Top Ten Tuesday: Great Book Club Picks

The short answer to this question: It depends entirely on the nature of your book club.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish! Do come join the fun...

The long answer:

For four or five years now, I've been part of a book club composed of Catholic girls with immense variety of taste among them. We've read everything from environmentalist treatises to Willa Cather to Chesterton to devotional works about Christ and faith and being a woman and Mary. It's hard to please everyone in the group, but over time we've learned each other well enough to pick works that reasonably fulfill the following qualifications:

• Under 200 pages or a very fast read
• Contains enough depth of thought to inspire some discussion
• Appeals to a fairly broad audience

If you asked every woman in the group, they'd probably all differ on which books succeeded best at this, but here are a few of the most memorable. I've tried to pick ones that would appeal to groups not necessarily made up of Catholics. :)

1. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. A quick, dreamlike read, with lots to consider and discuss. Bonus points for giving me the chance to talk about alchemy.

2. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. One of the few books that nearly everyone in the group actually finished.

3. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. While the tale reads very episodic, with little plot, it's a beautifully written, interesting and nuanced picture of Catholic missionary life among the peoples of the American southwest.

4. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. This book proved harder for some of the girls to finish, but contained plenty to discuss, which meant that we actually talked about the book for over an hour rather than drifting quickly into catching up on life.

5. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Barbara Kingsolver. I admit to only reading the first chapter—I think my head was too busy with my own book at the time—but the rest of the group loved it.

6. Dimiter by William Peter Blatty. Despite some of our getting creeped out by the torture scene, this relatively new release by the author of The Exorcist was moving, interesting, and most of us finished it.

7. The Lord Peter Wimsy mysteries by Dorothy Sayers. We've read the first two, which have always been good for a laugh and some conversation.

8. From Union Square to Rome by Dorothy Day. The testimonial of the former Communist who began the Catholic Worker Movement. Fascinating story, and a short, easy read.

9. The Shack by William P. Young. We tore it apart theologically, but it did have some good insights and was a very moving tale.

10. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. Another one I didn't finish, this time because the pagan menarche ritual cost me my suspension of disbelief (Dinah talked as if it were glorious, but frankly, I think it would scar most young girls for life. Also, I think it highly unlikely that Jacob would have allowed his wives to remove his daughter's proof of virginity.) But I wish I had finished it, because the rest of the girls loved the bond between the women.

We're reading Utopia (Thomas More) this month, and though I've not yet finished it, I expect it to spark some great discussion.

What books would you recommend? After all, we've reached the time of year when I need to bring a list of suggestions. :)

Surely the Darkness Shall Cover Me: Dealing with Creative Block

“Some must "stay drunk on writing so that reality cannot destroy you" (Ray Bradbury), others insist that "One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot" (Lev Tolstoy).”

"...to be an artist meant: not to reckon and count, to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear lest no summer might come after." ~Rainier Maria Rilke

Source.

"Moonlight is dangerous, but beautiful, essential for artistic dreamings, which is why, this week, in the darkness of the moon, I'm bringing the discussion over to the lack of dreams. What happens when the artist loses sight of the moon and flounders for awhile?" ~Masha

The moonless, starless darkening of the creative power terrorizes most artists from time to time. Sometimes it's simply indecision in the midst of a work. Sometimes it happens because of distracting circumstances, and sometimes the soul shuts down its own productivity in an all-hands-on-deck attempt to heal some wound. Whatever the cause, we who create all eventually face Masha's question, wondering not only what to do when the moon disappears, but whether we dare hope it will ever return.

Says Masha, speaking for herself:

In the dark nights, I wait, words ripening within, for the moon to light a new path. Not forcing words or faking inspiration. But I'm a part-time writer at best, with no deadlines to follow, and I have the luxury of time.

Says Mr. Pond, responding to Rilke's words:

This creative desperation seems in itself a fertile ground [where] an artist can take root. The challenge [to] any artist is not to be too afraid in the dark, moonless nights, to learn to welcome winters, and doubts and questioning. To find and love the hidden lights of winter, the darkest nights of stillness and starlight. To learn to whistle in the teeth of despair.

No two artists will handle the absence of the dreamer's moon in quite the same way. Perhaps we may not handle it the same way twice within our own lives. But we may take encouragement from those who have tried to walk in that darkness before us.

