Wingless Chickens

Flannery O'Connor about knocked my socks off with her letters. I'd read four or five of her short stories before coming to this book, and, while they were interesting enough, none of them really sparked my interest until we read "Everything that Rises Must Converge" for a seminar class last semester. The symbolism and wry humor intrigued me enough that I trotted down to the library and picked up, not her other works of fiction, but her collected letters. It was the greatest of fortune.

The book opens with letters written during her time in New England -- letters to her mother in Georgia, an exchange with Elizabeth McKee who became her agent. There wasn't anything particularly extraordinary or gripping in the first hundred pages or so. O'Connor's wry, biting humor, turned against herself as often as against others, definitely was there, and there was some talk of her writing and her thoughts on the literary figures and works of her day, but it wasn't until 1955 that the letters really began to pick up. Because, you see, in 1955 Betty Hester (known only as "A." in the collection; her identity was revealed after her death in 1998) wrote to Flannery, asking about her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find. Flannery's curiosity and interest were piqued from that very first letter. 

You were very kind to write to me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories. 

In the following letters, Flannery's delight with finding someone with whom she could engage in intellectual conversation as an equal is startlingly palpable. Letters to Hester form the bulk of the remaining collection, although not even all of these were included.

Reading her letters is to peep inside Flannery's head, and the portrait painted by the letters is extraordinarily life-like. Flannery's sense of humor, her impatience with sentimentalism, and her deep and tenacious faith all spring off the page with a fierce vivacity. After reading the nearly 600 pages of the book, I feel as though I know her, as arrogant and cliched as that may sound. Flannery wrote on a myriad of topics, informing friends of happenings on the farm (Flannery's mother kept cows and Flannery raised fowl of various kinds, including peacocks and swans), her reactions to books she'd read, tart commentary on goings-on in the world and not least of all, exasperation with the stubbornness of misinterpretation of her work. Her work is often (if not universally) labelled grotesque and "Southern Gothic" (whatever this may mean), and, not having read much of her writing, I feel disinclined to pass judgement on those labels. But, having read her own reflections on her work, I know that she saw herself as a sort of prophet (if I may use that term) to a world that had lost much of its sensibility of sin, its consciousness of the fallen state of man. She succinctly (and memorably) summarized this loss to Hester:

The moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

Her blunt forcefulness acted as a two-by-four to the head of a world that was losing, and in many ways had already lost, its ability to judge between good and evil. Flannery's writing is shocking in the way that smelling salts are shocking.

All is not a bitter crusade against evil and its minions, however, and Flannery is equally captivating when relating hilarious farm news or defending the Catholic faith to various correspondents. There are, of course others beside Hester, and I particularly enjoyed O'Connor's exchanges with Dr. T. R. Spivey, Cecil Dawkins and Maryat Lee. The last letter Flannery wrote, a short note to Lee, was found on her bedside table after her death and mailed by her mother. It refers to an anonymous phone call Lee had received, and counseled her to call the police, telling her that

cowards can be just as vicious as those who declare themselves -- more so. Don't take any romantic attitude toward that call. Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions.

It seems a very O'Connoresque note to end on: don't take a romantic view of the situation, and do what you need to do without fuss or emotionalism. I get the feeling that this would have been her approach to death as well as nasty anonymous phone calls.


Obligatory bio-snippet: Flannery graduated from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945, then attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Flannery spent time in New England, both with friends and at the Yaddo artists' colony before being diagnosed with lupus in 1951. Other than excursions to give lectures and a pilgrimage to Lourdes (and stints in the hospital), O'Connor spent the rest of her life living with her mother Regina on their dairy farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia until her death on August 3, 1964 from lupus.

Unnatural Selection

I could try and review Mara Hvistendahl's Unnatural Selection. Or I could just link to the WSJ review which says everything I want to say about it, but much more eloquently and succinctly. Because I'm lazy like that, and also trying to pull together an application for an honors program that's due in a week and a half. Hvistendahl is thought-provoking, although I was distracted from the thoughts she provokes by her left-wing/feminist bias, like trying to enjoy Bach with a mosquito buzzing in my ear. She realizes that there is this tragedy taking place, this "gendericide" of pre-born girls, but fails to connect the dots from the oh-so-sacred woman's right to choose (choose death, that is) and women choosing to abort female fetuses. If a woman can choose to abort because of Down syndrome, mental health or family size, why not gender?

Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

After reading an excerpt from Kay Hymowitz' "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys" in the Wall Street Journal, I was intrigued, placed it on hold at the library and added it to my ever-growing summer reading list. It sounded like an interesting premise, and judging from the excerpt, a pretty even-handed treatment of the topic. Did it live up to its promise? Weeeellllllll.... It's certainly one of the most interesting books I've read in a while. 

Hymowitz starts out with her definition of the "preadult", the 20-something who's half child, half adult, stranded between school and a solid career. How did we get to the preadult? Hymowitz lays out two primary factors, the Industrial and Sexual Revolutions. One changed the culture's idea of work and its purpose, creating the free-time necessary for a college degree and its resultant "knowledge economy jobs"; the other completely changed the script when it came to marriage, family and children. From this basis, Hymowitz examines how women have flourished in this new career playing field. Not surprising, since the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution freed women from much of the domestic drudgery and the Sexual Revolution "liberated" women from children and a husband. Men on the other hand? They've retreated to their man-caves with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. Think Knocked Up, beer pong, frat parties and Adam Sandler movies, among other things. Why?

Is it because women were the primary beneficiaries of the two Revolutions? Did second-wave feminists raise daughters to aggressively pursue degrees and careers that were once the sole province of men? Or are women just better at the knowledge-based career world that bloomed in the last half of the 20th century? Hymowitz explores all of these possibilities, as well as what the preadult phenomenon has meant for men and women in the boardroom and the bedroom. She ends her book by acknowledging that, while most women seem to still desire marriage and children, the growing bloc of "choice mothers" (those who employ sperm banks instead of the crude child-man) will probably become the norm. She ends by stating that

"men may have lost the clarity of previous eras' script for growing up, but that does not mean that the only alternative is to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and underachieving. They can still choose to keep their eyes on the things that will lead to a meaningful life." 

In other words, it's the guys' fault for not adapting and evolving to fit this new model of society where women don't really need them as husband, father or breadwinner. And yet puzzlingly enough, in the next paragraph, Hymowitz acknowledges that "with nobody expecting anything of them, men get worse." That's right, man, I don't really need you because I am woman, hear me roar. I have a satisfying career, a chic apartment, friends, everything I need. Well, actually I kinda need your sperm cause I want kids. But I don't want you cause you're gross and crude and immature. Somehow, Hymowitz fails to see the connection between the evaporation of the expectations placed on men by the previous societal life-script and the resultant slob who appeared after women decided that they didn't really need men performing in their traditional roles.

One other thing that bothered me: besides Hymowitz' obviously irritating stance that contraception did women a favor by "liberating" them from children, I also threw my hands heavenward over her dichotomy of the guys women date (or don't date, as the case were). She gives the reader two types: the sensitive, so-called-nice guy*, who's thoughtful and in touch with his feminine side, supposedly the ideal man in a post-feminist-revolt world; the other is the man's man (as Hymowitz defines him), the kind of guy who notches his bedpost and uses something called "Game" to score women without a shred of feeling. She sees no middle ground between these two kinds of men, and finds it somewhat puzzling that women don't seem to be attracted to the sensitive man, but are rather drawn to the so-called macho man. I found it most irritating that she defined the manly man, the man's man, as the slimeball in the second example. That is not a manly man; that is a cad (<== lovely, descriptive word, that). Ascribing such things as "respect" and "care" to her "nice guy", Hymowitz paints a picture of the manly man as an arrogant, neanderthal jerk. And that's just not true. Neither of her two options sound at all appealing, and I've had just enough experience with guys to know that there's a third type, the gentleman, and with all due respect to Ms. Hymowitz and her well-placed indignation over the Gamers, that's the kind of man I want.

So while I found "Manning Up" to be a fairly informative if somewhat frenetic attempt to cover all the bases, Hymowitz' failure to offer any satisfying conclusion to the question she poses disappointed me. I did enjoy reading the book. It's not your typical summer read, but it has offered me quite a bit to think about.

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*Nice?! *snorts of indignation* One such "nice" guy that she quotes is miffed because "you [the average preadult woman] ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy." Yeah. Cause I call a guy nice when he gives me emotional satisfaction only with the ultimate expectation that I'll sleep with him. Good call on that definition of nice, Ms. Hymowitz

Strength: Part I

(NB: This is the first of a 3-part series, examining three pieces of literature with dual female protagonists and how their strengths complement each other by following archetypal patterns .)

