Mark Shea has linked to a nice remembrance of C.S. Lewis. The writer speaks mostly of Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man, which is one of the few I’ve never managed to read. I tried in college, and it simply wasn’t what I was looking for. But it’s been popping up all over the place recently, and I think I’m going to have to find a copy.

I took my pickup truck out for a smog check today, and Dave, my six-year-old, came along for the ride. I brought a book with me to read while we waited–and so did Dave. He brought Ricky Ricotta’s Mighty Robot vs. The Voodoo Vultures From Venus, by Dav Pilkey, and while I read my book he read his book. He read it in the truck on the way down, and while we waited, and in the truck on the way home, and had a grand time.

This is the first time this has ever happened. I am so totally jazzed. Here’s to Mr. Pilkey (and may David outgrow him with all dispatch!).

A new Pratchett novel is an occasion for celebration in our house. When I
found this one in the bookstore I snatched it up and presented it to my son
for first reading. And the little snot wouldn’t tell me anything about it
til I had read it myself. Hmpff. All I could get out of him is that Vimes is
a peripheral character and there weren’t any witches or wizards in it.

Well, I read it in a longish afternoon that actually began pretty mid
morning and was punctuated by a trip to get my flu shot. And of course,
after a flu shot, you are pretty much incapacitated and just have to lie on
the couch and read until the throbbing pain subsides or the book ends,
whichever comes first.

This newest Discworld book isn’t a part of any continuing series Pratchett
has going. It’s more of a meditation on people’s inability to change thier
beliefs in the face of reality. And on War and what it does to people. Early
on I suspected he was gleaning material from “All’s Quiet on the Western
Front” though once the action got going, that faded into the background.
It’s not quite as boisterously funny as some of his other novels which was
fine. His wit was just as quietly sharp when touching war as it is loudly
funny when talking about politics or the arts.

And that’s all I’m going to say about it except that Vimes is peripheral
character and there aren’t any witches or wizards in it. You have to read it
yourself.

Recently I was laid off from my job at a state funded non-profit due to
budget cuts. I knew for two months ahead that this was going to happen,
giving me plenty of time to make plans in my head of all the housework I
would get done and all the cool projects I could work on and all the great
books I could read with all the wonderful free time. And then just before my
last day at work, my husband found a better, saner, higher paying job
relieving me of an immediate need to take any old job that comes my way to
keep the mortgage paid. Phew, I can sit back and relax and enjoy this time
around the holidays.

Well, what really happens is that one day you are part of an organization
and the next you aren’t and the abrupt change leaves you disoriented and
somehow in mourning for something that’s not specific. I was wandering
around the house in my pajamas all day and taking too many naps and drinking
too much coffee and eating way too much chocolate until I realized I need to
get out of the house more and set up a routine to keep myself from slowly
getting weird. So now I visit the library at least weekly and reward myself
for a morning doing nasty housework chores with an afternoon at the local
coffee shop with a book and a cup of ridiculously expensive coffee. And it’s
working. I started reading again and knitting again and stopped moping.
Moping gets you nowhere fast.

So, on my last weekly visit to the library I was browsing the sci-fi/fantasy
shelves looking for something my son might like that he hasn’t already read.
I saw this book by Bujold which rang little bells in the back of my head
due, I think, to a review of Will’s of its sequel. It made its way into my
bag of books. I picked it up one afternoon and couldn’t put it down. I was
as enchanted with this book as with her Miles Vorkosigan series.

What she does with the military in the Vorkosigan series, she does with
religion and clerics in this novel. She takes what is at least nominally
familiar to most of her audience and tweaks it enough to make it fresh and
realistic and yet still allow herself latitude to be creative. And she sets
it in a world that resembles medieval Europe with Church and State being
almost completely intertwined. There’s kind of a fun little nod to Chaucer
near the end that amused me no end. She does some very interesting things
with free will, fate and divine intervention and how they relate to the
lives of human beings.

The best thing about Bujold, though, is her incredible narrative skills. She
tells the most wonderful, believable stories in a style that’s articulate
and clear and descriptive. I can’t wait to find the next in the series at the
library next week.

Doyle is remembered for Sherlock Holmes, but it’s his historical novels–and
this one chief among them–that he really loved. I’d heard about
The White Company for years before I ever actually found a
copy on-line. I was immediately enchanted.

That was some years ago, and since then I’d been looking for a paperback
edition to no avail. It seems the book isn’t very popular, which is a
shame. I finally located a library edition, in hardcover with a library
binding and illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. It was expensive, but it was
worth it, for this is seriously good stuff.

It is the time of the Hundred Years War. When William
Duke of Normandy defeated the Saxons to become King of England, he
didn’t relinquish his French territory. And often enough his successors
not only attempted to expand English holdings in France, they tried to
take the French crown as well. The war dragged on for a century, with occasional fits of peace, and it is during one of these that our story takes place.