Bradbury’s suggestion of staying ginned up on writing holds a surprising amount of meaning for me, perhaps because I’ve used creativity as a tool to stave off destructive sorrow. Now, alcohol makes me first dizzy and then sleepy; it doesn't seem to affect reality for me very much—perhaps because I've never drunk enough at one time to, as Mr. Pond put it, use the karaoke machine. Intoxication may not be the best analogy for me. All my life, though, I've dealt with the troubles of reality by turning to the pen. On account of which, total writer's block has rarely come over me.

Tolstoy’s quote, however, baffles me a little. Perhaps that is because for better or for worse, my inkpot adamantly refuses to give forth its contents unless a bit of my own flesh goes in. It’s hard and confusing and often even embarrassing, but it’s the only way I can make the pen leave any kind of mark on the paper.

On second thought, perhaps I understand Tolstoy after all.

Rilke is a little more obtuse—the prerogative of modern poets—but if I stare long enough, I think I get what he means. It’s a slow and steady gain, not forcing what cannot be forced, but holding firm despite the powers moving against you. A wise path, that.

Because every artist and every time of creative darkness is unique, it's hard to prescribe any one remedy. A word, an idea, a change of place, a song, some contemplation of unexpected loveliness—any of these may inspire. Better yet may be an experience of art that holds the sort of beauty and truth the artist most hopes to capture in his own work. But sometimes the artist simply needs rest and refreshment, and nothing else will do.

One never quite knows what winds will blow the clouds away from the moon. But some wind generally does.

“This place of which you say ‘It is a waste’… 
There shall be heard again the voice
Of mirth and the voice of gladness.”
  ~Jeremiah 33:10-11

Songs of Praise and other stories

Source.

Both the brothers Pazdziora linked this beautiful paean to Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton yesterday, and I looked at the title and thought: wait, those are Neil Gaiman's favorite childhood authors? I am so reading this.

I read it breathless, sometimes on the verge of the best sort of tears. True, Gaiman seems to subscribe to the standard misinterpretation of Susan's fall from grace, and the various parallels between Narnia and Christianity have always seemed more to me like a love for the Biblical story of redemption rather than cold proselytic agenda, but otherwise, nearly everything he says about the authors and their works will delight anyone else who loved them. For instance, this:

I would read other books, of course, but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books to read.

And this:

I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that it had already been written.

And this:

Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

And there are others, but I'll leave some of the great lines for your discovery.

Read it, if you will. This is the sort of thing that reminds me why I want to be an author. Also, it made me want to read more Gaiman.

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Further, it makes me want to write my own paean, which might or might not include Tolkien (whom I took awhile to discover and longer to love), but would definitely include Lewis and Chesterton (mostly for Orthodoxy) as well as L.M. Montgomery, Jane Austen, and despite my discovering them much later, Rowling and Card and Hale. It would be far too long for just one piece, I suppose. But when Gaiman talks about what each of the three authors meant to him, what they did for him, I know exactly what he means.

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This week in the life of Maia:

Maia: I want to play in the toy room.

Me: That’s the laundry room, and like I’ve told you a thousand times, kitties aren’t allowed.

Maia: But there are toys in there.

Me: Those are potatoes.

Maia: They roll around when I bat at them.

Me: I don’t like finding them half-chewed and moldy under the couch.

Maia: OOH. And there’s water in there.

Me: Yes, in the watering can. Which I’ve seen you dump over by trying to climb on it. You’re not helping your case.

Maia: You’ll have to open the door sometime, and I’ll get in then.

Me: How many times do I have to trip over you before you realize that bolting in front of my moving feet is a bad idea?

Maia: I’m going to dig up your aloe plant while you sleep tonight.

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Runner-up writers' link of the week: Nick Mamatas shares ten bits of advice writers should stop giving aspiring writers. Includes some bad language. Also, much brilliance. Via Mike Duran.

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Music of the week: Eric suggested Morten Lauridsen the other week when I'd gone off on a rant against much of Christian music, so here's the O Nata Lux from Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna. It is quite beautiful.



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Random amusement of the week: Condescending Literary Pun Dog.