Last summer, I re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If you haven't read them, do yourself a favor, and read them. Your soul and heart with thank you for it. If you haven't visited them in a long time, why don't you stop by and call on them again. You'll discover new and exciting things in them each time you read. One of the chief themes that struck me this time around was the relationship- the differences, similarities, and connections between the two main female protagonists, Arwen and Éowyn. (Although, to be technical, I suppose that in the books Galadriel is more of a female protagonist than Arwen. And Galadriel definitely embodies female strength-she's the Wisdom figure. So, we'll touch on that as well.)

Many of the young women I know who are fans of the books find Eowyn the most attractive. Of all the woman role models in the Lord of the Rings, she's appears to be the most active and dynamic. Éowyn is a tom-boy's heroine. She gets out there with the men and gets the job done. However, Éowyn sacrifices a bit of her femininity doing so. Aragorn describes her as an iron maiden. She has steeled herself to endure the fate that faces Rohan. She's frozen her heart, for fear of being hurt. In the Houses of Healing, Éowyn fully recovers. Not only does she recover from her physical battle wounds, she unthaws. The love of Faramir nourishes and heals her-warms her heart once more. The love story between Faramir and Eowyn is so precious. He's not about to tame her-he simply pulls her over to his side. He sees this fierce warrior who, like any good mother bear, will fight tooth and claw to protect her loved ones. If he can win her heart, he knows that her loyalty will be forever his. And he melts her. She hardens herself riding into battle, and it takes the gentle sunlight of Faramir's love to melt the stone-cold statue and find the tender maiden underneath.

Éowyn is an example of the female archetype of the woman warrior. In times of great hardship and peril, a woman takes it upon herself to save. To protect. To challenge evil. Joan of Arc is a real-life historical example of this. Another literary example is Antigone, the heroine of Sophocles's tragedy.

Here's one main point that hit me when re-reading the trilogy: both women get what they want. That may seem unimportant, but it's not. It's highly unusual. Many characters never get what they want in books. Half the characters in Lord of the Rings don't get exactly what they want. For example, all Sam wants is to be with Frodo, and the saga ends with the two of them being sundered by a sea. Éowyn desires honor and valor. She sees her house falling into ruins, and it cuts her to the core. She longs for romance, for love, for brave deeds, a dire fight, fell adventures that will be remembered forever in song, and a life full to the brim.

Arwen wants one thing: Aragorn. To be with the man she loves. And her fight for him is one of endurance and patience. Women, like swans, excel at hunkering down and enduring hardships for long stretches. Swans migrate 3000+ miles. Women make it through 3+ childbirths. The power of women is the power to outlast adversity, to live through horrors, trials and tribulations, and endure it all with calm, equanimity and boundless courage. Calm and quiet, mystery and secrecy-these are at the core of classic feminine strength. Women are also much more relationship focused. Instead of striking out and winning glory and honor for herself, Arwen uses all her power to assist Aragorn on his mission. She is the perfect teammate-thinking only of the one she loves, and working with all her might to make sure he succeeds. She is generous enough to desire his success, because even his success is her happiness. Even though the price of this happiness is her death.

Arwen's more of a mover and shaker-the brains, not the brawn. And that's a crucial theme running through Lord of the Rings-mind over matter. The strength of her will is often remarked on. And there's little said about her, but one feels her power and her strength when she is mentioned. Hers and Aragorn's story is one of two individuals standing the tests of time. They have loved each other for so long. And Arwen is willing to face death in order to be with him. Like Éowyn, this woman has no fear of death. She would rather spend a lifetime with the man she loves than an eternity without him. That takes incredible quiet strength. She is willing to give her life for him. That is love.

Galadriel has a similar strength to Arwen's. She is wisdom and light. She is the Athena-like character in the story. Slightly removed from normal human emotions and passions. Goddess-like, tender and jovial, yet powerful and stern. In the Wisdom books of the Bible, Wisdom is often characterized as female or feminine. Galadriel is the archetypal Wisdom figure in the trilogy.

Recently, Mara and I were discussing Antigone, since I just read it in class, and was caught up in the amazing wondrousness of that play. We compared it to Pride and Prejudice, but as I revisited this blog post, I realized that all three of these pieces of literature have heroines that follow the same archetypes. Thus was born the idea of this series on femininity and feminine strength in literature. Stay tuned for more!

Light Lenten Literature (with a side of Alliteration)

My, my, but we've been actively posting lately. I wonder if it's the weather, or a desire to avoid schoolwork?

