Hattie and Grandma: Two Book Series about The Olden Days

Re-reading old favorite children's books provides an interesting opportunity to revisit childhood experiences and evaluate them from an older perspective. This can sometimes backfire; I may have loved something as a child, but as an adult, the allure is replaced by an underwhelming sense as all its flaws are now more evident. However, I would say the majority of the time it's pleasant to re-read books from Way Back When, especially when it turns out that these books are "Actually pretty good." 

(Past-tense Me, being able to hear this approval from Present-tense Me, can't help but feel vindicated in her choice of literature when this happens.)

“The Swiss Family Robinson,” where the Flamingo and the Penguin Shall Dwell Together, Apparently

As a child, the Disney adaptation of The Swiss Family Robinson was one of my favorites movies my grandma had at her house. Because she only had one or two other VHS to choose from, I ended up watching this movie a lot. There’s just something alluring about a treehouse, and having wild animals as pets, and fighting off pirates.

My mom read the book aloud for school, but I only remembered one part where one of the boys, Ernst, asks to be left in solitude so he can pretend to be Robinson Crusoe, and his dad says he’s already gotten enough experience.

In re-reading it this year, I came to the unfortunate realization that there was a reason this was the only thing I remembered. The book is overall boring.

And, for those who like the movie and haven’t read the book, spoilers: there are no pirates.

Modern Medieval: The Literature of Chretien de Troyes

As I’ve written before--probably more than once--Erec et Enide is one of my favorite Arthurian stories. I was excited to begin reading other Arthurian romances by the same author, Chrétien de Troyes:

• Cliges
• Lancelot
• Yvain
• Perceval

And, for the most part, he lived up to the hype. One thing that de Troyes does (that I haven’t noticed much in other “original” Arthurian tales) is give his characters introspection. For instance, when Cliges first meets his true love, Fenice, de Troyes devotes several pages to each of them, relating their inner dialog in almost stream-of-consciousness fluidity.

Finding New Friends in Elizabeth Goudge’s “A Book of Comfort”

In school my mom had me keep a copybook—a notebook filled with favorite or classic quotations, poems, and excerpts from books, all copied out in my best handwriting. Even though she reads this blog and it might go badly for me, I must admit that I didn’t enjoy this, at least not until halfway through high school. In college, though, I found myself still keeping a copybook of sorts, as I would jot down powerful or poignant lines from the literature I was reading in class.

In reading Elizabeth Goudge’s A Book of Comfort I got the distinct impression that this was her copybook. It’s the first of her collections that I’ve tried, and although it’s not technically her writing, the experience of reading it was similar. One has to approach a Goudge novel (and collection, apparently) with patience, allowing it to unfold until one can appreciate its meaning.

Reviewing “Real Love in an Angry World” by Rick Bezet

Real Love in an Angry World: How to Stick to Your Convictions without Alienating People is about being a true Christ-follower and showing God’s love to a world that is full of conflict, hostility, and suspicion about Christianity (and a lot of other things). Looking to Jesus’ example, Pastor Rick Bezet discusses different specific ways Christians can relate to people in love, without judging them, while also not compromising their beliefs or condoning unbiblical behavior.

Basically, this book is about the biblical principle of “speaking truth IN LOVE.” First, it establishes that there is a universal truth, one that isn’t damaged or injured by people’s dismissing or disbelieving it. However, this truth is not a stark, judging, hateful truth. Because it cannot be hurt, it doesn’t need to go on the offensive to protect itself.

Reviewing “The Communication Book” by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler

In The Communication Book: 44 Ideas for Better Conversations Every Day, authors Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler hit a sweet spot of condensing complex theories into simple chunks of easily-digestible information, both in text and infographic form translated seamlessly from their original German by Jenny Piening and Lucy Jones. Subject matter runs the gamut from Aristotelian principles of rhetoric to the FoMO phenomenon. Every chapter is preceded by a “chalkboard” style infographic that illustrates the theory, rules, or other information that is detailed in the pages following.  

Here are a few chapters I found interesting:

·        The Salami Tactic – the idea of presenting an idea or proposal in small, “bite-sized” slices rather than overwhelming your audience with a full-fledged plan and all its details.

·        The Spiral of Silence – the phenomenon that, the more one believes their opinion is the minority or unpopular, the less likely they are to voice that opinion.

·        White Lies – did you know there are different colors of lies aside from black and white? In this chapter, you learn there’s also gray and red. (But no blue. Which is good, since blue is my favorite color, and I can’t imagine blue would ever lie to me.) The difference between the four is “who the lie benefits.” A white lie, for instance, supposedly benefits the person it’s told to. (Which is a red lie, if you ask me!)

·        L’Esprit de escalier – Which is the French term describing that feeling going into a job interview feeling completely prepared for every possible tough question, tanking the interview, and then waking up in the middle of the night from an epiphany of the perfect thing you should have said.

