Heaven is a Big Stack-o-Books

I've been reading the last couple of weeks. The books-for-Christmas quota was a little lower this year than usual, but the quality is up. Here's what I've finished so far:

A Million Little Pieces - James Frey. Very compelling. I've had so many friends, IRL and online, recommend this title that I bought it without even reading the back cover while I was out Christmas shopping. An impulse purchase, but not one I regret. There were parts that were very hard to read because they were very, very real... one part I just could not bear. (If you've read it, can you guess what part I couldn't take? Hint: it wasn't the part about his visit to the dentist.) Aside from that one scene, however, I found the book riveting. And I decided that while the book is not great literature, this one title alone could possibly be the most effective anti-drug message a parent could ever give her kid. (If she were of the love-hurts school of protecting her kids. Which at times I can be, I admit.)

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss. Hard to sing the praises of this book too highly. I fell through the looking glass almost immediately and found myself surprised and annoyed whenever one of my kids interrupted my reading to ask me for breakfast. Or lunch. Or dinner. ("Please, mom, we're hungry!") Such is the power of some books, that you enter their world so completely that you are disoriented when jerked rudely back to your own. This was that kind of book. And the characters in it were people unlike any I personally know, which is always a pleasure to be found in good books. I grew up in the South, have always lived in the South, and all my people are of Protestant Scotch-Irish descent. The characters in this book are Polish Jews who've made their way to the Americas, North and South, and their offspring. Their voices are beautiful and pleading and so different from my own that they are fascinating.

The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd. (Yes, BFF Ruthie, I finally got around to reading this. You're welcome.) This was a find from the Scholastic Book Sale - an unabridged audio CD set of the entire novel. I started off listening little bits at a time in my car. By the midpoint of the book, I had to borrow DH's fancy-schmancy earphones and listen on the DVD player late into the night. What I loved about this book was what a powerful picture of women it presented, the great gift mothers give daughters and that daughters seek out long after their mothers are gone. The narrator for the audio version had a WONDERFULLY authentic deep Southern accent, which just cannot be faked. I don't care if you are Meryl Streep or Emma Thompson, if you did not grow up in the South you should not even try to imitate a Southerner. But I digress. Yes, Ruthie, you were right - I did love this book.

The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness, Joel ben Izzy. A simple and profound true story of a professional storyteller who loses his voice and how he came to see the loss as a gift. Interspersed with the author's story are the legends and fairy tales he used to tell, woven throughout as illustrations for his own journey. This was a short but worthwhile read.

Shopgirl, Steve Martin. I loved this book the first time I read it. Not as much the second time, but I still think it's well-done. Martin surprised me as an author; the element of surprise was missing the second time, but I still found his prose lovely and his insights refreshing. I hope the movie will be as good.

Here is the list of books still stacked up in anticipation of being read:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathon Safran Foer.
Shakespeare and the Art of Language - Sister Miriam Joseph. This one looks rather dense - a thick book with small print - so it will take me a while. But it is about how the Trivium influenced Shakespeare's work. Doesn't that sound intriguing?
Henry V - Kenneth Branagh version, on videotape. Yes, I know it's not a book, but I've put it on the list because it WILL take time to watch and it IS literary. So there.

So, what about y'all? What titles did you get for Christmas? My stack is too short, and I need suggestions!

P.S. To Patty in WA: I am thinking through a response to your recent comments re: the Great BoyBob Wars. Take courage, my friend! You are fighting a good fight! (More soon.)

Delayed Gratification

This summer, while camping with my folks, we made our annual jaunt to the outlet mall between our home and the campground. At the kitchen store, I found a new, fancy, stainless-steel cookie press. There were other cookie presses - some battery operated! - but I was drawn to this one. It looked... substantial. Like it would not break mid-cookie-batch and leave me with a big bowl of unshaped, unbaked green cookie dough three hours before I needed to take cookies to my kids' fine-arts-class end-of-year-celebration. Not that I'm holding a grudge or anything.

So I bought it. And it sat in its box in an upper cabinet in my kitchen for six months, waiting. Waiting to prove itself to me. Waiting to flex its muscles, click its ratchet, gleam in the glow of mid-morning December sunlight, and press cookies worthy of a magazine cover onto my humble but well-greased cookie sheets.

Late this week we had home economics and applied math (emphasis: fractions) class in the kitchen this morning and put the cookie press to the cookie test.

At first, I was thrilled. THRILLED! What excitement, to press the lever, hear the little, satisfying "click," then lift to see a perfect little green tree resting on the cookie sheet. Success! A ha! I am now a cookie goddess! I shall make a hundred batches! I shall give them to everyone I know! mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha..... DD caught the fever and insisted upon taking over lever duty. I obliged, but stayed near to assist.