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Now, I'm off to work on rewrites of my novella, clean the house, finish reading Card's Xenocide because it's absorbing my mind and I need my concentration back, continue plotting a couple of important fixes to my second novel, and try to make some progress on dealing with my first novel. And get ready for tonight, because my beloved gentleman of a husband is taking me on a nice little date, because... because... because I'm thirty-four now.

Happy weekend!

Currently Reading: Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson, book 4)

The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school. But there I was Monday morning, the first week of June, sitting in my mom’s care in front of Goode High School on East 81st.

Goode was this big brownstone building overlooking the East River. A bunch of BMWs and Lincoln Town Cars were parked out front. Staring up at the fancy stone archway, I wondered how long it would take me to get kicked out of this place.

“Just relax.” My mom didn’t sound relaxed. “It’s only an orientation tour. And remember, dear, this is Paul’s school. So try not to... you know.”

“Destroy it?”

“Yes.”

Author: Rick Riordan

Synopsis: All Percy needs to do is live to age sixteen so he can fulfill the big prophecy, but that isn’t as easy as it looks.

With Camp Half-Blood under threat from Kronos’ army, Percy accompanies Annabeth on her first quest, a trip into Daedalus’ Labyrinth. But Annabeth refuses to tell anyone, even Percy, the last line of the prophecy the Oracle gave for the mission. Besides having to fight for his life every few turns in the maze, Percy has to deal with Annabeth’s confusing behavior, another unexpected half-brother, a reckless son of Hades, a mortal girl who sees through the Mist and annoys Annabeth, Grover and Tyson’s troubled search for Pan, and a hard-to-control power that he didn’t know he possessed. If all that weren’t enough, his archenemy, Luke, is getting weirder and stronger, and unfortunately no less vicious.

Notes: Percy’s fourth book is darker than the second and third, partly owing to its passing almost entirely underground. Though Riordan maintains the humorous junior high boy voice, life in the Labyrinth cannot stay light. Particularly not when our hero stands opposed to an evil Titan rising from Tartarus, and spends a fair amount of time dealing with a son of Hades.

Now fifteen years old, Percy has begun to think and act just a little more seriously. Annabeth mystifies him; he cannot understand either her dislike of Rachel Elizabeth Dare or her continued bond to Luke, let alone her various charged responses toward Percy himself. Determined to take on the burden of the prophecy, Percy soldiers onward, but to his surprise, he seems unexpectedly capable of destroying not just schools, but parts of America. Influence over Nico, however, seems beyond him.

Nico's character progression is excellent. Hating Percy and desperate to revive his sister, he starts off under the influence of a vengeful minor god. His summoning of the dead will make some readers uncomfortable, though in the context of the story he has some right to communicate with the Underworld and even exercise limited authority over it. But the direction of his story is toward wisdom. It should be interesting to see where he goes in the next book.

Darker by far than Nico is Luke, who, having sold his soul to evil, begins to suffer its demands upon his body as well—though perhaps not in the way one might expect. It’s not a gory or visual horror, but it’s horror nonetheless. Though Percy has no good feelings toward his archenemy, Riordan maintains a limited, if suspect, sympathy for Luke. Or maybe it’s just this reader sympathizing with Annabeth.

Despite the darkness, the tale seemed slightly less Vegas-y and rather more beautiful than its predecessors. Calypso’s island and the cave of Pan are both intensely lovely, and Daedalus’ workshop has a beauty of its own. Percy’s dreamlike narration of the former two gave off a stronger sense of beauty than I recall finding in either of his trips to Olympus.

The environmental sermon from a certain character was interesting, and amusing and poignant enough to keep the rhetoric from being quite so tiresome as environmentalist moralizing sometimes is. It was also one-sided and therefore short on subtlety, but meritorious nonetheless.

The Greek words and concepts got a little overwhelming compared to the other books in the series. On the other hand, I read so quickly that this may have been more my fault than Riordan’s. A second read would probably clear up all that.

Recommendation: Highly readable, with much to like. I’m looking forward to book five.

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Characters

It's a Top Ten Freebie this week, so I'm picking the seventh topic The Broke and The Bookish ever posted, which I missed by several months.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish! Do come join the fun...

All right. Limiting this to ten was a challenge; I had ten in a matter of minutes, and certainly could have kept going. Also, this sort of thing tends to change from time to time. But here are ten I absolutely love.

1. Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. I have never known a more brilliantly drawn, fascinating character of the larger-than-life variety. (The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling)

2. Andrew "Ender" Wiggin. About whom I could say just what I said of Dumbledore, only "larger-than-life" would mean something less humorous and more introspective. (The Ender books, Orson Scott Card)

3. Lucy Pevensie. While we don't know Narnia's visitors as intimately as others on this list, Lucy's name means light, and she is just that—light incarnate. (The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis)

4. Anidori Kiladra Talianna Isilee. Crown princess turned goose girl, Ani has a natural goodheartedness that becomes grace through strength and wisdom. (The Goose Girl, Shannon Hale)

5. Jane Eyre. Brave and passionate and firmly principled and intelligent, Jane is nearly everything a woman could ever hope to be. (Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë)

6. Hermione Granger. Brilliant and brave, loyal and capable. Hermione is also nearly everything a woman could ever hope to be. (The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling)

7. Annie Anderson. Gentle, patient Annie, sensitive and sweet. I love her so much. (Alec Forbes of Howglen, George MacDonald)

8. Anne Elliot. Austen's mature heroine, who has learned greatness through sorrow. Anne is exquisite. (Persuasion, Jane Austen)

9. Anne Shirley. All "spirit and fire and dew", one of "the souls by nature pitched too high/ by suffering plunged too low." Anne is poetry personified, and we all love her for it. (The Anne books, L.M. Montgomery)

10. Mortimer Folchart. Young adult books are full of young male leads for girls to fall in love with... and not one of them holds a candle to Meggie's father. Now that's a man. :) (Inkheart and sequels, Cornelia Funke)

Why are half of them named Anne? This I don't know.

Honorable mentions to Ian O'Shea and Wanderer, Heidi, Rand al'Thor, Konstantin Levin, Benny Hogan, Peeta Mellark, Harry Potter, Lily Evans, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Aravis, Old Parson, Miri Larendaughter, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Henry Tilney, Elinor Dashwood, Sofya Semyonovna, Bambi, Alec Forbes, Agnes Wickfield, Mr. Knightley, Mr. Bingley, Mr. Darcy, Cosmo Warlock, and many, many others whom I simply haven't managed to think of at this moment....

Who would you choose?

Music of the Night: Dreaming in Fictional Worlds

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. 
~Vladimir Nabokov

I probably tend to read with less charity and more criticism. When the worlds painted aren't as alive and richly colored as mine I grow dissatisfied. There are flaws I can't forgive, and generally they are flaws of attitude. I can revel in darkness with only the smallest flicker of light, but if an author gives the indication he doesn't recognize a character's personhood I'm gone. Stock characters are all well and good, so long as I can feel their humanity. I can embrace a world unlike my own, so long as it doesn't offend it.

Source.

Jenna, Mr. Pond, your charity impresses me, but do you draw a line where quality is concerned?
~Masha

The accolade of charity delights me, deserved or otherwise, but the format of blogging can introduce one critical confusion that I'd like to clear up right away. Blogging often mingles personal response with quasi-professional opinion a little too closely. I've actually (and very recently) begun trying to move away from that, to write objective reviews of the books I read rather than journaling about my own response to them—though I would argue that even the best and most professional reviews are somewhat subjective. Which contention is part of what got this blogalectic started in the first place.

Quality, however, matters to me as a reader, not just as critic and artist. I look for smooth sentences and prefer beautiful prose; I look for worlds drawn in imaginative clarity and strong detail, and for characters who show humanity in their joys and sufferings.

Most especially, though—and here is probably why I get along well with Meyer and Alcott and Rowling and Grisham despite their not-very-artistic prose—I look for a vision of light and life that resonates with our existence beyond the mundane. As Mr. Pond says:

A masterpiece is a world of night and shadows and moonlight, of wonder and anticipation and tears and laughter, that fits, and feels more homelike because it’s more true—even if it be more terrible and sad, or best of all more prone to laughter—than the capricious, flattening factual world.