·        The Standpoint Theory – Describes a feeling that has been growing in me of late, that the more power a person has, the more likely they think their perspective is the fair and balanced one.

That said, there are a few flaws to this book:

1)      Its easy readability is a bit deceptive. That is, I was surprised when I started reading it to find how fast I was breezing through it. As I was reading, I felt sure I was understanding everything. However, understanding and retention are two different things. In retrospect, if I were to suggest a pace of reading this, I would say to read only one chapter (a total of a couple pages) at a sitting. Otherwise, it might be better to keep on hand as a reference book rather than reading through in a linear fashion.

2)     Like so many books published after 2016, this one seems to make certain oblique allusions to political figures and events. I’m sorry, but I’m tired of tripping over these sorts of things in current publications. It’s lazy, somewhat tacky, and—the weakness of making “current” comments being its inherent transience—I don’t believe it will age well.

3)     A few times the subject matter skirts on the equally-fascinating (but perhaps tangential) topic of logic and commonly-implemented fallacies. If there was one thing I wished to see more in this book, it would have been a more detailed investigation into these, since logic (and identifying bad logic), is such a huge part of communication. (Although admittedly this is the first book by these authors that I have read, so it’s possible that they’ve already done so in a different publication.)

 A Few More Thoughts on the Subject of Communication in General

If you’re an introvert like me, you may look to “scientific research” to learn how to communicate with people. It’s not that I feel like I don’t understand what people are communicating to me, but whenever I try to reciprocate, there is often a dissatisfied feeling that I’ve fallen short. I end up walking away thinking

    “That is not what I meant at all,

    That is not it, at all.”

 ...and any conversation that ends with me feeling like J. Alfred Prufrock is not a successful one.

 The thing is, there seems to be some intermediary level of the Study of Communication that I can’t seem to grasp. "Small talk" I can do, although I dislike it inherently; it’s so disingenuous, me asking questions that I don’t care about the answers to, and answering with inanities any questions that might be placed to me. The only sort of conversation I really enjoy, and which I wish I could achieve more often, is the deeper sort of interchange of thoughts, opinions, feelings, and ideas.

 To swap memories or suggestions, discuss alternatives and hypotheticals…actually, now that I think about it, “discuss” rather than “converse” is the real activity I enjoy. I blame college for enhancing the expectation that adulthood would be filled with such stimulation. Whenever I have encountered a conversation that discusses something that really intrigues me—literature, for example—I have almost exclusively been met with glazed-over eyes when I allow myself to be fully engrossed in it. Apparently, people are fine saying “Oh, I love to read!” but don’t want to have to prove it by talking about it.

In short, to move from my favorite poet (T.S. Eliot) to one of my favorite authors (Jane Austen, in Persuasion):

‘My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'

'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.’

My problem, then, seems to be an inability to transition from the undesirable small talk (or, to use the technical term, “chit-chat”) to the more desirable, deeper discussion...which is where this sort of research comes into play.

In the end, The Communication Book is more about the why, such as “why do people communicate in such a way?” or “why do we interpret things according to this mindset?” rather than the how of “how do I use this information to communicate better?” or “how can I put this into practice?” While this book didn’t quite provide me with the tools to overcome this “mental block,” it did cover a vast amount of topics that I think I’ll find useful in the long run. In particular, this book seems like a great fit for learning about workplace communication.

Reviewing “Ulysses Found” by Ernle Bradford

While sorting through some of my books to donate, I found Ulysses Found. This book was one of simply gobs of volumes that I’d pulled from a book drop when our local public school was doing a purge of older works. I know that, at some point several years ago, I had read this book, but I could neither remember anything about the book nor why it was in the Donation Pile in the first place.

Ernle Bradford was a British author who happened to have a lot of experience sailing the Mediterranean. His reason for writing the book in the first place was that he seemed to “recognize” islands and coastlines, connecting his travels to the so-called mythological places in Homer’s Odyssey. From chapter to chapter, he traces the epic journey through real-life geography.  

Reviewing “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe

 

This has been a rough year. I have hardly read any good books. And not for lack of trying.* If I have often thought of and felt books to be my friends, I have been cruelly betrayed many times these past several months. Old, trusted “go-to” authors have inflicted bitter disappointments such as Agatha Christie’s The Clocks and H. Rider Haggard’s The Yellow God. Even ancient writings like The Nibelungenlied made me less inclined to cradle the volume in my arms (as I am wont to do) than throw it across the room (as usually would be unthinkable!).

I have been searching for solace in reading, and haven’t found a safe haven. It’s a feeling hard to describe, but not usually quite so difficult to find. The feeling of comfort when one lays open a few pages of paper and looks at them, and somehow is transported out of one’s life and enters the existence of someone else.