Alas, our dreams of world domination via sugar cookies were dashed somewhere in the middle of pan number four. We did the same thing we had been doing, all along, when all of a sudden... no "click." More like, "clunk." Lift the press... no cookie. Only a small smoosh of dough clinging to the bottom of the disc. Mutter, mutter... pull the lever, try again. "Clunk."

Clunk, indeed. Just for fun, I got onto Amazon to see if anyone had reviewed this cookie press. Oh, yes, indeedy... mine was not the only disappointing experience. If you're in the market for a new cookie press, you can go here and read what NOT to buy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the dough became... thumbprint cookies. Not nearly as fun and tasty as little Christmas trees. Bah, humbug. But at least they all were eaten. Multi-colored sprinkles are just irresistable, no matter the appearance of the cookie on which they are delivered.

Favorite Christmas Ornament

Reading a few of my regularly-read blogs today, I've enjoyed several posts featuring favorite Christmas ornaments. So I just have to follow suit, only my favorite ornament doesn't hang on the tree. It is a very special Nativity set, made by my middle ds, when he was 6 years old, in a pottery class:



You probably can't see this, but the eyes on these figures were formed by his six-year-old thumbnail pressed gently into the soft clay.

He will never be six again. But I will always, always have his thumbnail-prints, even when he is a grown man with children of his own and I am very old and in a nursing home and forced to choose the five or six possessions I am allowed to take with me into my sad and lonely room. I will not be so lonely with my little Nativity set there to remind me of ds.

Once A Reader of Narnia, Always a Reader of Narnia

This weekend I saw The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe with my family. My dh loved it. My kids loved it. My sister and her husband loved it.

I… have had a hard time putting words around how I felt about it.

It’s not hard to dissect the movie into various elements and discuss what worked and what didn’t. Aslan? Perfect graphics, wrong choice of voice. The Queen? Excellent portrayal, wrong physical build for the part. The children? All outstanding, a nice surprise. The story? Minor plot changes, but in substance, the same (to my great relief).

What’s harder is to accept this movie – the gestalt of it, the whole package. That effort may be an impossibility for me.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the house my Grandmother lived in during my very early childhood. (She moved back to the farmhouse where she’d been born when I was, oh, nine or so, and the house was sold to some distant relatives.) I had spent a couple of Easters and Christmases in that home, and I had good memories of all its rooms. So it was a real shock to me to come back years later and realize how very tiny it was. I never knew it, as a kid. The house never felt small at all. Yet as an adult, I was stunned to realize it had only four rooms: a living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms. Oh, and one miniature bath. I could walk through the front door and out the back in 15 seconds flat. The ceilings were low. Even the yard, with its muscadine grapevine and big tank of propane, was not the giant playground of my memory but a small rural lot at the end of a dirt road with just enough room for the house, driveway, and clothesline, right by that grapevine and the gas tank.

Seeing Narnia as a 21st century moviegoer was a little like revisiting my Grandmother’s old house. I’ve always felt a fierce loyalty to the Narnia series. They were the first books that felt like friends to me, some of the handful that I read over and over and over again throughout my childhood. When I read them as an adult, they had lost none of their magic. Indeed, they felt bigger in some ways, because I caught more of the symbolism and theology in them than I had picked up on as a young reader.

Alas, the movie Narnia feels small to me. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was very well done, in many ways. But it did not capture my heart and enlarge my imagination as the book did. In my mind, the lamppost in the forest is stately and grand. The trees are massive, like redwoods. They extend for leagues and require days to journey through. Cair Paravel is like the great Scottish castles – thick, impenetrable, medieval. The Ice Palace of Jadis is otherworldly, foreign, and much more frightening than misty green lights can render. Tumnus’ home is homier, the Beavers’ dam is cozier and cleverer. Narnia seems more possible, in my mind. More like a real place that my heart could long to visit.

Perhaps no movie adaptation will ever be able to capture for me what Narnia is. Perhaps I’m asking too much of a limited medium. Or perhaps I’m past the age of being captured and owned by an imaginary world. I had hoped I was not.

Be Back Soon

I'm trying to write a post about the new Narnia movie. It's taking a while. My feelings are... complicated. But I'm working on it.

More soon.

One More Day Until...

...the Scholastic Warehouse Sale!

I live, literally, within walking distance of the local Scholastic Book warehouse. But I cannot walk to this sale. For one thing, how would I get all my books home? (grin - yes, I buy a lot of books at this thing.) For another, to walk, I'd have to cross over a golf course, scale a massive chain link fencen topped with barbed wire, try not to get hit by a huge freight train as I sprint over a series of several parallel tracks, and navigate my way past big ol' trucks and big ol' truck drivers in their rigs at the ends of the loading docks in the industrial park where the warehouse sits. Sounds like a game of Frogger, huh?