Anyhoo, I've just popped in to recommend Peter Kreeft's The Snakebite Letters. Why, yes, it is written in the style of Lewis' Screwtape Letters, thank you for noticing. Screwtape just happens to be one of my favorite books ever (and that's saying a lot, coming from the girl who can't make up her mind whether to go for the caesar salad or the caesar salad wrap), so this book has been sitting on my "to-read" pile for a while now. Since I work in the college's library, I snagged our copy sometime at the beginning of the semester and finally settled down to it a few weeks ago.

Although I didn't find it as engrossing as Lewis' original (in most of the letters, Kreeft tries too hard to be Lewis-writing-for-a-modernish-American-audience, and the cleverly diabolical viewpoint is a leetle forced on his part, but I loved the extravagance of Kreeft's descriptive phrases, as I tend towards that style of writing myself), it was still pretty good. The letters on the liturgy and all of its faults, failures, and flaws (as well as how to look past them to what is really going on during Mass) were especially interesting and enjoyable. So, while I wouldn't recommend running out and buying this book for your Lenten meditations, I would definitely pick it up should you happen across a copy.

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In more-than-slightly-related news, Fr. Longenecker  has a series of (very) short columns at patheos written in Screwtapian (if it's not a word yet, I just made it one) style. Personally, I find his take on the genre a bit more true-to-the-original and...zingy than Kreeft's. First installment here, with a complete list of articles here.

This Madcap Existence We Call Life

How do you quantify the unquantifiable, and reduce the unexplainable to a rational equation?

Martha Beck is Harvard-educated, brilliant, and married to an equally Harvard- educated and brilliant man. At the outset Expecting Adam, neither Martha nor her husband are religious, although both were raised as Mormons. They had agreed that "it was a very good idea to abort fetuses with birth defects." But when Martha becomes pregnant with a Down's Syndrome baby, whom she names Adam, she's not so sure about things. It doesn't help that her entire world has been turned upside-down with inexplicable events and miracles large and small since Adam's conception.

Precisely because Beck refuses to be pigeon-holed by either right or left, Expecting Adam continually turned me on my head while I was reading it. Beck can write (when describing her complete lethargy and weakness at one point in time, she compares herself to "Popeye during the Great Spinach Shortage"). Simple statement. I enjoy, I tremendously enjoy, reading the work of people who can write. Beck is witty, sharp, and sarcastic. When she experiences any negative or shallow reaction to Adam's existence in this world, she roars with all of the fury of a mother bear. Yet she makes it abundantly clear that it is Adam who has taught her what life really consists in: the ability to slow down and enjoy the world, not to be caught up in what society classifies as the necessities of life, to truly appreciate the wonder of this mad existence that we lead.

Beck writes quite frankly about Adam's existence as a person before his birth. Neither she nor her husband deny the humanity of the unborn. This, coupled with all of the incredible things that happen to her during her pregnancy beg the question -- why hadn't she become "pro-life" by the time of Adam's birth? She admits that she's come to believe in the existence of the spiritual realm (it's hard not to when someone pushes you out of a burning building and a picture shows absolutely no one behind you), whether it's God, angels, cosmic puppeteers or invisible gremlins. She does offer the explanation that "I myself had suspended my disbelief in a spiritual realm and was stumbling daily over more and more evidence that my world was full of things rationalist science could not explain. But this made me feel better, not worse, about the fate of those who die young, including those who die as fetuses. Why should people who believe that life exists outside of mortal bounds be the very same people who are so obsessed with a fetus's 'right to life' on this messy little planet?"

It is because Beck remains an "outsider" of the pro-life movement, that her memoir resonated with me in a way that similar stories, told by wonderful and fervent pro-lifers, have not. I am not accusing these people of propaganda (on the contrary, I agree with them on nearly every count), but because Beck remains as mystified at the end as at the beginning of her story as to why exactly she kept Adam in the first place, her words carry a raw honesty that is often lost in the charged rhetoric of the abortion/pro-life debate.

Beck's story provided me with much fodder for thought, but ultimately the lessons she learned from Adam touched me the most deeply. One thing that I've come to learn over this past summer is the importance of appreciating the wonder of life, and all the beauty and miraculousness that God has placed here for us. Beck does not hesitate to admit that her own obsession with achievements and the perfect life were entirely upended by Adam.