But as Escapism has consistently eluded me this year, I decided that perhaps I was approaching the problem in the wrong way. I was trying to avoid reality. But books are more than an escape; they delve into reality so that we can understand our lives in a new, different, better way.  So I reversed my course completely, and read A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. 

Sherlock Holmes and Science Fiction

It seems almost natural today for Sherlock Holmes to be linked to science fiction. Holmes is such a real character, yet somehow he is real in any sort of iteration. There are many, many adaptations of books that I have merely to glance at, and my reaction is instantly: “No. Oh…no. That is no so-and-so.” I am hard to please with my adaptations.

Yet, as I said, Holmes seems to be an exception. (Watson? Not so much….) I have seen probably a dozen or more actors or various “incarnations” of the character, from Basil Rathbone to Benedict Cumberbatch, The Great Mouse Detective to Sherlock Gnomes. Of course, some portrayals are better than others. Most interpretations of the character emphasize certain Holmesian characteristics unevenly; for instance, in the movies with Robert Downey, Jr., they highlight Holmes’ pugilistic talents (I remember hearing people complain, “Sherlock Holmes doesn’t fight!”).

The fact remains that Holmes isn’t not most of these interpretations. He’s a combination of all of them.

Reviewing “The Clocks” by Agatha Christie

It started out with such promise. 

A young typist with a shadowy past is assigned to go to 19 Wilbraham Crescent. Said typist, Sheila Webb, goes to said address…and finds a corpse surrounded by clocks. Just as she has discovered the dead man, a blind woman comes in—the real owner of the house, Miss Pebmarsh. Sheila goes hysterical and runs out into the street, bumping into marine biologist Colin Lamb—who, luckily, is actually a British spy who has friends in the police force, and thus can instantly become a first-person narrator.

Third-person narrative takes turns with Colin as he joins Detective Inspector Hardcastle on the routine rounds of interviewing all the possible suspects, most of them neighbors who are Rather Suspicious. Somewhere along the line Christie remembered that she meant this to be a Hercule Poirot novel, so she has Colin also coincidentally be old friends with the famous detective. Colin visits Poirot at his home, where Poirot is going bonkers from boredom. After a rather awkward diatribe of various mystery writers, Colin finally gives Poirot the Cliffs Notes of what has happened so far. Poirot proceeds to stay in his flat for almost the entirety of the book, only showing up at the end as a Belgian ex Machina to solve the crime without doing any legwork.

Unnerving Short Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I have known for a long time that there are two basic views of Rudyard Kipling:

1.      Rudyard Kipling the author of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories…thus, a children’s author.

2.      Rudyard Kipling, author of The White Man’s Burden…thus, a racist.

The Kipling I met when reading the collection Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror & Fantasy (edited by Stephen Jones) was bits of both, yet neither.

While I prefer novels where I can really settle into a world and get to know the people that live there, I have recently begun to appreciate one aspect of short stories: collections of one author can showcase the broad spectrum of their talents, and thus reveal more of themselves.

Reviewing "God So Loved the World" by Elizabeth Goudge

“The life of Our Lord is like a great symphony. It has three movements, with a silence between each when we are left wondering what is happening. The first movement is the music of his babyhood and boyhood, the second of his ministry and suffering and death, and the third of his resurrection.”

~ Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World, Chapter 4 , page 39

My reading habits do not naturally gravitate towards books that are retellings of true historical events. If truth is stranger than fiction, it is also more important and meaningful. What fictionalizations do accomplish, however, is making something come alive in our imaginations, so that historical events are not just some facts laid out in dry terms in an encyclopedia or textbook, but instead were real actions involving real people with feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, and failings.

Writing about Biblical events is an even more perilous undertaking. Even watching a VeggieTales interpretation of a Bible story can lead one into a misconception…and not just that David and Goliath were not, in fact, an asparagus and pickle (respectively). So if I avoid fictionalizations of history, that goes double, usually, for Biblical fictionalizations.

Expanding Empathy

I find it odd that people who like to read are so often pigeonholed (by fellow bibliophiles as much as non-readers) as being antisocial, solitary, and awkward. Not to say it isn’t true in some cases, but the idea that readers don’t know how to deal with reality or connect with other humans is flawed, in my opinion.

If anything, I think it's possible that readers may possess an even greater capacity for empathy and understanding the world around them, simply because books require the exercise of this ability.

There’s Nothing Quite Like a Book Sale

One always can tell the change of seasons by when the used book sales start up in early summer.

That is, almost always.

In recent years I thought I’d gotten somewhat desensitized to the allure of the words BOOK SALE. After all, for several years when I have attended book sales the majority of the “finds” are books I already own. While there’s nothing wrong with swapping out a trade paperback for a hardcover edition with gilt pages, the joy is a bit dampened compared to that of finding a book one doesn’t own. (Janine is French, I’m thinking of you.)