SO... I reckon I'll drive.

At past sales, I have scored Hooked on Phonics (new and complete) for $50, Kingfisher encyclopedias galore, numerous glitzy cookbooks, abundant cheap paperback readers for all my kids, nifty little crafty kits, Klutz books, beautiful leatherbound classics collections, and lots of teaching and literary guides. You never know what you will find, but almost always I find something that was on my list anyway, or something I'd browsed at B&N but couldn't bring myself to buy. All at half off. Or more. (There's a dollar box that's taller than I am.)

I'm an addict. And there's no 12-step in sight. (Like I want help. No, I don't have a problem. Really. I can quit anytime I want.)

So, How Random CAN I Be?

Gleaned this weekend from Breaking Out Of Beginner's Spanish by Joseph J. Keenan:

"Hispanisms"

The history of Spanish isn't a distressful one of bombardment by other tongues but a proud one of influencing the languages with which it has come into contact. For all languages, evolving is part taking, part giving, and Spanish has given far more than its share. What follows is a list of Spanish words that have been adopted into English:*

alligator
alcove
booby
bozo
canyon
cinch
embargo
guitar
hazard
lasso
marijuana
mosquito
patio
quixotic
ranch
savvy
silo
tobacco
tornado
vanilla

(*Note that I shortened his already abbreviated list, just to give you a sample of a sample. If you are a student of Espanol, do yourself a favor and get this book - it is just chock-full of "who knew?" mistakes that we newbies make all the time that defeat our attempts at sounding native.)

Did YOU know that we got the word vanilla from Spanish? !Salga! (That's Spanish for, "Get OUT!" ha ha ha) Go ahead - go to Merriam Webster Online and look up any of those words. (Or don't and trust me!)

Isn't English fascinating? We take words from whatever source we like. Words like "adios" and "sombrero" are obvious, but I loved learning that words like "booby" come from Spanish as well. Maybe I'm weird.

ALSO gleaned this weekend: A quote by Martin Luther printed in the worship guide at church.

No matter where you are reading in the Bible, faith is the first mystery you should recognize. Faith is not believing that the story you are reading is true as written. That does nothing for anyone. Even unbelievers can believe the Bible story of Jesus' birth is true. Faith is not a natural work apart from God's grace. Rather the right kind of faith, the kind that flows from Grace and that God's Word demands, is firmly believing that Christ was born for you. His birth is yours and occurred for your benefit. For the Gospel teaches that Christ was born for our benefit and that everything He did and suffered was for us.

Good news indeed.

May I Recommend...

...a movie I saw for the first time earlier this month called The Sea Inside? When DH pulled it out of the Netflix envelope and read the description, he said, "All yours, babe." "Really? You're not interested?" I queried. "Emphatically not," he replied, "I've learned. No more movies about death and suffering for a while."

(Let me put your mind at ease here and point out here that DH and I are not currently grieving any personal losses at this time that sad movies would only exacerbate. It's just that DH and I have an ongoing battle over the Netflix queue - perhaps you can relate? - where he likes to load it up with Jackie Chan and oldies from the AFI Top 100 list, whereas I love anything like Mystic River or 21 Grams or My Life Without Me where you get very attached to major characters and then they die or commit a crime or both, but not in that order. The more twisted, tragic, and heartwrenching, the better.)

Well, I popped that little disc into the player while DH was working on his computer in the same room. And before long, he was saying, "Can you back it up?" because, a) he'd been looking down at his work and missed something, and b) the movie is all in Spanish so if you are looking down you not only missed action but the English subtitles too. AND... this movie is hard not to watch. The acting is SUPERB. The dialogue is realistic and intelligent. The subject matter is compelling. The emotional impact is shattering.

No, I don't think I'm overdoing the hyperbole. This movie really does merit high praise. It tells the true story of Ramon Sampedro, a Spanish quadriplegic who wanted to end his life but was forbidden to do so by law and unable to do so by nature of his physical condition. The movie is unflinching and unsentimental, yet tells the story with compassion for those on both sides of the issue. It raises questions of ethics, of life, the boundaries of friendship, and the limits of love.

Not exactly the feel-good movie of the year... and yet... still a celebration of life. I much enjoyed it. (And, incidentally, so did DH. Even if he did bug out of the last excruciating 15 minutes and I had to tell him how it ended. I understood, though. I couldn't make it all the way through his Hotel Rwanda without leaving the room every so often to break up the intensity. I suppose we balance each other out somehow.)