"I was afraid Adam would slow me down, and he has. Not because he has required more care and time than a "normal boy" (he is the most helpful and least demanding of my children) but because the immediacy and joy with which he lives his life make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style, look a lot like quiet desperation. Adam has slowed me down to the point where I notice what is in front of me, its mystery and beauty, instead of thrashing my way through a maze of difficult requirements toward labels and achievements that contain no joy in themselves. Adam takes his joy straight up, in purer form than most of us can handle. He was the person who, at two years of age, spent enough time experimenting to learn that his four-month-old sister was capable of laughter, and determining exactly what would make her laugh. He is the one who goes into transports of delight over clean sheets, or packaged waffles, or batteries. He is the one who taught me to appreciate rainbows -- not only in the sky but also in lawn sprinklers and dish-soap bubbles and patches of oil. He is the one who stops, and makes me stop, to smell the bushes."

(caveat emptor: Beck is extremely frank about her views on abortion and contraception, almost to point of rubbing the reader's face in them. She also swears on occasion, but I found it to be understandable, if not excusable. There are also some slightly, but not horrifically, graphic descriptions of various medical complications from her pregnancy.)

Dumbing Down Darcy

After a delightful, stimulating but intellectually difficult semester of Aristotle, Euclid, Plato, God and the likes, I prepared myself for a summer of mental marshmallow fluff (compared to the mental meat-and-potatoes of those intellectual giants). For me, a little chick lit goes a loooooong way, and I was about due for another bi-yearly installment. So, I scouted around the blogosphere and scored. Austenland, by Shannon Hale. Not only did I find chick lit, but I found chick lit that clearly had to do with one of my favoritest authors around. The book acquired, I settled down to enjoy myself, which I did. Up to a point.

Basic plot premise: Jane Hayes is a thirty-something New Yorker with an obsession for Mr. Darcy as played by Colin Firth in the 1995 adaptation. No mere mortal could live up to that ideal of manly perfection, and Jane's love life suffers. So, when her great-aunt Carolyn dies and leaves her an all-expenses-paid trip to an Austen-inspired resort, Jane hardly needs two seconds to agree. Austenland is a resort that caters to idle rich women obsessed with Austen and all things Regency. For a few weeks, they exist in 1816, living, for the most part, according to the social standards and technological limitations of the time (exceptions being made for modern bathrooms and makeup; cellphones not allowed). Actors are payed to romance the vacationing women, and Jane hopes she'll get a piece of the pie. But will this trip to Austenland allow Jane to kick her Darcy obsession for good? Or will she wallow in more daydreams of the perfect -- and perfectly unattainable -- Regency gentleman? This being chick lit, Jane gets more than just a brief Regency fling, and the novel does have some good things to say (more on those later), but first I'll flay it alive.

My first beef with the book is that it's chick lit. I like chick lit, in minuscule amounts administered at lengthy intervals. I think most women do. Who doesn't want to be the heroine, get the guy, and rub your opponents' faces in the dirt, at least every once in a while? But that's where my problem with these kinds of books starts. Even if the heroine is remotely life-like (and all too often she's model-thin, stunningly gorgeous, and has a closet larger than my bedroom crammed with the latest fashions), the story isn't.

I just have to come out and say it, unbelievable as it may seem, but life doesn't often dump all of these good things (clothes, looks, men, jobs, opportunities and talents) in your lap and wait for you to make your selection. Yes, chick lit is mostly escapist fiction. We want out of our daily lives and in on the perfect world presented to us in these books. But all too often this escapism leads to discontent with the lives we have. Don't get me wrong; I think our lives, as the lives of fallen humanity, are pretty pitiful, and we should always strive to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect, but that's obviously a life-long mission, and that kind of perfection doesn't entail driving a Ferrari or living in a chic downtown apartment. And as for the men in the real world? They're fallen humanity, just like us, and they deal with a lot of the same faults, disappointments, temptations, and icky real-world issues that we do (we have our differences, but that's a whole 'nother blog post).

Which brings me to issue number two: although Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy isn't real, ladies (and gentlemen, if you're reading this), he's so much more than Shannon Hale gives him credit for. Mr. Darcy is a wonderfully and realistically drawn character, and I deeply cherish the romance that Jane created between Elizabeth and Darcy. He deserves better than to be the prize at the end of a chick lit story. Henry Jenkins (or, as his Regency gentleman character is known, Mr. William Nobley), the Darcy-esque character of the story, is just that -- a door prize that Jane gets to take home with her at the end of her vacation. The real Darcy is so much more than that.