It is the tale of a young man who has been raised in a monastery from his
earliest days. He’s just turned twenty, and though he loves the cloister
his father’s arrangement with the monks is that he must spend the next
year in the world before he can elect to become a monk and dwell in the
cloister all of his days. (His father was clearly a man of sense.) He
immediately falls in with interesting folks, and shortly, to his
surprise, his finds himself squire to the famous (if impoverished) knight
Sir Nigel Loring. With Sir Nigel he travels to France, for Sir Nigel is
going there to take command of a troop called the White Company and lead
them into battle in Spain for England and Prince Edward.

Let me tell you, if you want knights in armor, and chivalry, and
tournaments, and all that sort of high-flown thing this is the book for
you. More than that, it’s a celebration of the manly virtues: honor,
honesty, stoicism, courage, and similar things American society would do
well to rediscover.

It is a tad anti-clerical–monks, friars, and so forth are
described in no very admirable terms–whereas Sir Nigel and his fellow
knights are (for the most part) described in glowing terms with every
sign of sincerity. There are good monks, certainly, and knights who fail
to achieve every knightly virtue, but it seems clear where Doyle’s
sympathies lie. And so I was interested to read in an afterword that
indeed, Doyle had given up on religion as a moral foundation for
society, and he honestly favored a return to the knightly virtues as a
replacement. Amazing.

I go through cycles.

Sometimes there will be weeks or months when all I do is go to work, play
with the kids a little, talk to Jane a little, read books, and sleep.
I’ll have projects hanging fire, and I’d kind of like to work on them,
but I don’t have the energy or the inspiration, and I know it.

And there are times when my head is just buzzing with ideas, and that’s
when the problems start. I spend the day at work–and then I come home
and (so far as is consistent with being a husband and father of three)
spend the evening working too. And when I get tired of one project,
there are (it seems) three more clamoring for my attention.

That’s how it’s been over the last couple of months, and especially the
last few weeks. I keep needing to remind myself to slow down and relax
now and then. So I thought I’d sit down and take stock by writing a blog
post.

Trust me–at times like this, sitting down and writing a chatty blog post
counts as slowing down and relaxing.

Continue reading →

This is the sequel to [btitle “Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds”], and as
with its predecessor I’m not going to say much about it this time around;
except that I took it off of the shelf because it’s fun, and familiar,
and comforting.

And also because it contains one of the funniest scenes in all
science-fiction, the funeral of the Lord High Meddler.

If you have any taste for space opera at all, and you’ve not read these,
you really ought to dig up copies. Good fun is guaranteed; tell ’em
Delver Rootnose sent you.

This is an old favorite, and as I’ve reviewed it many times before I’m
not going to say much about it; you can click on
Brian Daley’s name, above, to jump to a page listing previous reviews.

What it is, is a rollicking romp of a space opera. It’s not perfect but
it’s still an awful lot of fun. With my head completely taken over
by programming projects, I needed something both light and familiar to
relax with in the evening, and this fit the bill perfectly.

This book was much better than I feared it would be. It’s an
introduction to medieval literature that I bought it when I
was in Australia earlier this year, only because I’m a big-time
Lewis fan and had never read any of his literary work. I figured
it would be way over my head and dull as dishwater.

The facts are to the contrary, I’m pleased to say–Lewis on medieval
literature is just as readable as Lewis on any other subject. And he
explains many things I hadn’t understood, both in his own work and in
other reading I’ve done, and shed quite a bit of light on matters my
English Lit teacher in high school merely touched on. (Mrs. Martinson,
your Great Chain of Being lectures were not entirely wasted!)

I expected the book to be a survey of medieval literature, but that’s not
the case. Instead, Lewis attempts to capture the general world-view of
the medieval age–the Model of the universe shared by readers and writers
alike. In so doing he presents many examples from a plethora of authors,
and gives us some idea of what they are like, but that’s secondary. The
primary goal is that we should have some idea of the things the authors
would have taken for granted.

I won’t try to explain the Model; it took Lewis an entire book, so I’m
hardly likely to capture it in a blog post. But it has several aspects I’d
never have guessed. First, it was the synthesis of all extant written knowledge
by men who could not conceive that anyone would go to the trouble of
writing a book that was not true. Most books were old and venerable, and
were therefore seen as authoritative. And if all were authoritative,
then inconsistencies had to be made to fit. This led to allegorical
interpretations of many works that were never intended to be read that
way, and one wonders if it led to the rise of genuine intentional
allegory.

Second, the medieval world had almost no sense of historical period. We
are accustomed to clothing the people of history in period costumes; they
did not. They saw the Greeks, Romans, and Jews of history as men and
women more or less like themselves, with similar skills, similar garb,
similar institutions, and similiar habits. They perhaps knew less of
history than we do–but at the same time they felt much closer to the
Ancients than we do, for they perceived no essential gulf between
themselves and the folk of ages past.

I won’t say that Lewis has instilled in me a desire to go read lots of
medieval literature–but I enjoyed his book very much.

I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.