at four, he was still there, without appearing to have moved, but wearing a different shirt and tie: he had gone home, slept, showered and come back in to school between two and four am. He then led morning prayer at six-thirty, which was when I decided to give up on life and start taking my computer games more seriously.

Anyway, this book is by Leithart, which is a very good thing. However, even his tremendous ethos (think reputation) may not manage to drive so much as the title through the emotional antagonism that the vast majority of the church has toward Constantine. I had no such hesitation, as, on the one hand, I don't believe that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, or that AIDS is caused by an STD, or that our last president was stupid, or (no stoning me allowed) that our current one is evil, and on the other hand, I could easily believe that Leithart and Constantine were good friends back in the day, when Leithart was young and foolish, so I was eager to believe the best of Constantine. Plus he has an awesome name. However, I and my kiddie-pool enthusiasm weren't quite prepared for the tsunami of Leithart's nearly exhaustive knowledge of the subject. In some ways, this book reminded me of his Brazos commentary on 1 & 2 Kings, in which half of the book is spent interacting with other authors of differing opinions. There is no shortage of authors antagonistic toward Constantine, charging him with everything from brilliant and cynical statesmanship to being a rather dense tool of the devil to having extremely poor penmanship, and Leithart has to spend almost the entire book exhuming him so as to exonerate him before he got to the dessert: the last chapter: the baptism of the world.

I'll not even attempt to summarize in a book review what took a man such as Leithart an entire book to lay a foundation for, and forty pages to expound. Allow me to simply say this: I'm not actually as twitterpated about Leithart as I make myself out to be. I believe him to be tremendously brilliant, but there are actually several points upon which, I flatter myself, I disagree with him. Probably I don't even understand the issues that I disagree about, and lack the intelligence to comprehend, let alone defend my position, but so be it; I can only do what I can with what I was given, though I'm usually too busy eating kettle chips and reading Dilbert to do even that, so I operate on a different plane than men such as Leithart. However, this book was a sledgehammer. Had I loathed Leithart's very existence (which is impossible to do once you've met Smith, or at least heard him play piano), I still would have been thoroughly shaken. Had I ignored every argument that he made to lay the foundation for his final argument, I still would have been stunned by the breadth and the implications of it.

All of this to say that Leithart's Defending Constantine had a greater impact upon me than any other book I've read this year, and opened an entirely new way for me to view the world. It is a tremendous book, and very well worth the read.



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Getting Full

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Angry Jesse. Cannot anyone write a decent ending anymore? Of course she married (I'm rebelliously inferring marriage) the twit while the other guy runs off somewhere. Of course district 13 exists, but is a Brave New World in the style of Pink Floyd mixed with Huxley (did you ever wonder why we had to run for cover when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath the clear blue sky?). But Prim? That was downright evil. The entire purpose of the first book has been negated. Everything goes from grey to black to black with a glimmer of grey, and I'm getting tired of waiting for sunrises.

Yet, these were well written and very enjoyable, and a movie version would of necessity be happier. So, still four stars, still not kids books in any way save the writing style, and I still think they were worth reading.



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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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