(Am I taking this too seriously? Probably, but two points: A) the copy of the book that I read included a study guide for pete's sake. You don't include a study guide with a book unless the book is worth studying. B) Any time you bring Austen and her works into a story, you'd better be prepared to go intellectual because that's what she is. Jane Austen did not write chick lit (this is why men are able to read her books); she put zing and thought and effort into what she penned, and that is not to be taken lightly. We may laugh at the opening line of Pride & Prejudice, but there are other universally acknowledged truths in her works that transcend the time in which she wrote them. A hundred years from now, people will still read Jane Austen; a hundred years from now, no one will know who Shannon Hale is.)

And there were good points: for one thing, Jane Hayes is obsessed with Mr. Darcy, not the latest celebrity heartthrob. She actually has standards for the men she dates, and they are standards based on a true gentleman. She's looking for a lifelong commitment, and most of the men she dates ("men" here being applied in a very loose sense) can't or won't give it to her. And eventually, she finds someone who meets those standards; she doesn't have to settle for less (they even want to have kids, albeit with the ever-stated caveat of "someday"). As far as chick lit goes, it's decent, enjoyable and clean.

But mixing Austen and chick lit? Mixing oil and water? I just don't know. Austen is so real and gritty (in a way, my friends; she doesn't rub her readers' faces in the crasser details of Regency life, but she does deal with reality). The idea of Darcy as a passive character to be won by a woman is inimical to the spirit that Jane imbued him with. In Elizabeth and Darcy's story, there is a beautiful give-and-take between the two of them that mirrors the romances of the real world. Elizabeth would be lost without Darcy, and Darcy's life would be far poorer without Elizabeth.

And, yes, Darcy is a fictional character. It's not healthy to be obsessed with a fictional character, even one as awesome as Mr. Darcy, especially as played by Colin Firth. But the spirit of Darcy lives on in the many wonderful, real but flawed gentlemen of this world. Why settle for a dream when you can have the reality?

Harry and Me

Finally, I've found someone who can summarize how I feel about Harry Potter.

From Left of the Dial:

"And what I’ve decided is that J.K.Rowling is one of the great storytellers of our time, able to spin a tale wonderfully, keep multiple plots in the air successfully, create interesting characters and worlds and situations. What’s she’s not, however, is a great writer, the way J.R.R.Tolkein, for instance, or Charles Dickens or Mark Twain or Willa Cather or Fred Chappell are; every one of them are both outstanding storytellers AND magnificent writers, whose language glows like burning coal, to borrow The Bard’s words. Rowling’s prose is never more than pedestrian. And that’s okay—Stephen King is one of my very favorite writers and he’s the same way: a phenomenal storyteller but a journeyman when it comes to the actual language.
[Interrupted for me to exclaim: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I totally and completely agree; there are some books (Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, for example) which, quite literally, made me cry with how beautiful the language was. Others, like the Harry Potter books, are marvelous stories without that same stunning impact: the language really IS pedestrian. And finally, there are the Tolkiens of this world whose language and story are equally full of goosebump-inducing, spine-tingling, make-me-hurt beauty.]
[...]
Now, breaking rules is no big deal, per se, as long as there is a consequence attached. You sneak out, you get caught, you get punished. That’s life. You run the red light, you get caught, you get punished. But Harry virtually never gets punished. Yes, there are a few exceptions, but they are comparatively minor. And here’s the thing: the rules he’s breaking aren’t arbitrary and foolish; this isn’t your basic civil disobedience here or minor schoolboy pranks. The rules are there for one very good reason: to keep the children from being killed. Yet time and again, Harry breaks the rules and, frequently, almost gets killed, or worse, almost gets someone else killed...and gets away with it because he’s such a skilled liar or because he’s Harry Potter and he gets special dispensation.
[...]
Again, I cannot stress strongly enough that I have enjoyed the books and that the witchcraft angle doesn’t bother me in the least; it’s part of a long and noble history in children’s literature. What bothers me is the fact that the hero is a charming boy who lies and cheats and gets away with it."


Now go and read the rest!!!

And then this follow-up piece.

And then this one.

Dangerous

When you have a 1500 word philosophy paper due in less than a day, do NOT visit this blog. You will get sucked in. So many pretty, shiny books! I'm going to read this one, and this one, and oh look! My TBR (To-Be-Read) list is now 300+ books long!

For the Bookworms

As most of us are here avid bookworms, I thought that I'd share these free bookplates that I found via wide open spaces (a lovely blog, by the way). What better way to proclaim your ownership of the best that literature has to offer?

From Martha Stewart:



From Blah Blah Blahg:


More bookplates can be found here.