What Masha calls charity is probably just that I find at least hints of this in almost everything I read. That fact is partly due to my optimistic tendencies and partly to my general refusal to read novels that will likely make me angry. Again like Mr. Pond, however, who calls Nabokov "one of the great literary charlatans" who "utterly wasted a talent for beautiful prose", I read with the understanding that just because I found nothing of value in a book doesn't mean that everyone will have the same experience. Mr. Pond continues:

I do not like Nabokov... But I like and respect Masha, who likes Nabokov. That tells me there is something about this man’s writings worth considering, something about his thoughts worth pondering. It tells me to remain open to the possibility that there may be something in these words that I cannot see.

Only a few problems ever thoroughly destroy a story for me. In Nabokov's case, it was a certain contemplation of the grotesque that I found particularly hard to put my mind through. But Masha hit close to my usual difficulty when she said this:

I can embrace a world unlike my own, so long as it doesn't offend it.

And with that, we move into the other two quotes she put up for discussion.

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."  ~Oscar Wilde

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."  ~Vincent Van Gogh

The Wilde quote occasioned rather different interpretations by Masha and Mr. Pond, so I looked it up. It comes from a dialogue titled The Critic as Artist, which I got caught up in reading—and in laughing out loud over, because Wilde is hilarious. After some acquaintance with the personality of Gilbert, who I believe stands in for Wilde himself, I had to smile at Gilbert's claim to be the moonlight dreamer whose punishment is the first sight of dawn. "His punishment?" says Ernest in response, in concert with my thoughts. "And his reward," Gilbert finishes.

Source.

Van Gogh speaks as an artist, and indeed as artists we spend much of our time in the night. The conflict is there, the struggle, the passion, the story. For us novelists, the goal—usually—is the dawn, but once we've reached it, the story proper has ended.

Of course, now I'm confusing the symbolism. Wilde's comment and Van Gogh's do not necessarily make the same allegory of night and day. They did, however, give me the same thought at first look, and that is that night as a better place than day doesn't really work as a metaphor. Not to my sensibilities, at least. If you will, it creates a world unlike my own, which offends the latter.

Such a response is a completely unfair interpretation of both quotes. I understand that, but I also have a strong inner resistance to the call to "Turn your face away from the garish light of day/ Turn your thoughts away from cold unfeeling light." It is true, as the earlier part of Hart's lyric goes, that:

Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination

...and more importantly to the artist, who seeks to disarm and soften the disbelief of the recipient, that "Silently the senses abandon their defenses." But to love the night too much, as the Phantom does, is usually to become its true child: a monster. Raoul may be cocksure and Christine over-credulous, but both of them still have a firm hold on their humanity, and must come out of the night to live in the day.

The story ends there, of course, but only—I suspect—because we are mostly too much children of night ourselves to fully appreciate the inside of happily ever after. Most of us are also human enough to hope for it, though.

For some of us artists, writing dark imaginative tales is a way of holding on very hard to that hope. So hard that though we dream by moonlight, our visions are ever of the day.

The Side Effects of Snow Days and other stories

Today, I am grateful for this:

Meaning the snow, though I like the yard, too.

...as it cancelled nearly all of my normal errands and meetings and events this week. Which allowed me to sit down on the couch with blanket and computer and sometimes cat on my lap, and push out the last thirteen thousand words of my second full-length novel.

This story has been blood and tears, mental exhaustion, uncertainty, the setting aside of over fifty thousand lifeless words and starting over, and the general writerly idea—nascent to the efforts of the long hard middle pages—that I Suck At This. But it has a beginning, a middle and an end now, and though I'm still scrubbing up bits of the final chapter before I dare show it to alpha readers, I'm relieved at having my red-faced, wrinkled, but whole little baby in my arms.

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According to Maia, we built the bookshelves for this purpose:

Everything belongs to the cat.

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Writers' link of the week: I loved this post by Sean Ferrell on the Writer who never shows up.

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Music of the week: This band may be as famous as all get-out, but I never heard of them till I saw this video and OH MY WORD.



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Random amusement of the week: Not only am I rather delighted to discover a site called Geeks are Sexy, I thoroughly enjoyed this comparison chart for Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.

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I think it may be sleeting.

And though I've written the first word and the last and everything in between, I can't help longing to get back to making little polishes on that last chapter. Of course, I also have a house to clean, and it's getting dark, which means it will be hard to sweep the floor... the days are never long enough when I'm in full writing mode. But then, I never get bored, either.

Happy weekend!