Don’t let the title of the book—and, consequently, this blog post—fool you. As its subtitle (Being an Account of the Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis) suggests, this is the story of Harmachis, priest of Isis and last heir of the ancient royal line of Egypt, and how he betrayed the hopes of his family, his country, and himself when he found his fate intertwined with that famous Ptolemaic queen.
When orphan Reynard “Reynie” Muldoon answers an enigmatic advertisement in the paper, he didn’t know what to expect. What he probably did NOT expect, however, was to be swept into an adventure involving three other uniquely-gifted children, a secret mission, dastardly worldwide conspiracies, subliminal messaging, abducted children (and secret agents), and lots and lots of riddles.
Expected or not, that’s what happened. After a few tests, Reynie found himself part of the Mysterious Benedict Society, a team of children hand-picked by the benevolent Mr. Benedict to carry out a vital mission: to go undercover at a shadowy Institute to stop some unidentified—but unquestionably horrible—plan from successfully unfolding.
Somehow, secret messages are being transmitted via television and radio* into people’s minds, and only Mr. Benedict has been able to discover them. Unfortunately, these messages have a protective fail-safe: they convince the people that hear these messages that the messages don’t exist. Only minds that are particularly focused on the truth can detect them at all…which is where the Mysterious Benedict Society comes in.
After discovering Elizabeth Goudge through Green Dolphin Street—originally the movie, then reading the book itself—I decided that this was definitely an author whose bibliography I would exhaust. Goudge’s writing is unique, complex, and thoughtful. The plots are secondary to the characters, almost each of which is developed in exquisite (sometimes excruciating) detail. The writing is dense, sometimes dry, and so her books aren’t given to binging several in a row.
As I’ve slowly made my way through her bibliography, I’ve finally made it far enough to start recognizing a pattern. Mentally, I can stack her books in distinctive piles:
There is, of course, the Wow I Can’t Believe This Book Actually Exists It’s Like the Holy Grail of Reading pile, which contains Green Dolphin Street and The Rosemary Tree.
Unfortunately, there is also the I Really Tried to Like This For Your Sake, Elizabeth, But Let’s Be Honest I Don’t pile…God So Loved the World, The Child of the Sea and The White Witch are hesitantly, tentatively placed here. A Book of Comfort is also here, not because I didn’t have parts that I enjoyed, but rather that there was just so much that was dull and humorless and failed to strike any chord with me, that I would forget that I’d even read if I hadn’t written a blog post about it!
Finally, there’s the Elizabeth You Have Betrayed Me pile, where the books are not only “meh” but downright impossible for me to think about with a trace of fondness. It’s a small stack, but one that seems to have a general rule that governs it: the children’s books. That’s right, Little White Horse and I Saw Three Ships. That’s where you belong!
And now I have two more books to add to their respective piles.
At the end of December I was nigh-certain I was going to "fail" my self-inflicted appointed reading goal, having been consistently ten books behind schedule since The Brothers Karamazov. (Why I thought that would be a good selection to start out last year, I don't know.) So in desperation, I turned to re-reading some of the Juvenile Fiction I've been meaning to review on this blog.
It was the T.C.D.C. to the rescue.
"What's a 'teesie-deesie'?" you may ask.
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.)
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.
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, ChrĂ©tien de Troyes:
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