Yet this year, as book sale season sails by uncelebrated, I find myself feeling empty, like a certain vital part of my existence is missing.

Reviewing "The Question that Never Goes Away" by Philip Yancey

Why?

If there is a good, all-powerful, all-knowing God, WHY do bad things happen?

In a world that often feels like it’s spinning out of control, it’s easy to ask this question. And even when life seems to be going alright, the question never quite goes away.

An American Linguist in England: Reviewing "The Prodigal Tongue" by Lynne Murphy

Lynne Murphy is a linguist from the United States who emigrated to England and teaches at the University of Sussex. In her book, The Prodigal Tongue, the humor carries a little bit more bite than Erin Moore's That's Not English! 

Almost as if the author has been given a bit of a hard time over her nationality of birth, and finally wrote a book so that when she gets corrected on word usage she just hands the critic her book.

Oh, But It Is! Reviewing "That's Not English!" by Erin Moore

That's Not English! Britishisms, Americanisms, and What Our English Says About Us

In which the author, Erin Moore, reflects on various ways the English language is used in different cultures.

Moore was born in Florida but moved to England, married an Englishman, and had English children. Hers is less a study of linguistics than an affectionate comparison of two cultures that are close to her personally: the one she was born into, and the one she chose. Since “the one she chose” is England, it’s understandable that the slant would be slightly in that direction. However, her tone is (usually) less of an Anglophile fangirl and more “Look at this nifty phrase or word! Why don’t they use it in America?”

I've Read It Both Ways: Differences in English Usage From Country to Country

“…It [a shape-shifting alien…it makes sense in context] has amazing mimetic abilities. In one month it learned to speak English perfectly and to become well acquainted with British customs. That is no easy feat, Bunny. There are thousands of Frenchmen and Americans who have been here for some time who have not yet comprehended the British language, temperament, or customs. And these are human beings, though there are, of course, some Englishmen who are uncertain about this.”

           

The Problem of the Sore Bridge—Among Others

By Philip José Farmer [full disclosure: an American writing a pastiche of British author E.W. Hornung's Raffles short stories] (writing as Harry Manders)* 

Communication as a form of connecting and understanding other people fascinates me. It’s probably an underlying influence on my interest in the written word. Spoken words are interesting, too, but they’re transient. They fly into oblivion almost as soon as they escape the mouth. Even if words happen to be recorded in a video or audio format, it requires rewinding and replaying to review the words intensively.

Written words, on the other hand, stay put. One can stare at them, dissecting, defining, rearranging, until the writer’s intended meaning is pretty well grasped. This orderly method of communication may be why, in many ways, I prefer writing to speaking. I can be methodical and take my time with written words where one wrong curve of the tongue may distort the pronunciation of a word (basically a verbal typo), potentially affecting the meaning in the process.

Reviewing "Snow & Rose" by Emily Winfield Martin

I’m not sure exactly what “flavor” of fantasy Snow & Rose evokes. All I know is that if you can judge a book by its cover, Snow & Rose’s writing style fits the cover art (and illustrations) perfectly. It’s simplistic, sweet, folksy, sentimental, and tinged by a little bit of Grimm-esque creepiness. It’s a “modern” retelling of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red (no, not that Snow White), about two sisters and their adventures with a cranky little man (no, not one of the seven dwarfs) and a benevolent bear (no, children, do not try this at home).

Reviewing "Threads Around the World" by Deb Brandon

I originally put this on hold at my library on a whim, not even really looking past the title of the book and thinking it must be one of those how-to books about embroidery that I sometimes enjoy perusing. The kind of books with a lot of pictures that are easy to read through in an afternoon.

When I picked up the book at my library I almost didn’t start reading it. Firstly, it was much thicker than I’d anticipated. When one expects a pinky’s-width thick book and it’s more like a thumb-and-index-finger’s-width (actual measurements may vary), it may cause one to reconsider whether the book is perhaps about something completely different than originally thought.

All in the Wrist and Other Excuses

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything to this blog, and not for lack of thinking about it. Here are my excuses, in chronological order:

1.      November-December: “I’ll just wait until the holidays. I’m so busy, and blog readers will probably be pretty busy anyway.”

2.      January: “I have injured both wrists. Since my day job involves typing and other wrist-centric tasks, when I get home at night I can barely do anything.”

3.      February: “I have been sick. Twice.”

4.      March: “I’m having an existential crisis that is being exacerbated by a worldwide pandemic and a statewide shut-down the day before my birthday.”

5.      April: “I need to do my taxes. I need to do my taxes. I really don’t want to do my taxes. I think I’ll download Stardew Valley instead.”

And that’s how we got to May.