Monthly Archives: January 2010

Time Spike

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Time Spike, by Eric Flint and Marilyn Kosmatka, is the latest outing in what the cover refers to as the “Ring of Fire” series, and which Flint has elsewhere referred to as the “Assisti Shards” series (IIRC). I picked it up because I generally like Eric Flint’s work; and since collaboration is a normal mode of operation for Flint, the fact that this one is a collaboration didn’t faze me.

And then I started trying to read it. Oh, my.

First, a bit of background. The book begins present day, in a United States in which the town of Grantville had mysteriously disappeared a few years before. A few dedicated researchers have been trying to discover how, and as the book beings they are detecting something interesting, and of greater magnitude (they think) than the Grantville event. (For those who came in late—the book 1632 has the entire town of Grantville being transported to Germany in 1632.) At the epicenter of the new event is a grossly understaffed maximum security prison—that gets transported to the age of the dinosaurs. They aren’t the only ones, either. Joining them are a bunch of Cherokees, some Spanish conquistadors, and some prehistoric men, and maybe a few others. Meanwhile, the scientists are running around present day, trying to figure out what happened.

It’s no sillier a premise than that of 1632, and it looked like it might be fun. But frankly, it’s awful. As I said to Jane, “Verily it sucketh.” The premise might be OK, but the writing and characterization are just plain clumsy. I sometimes couldn’t keep track of who was who from one page to the next.

I gave up after forty or fifty pages, something I almost never do; and then I handed it to Jane, just so that she could see how bad it was. She worked her way through it one day; her assessment: it was barely adequate, for a day when she’d been up with a sick kid half the night, and when moreover she’d neglected to take her thyroid medication and consequently was feeling particularly dopey. The bar was very low, is what I’m saying. And even then she skimmed it, skipping pages freely.

I don’t like panning books, in general. But Flint’s a popular author, and his readers should be warned, and he himself should be more careful what gets published under his name.

St. Thomas Aquinas

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Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas. I’d like to say something profound about Thomas, my favorite saint, but I’m feeling a little dopey today. However, many, many others have written profound things about him today; here’s a list.

First, Godzdogz has an excellent overview of his life and the importance of his work.

Next, science-fiction author Mike Flynn has a roundup of things Thomas had to say, and especially on the topic of science. They might surprise you.

Philosophy professor Edward Feser has a collection of things by Thomas and by others about Thomas that are worth reading on St. Thomas’ day.

Brandon has a thought of St. Thomas’ about how God illuminates our minds.

Lex Communis has a reflection on St. Thomas, and particularly on his poetry and prayers about the Eucharist—prayers that are still used by the Catholic Church to this day.

St. Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of students, philosophers, theologians, and (IMHO) software engineers, pray for us!

Well, The Rain Stopped….

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…which, given the burned hillsides up yonder is a very good thing. Our house isn’t in any significant danger, but there are many houses that have been.

On the other hand, the rain stopped because the clouds went away. The sky is blue, and it’s sunny out there. Do you know what happens in cold weather when the cloud cover goes away?

The temperature drops. After a week of temperatures in the upper 40’s, I woke up this morning to find that it was about 30 degrees outside. I know that that’s balmy compared to many places in the U.S., but it’s rare here in Southern California, and our house simply isn’t insulated for it. I foresee a frigid weekend ahead.

But be all that as it may—the hillsides here are still up on the hills, where they belong. And that, as they say, is priceless.

Haiti

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I don’t tend to comment on current events, and so I haven’t said anything about the mess in Haiti. But if you’ve not yet done anything to help, please do. If you don’t know where to give, Catholic Relief Services and Food for the Poor are both worthy organizations; the money you give will get where it’s supposed to.

And if you’re a Christian, continue praying. (You have been praying, haven’t you?)

King Day

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A couple of days ago, my five-year-old said this:

Monday is Martin Luther King day. But he isn’t a real king, because there aren’t any queens or princesses.

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

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I’ve not been highly motivated to write book reviews over the past month or so, and so there are a number of books I’ve read that I’ve not reviewed. I thought I’d give ’em a mention and move on.

The Deathstalker Series, by Simon Green.
I’ve been working on this one for a while; finally got all the way through it. It ended much as it began: long on super powers, violence, and brightly colored mayhem, short on plausibility and character development. It isn’t the best space opera I’ve read, not by a long shot, but it provided a bit of diversion. The real question is whether I’ll ever feel motiviated to read them again.

Princeps’ Fury, by Jim Butcher.
This is a great series; it’s not as hip and ironic as Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels, but it’s outstanding high fantasy. I won’t bother describing it; if you read fantasy, go get a copy of Furies of Calderon.

St. Dominic: The Grace of the Word, by Fr. Guy Bedouelle, OP.
This is a biography of St. Dominic I picked while we were on vacation last August, and read a month or so ago. I’m sure there was some good stuff in it, but nothing particularly stands out in my memory. In particular, if I were unfamiliar with St. Dominic I’d start with a different book; this one is more an analysis of aspects of Dominic’s life than a description of his life and I think would be fairly opaque to anyone who didn’t know the broad outlines.

Neglected Saints, by E.I. Watkin.
I picked this one up in October, at Powells Books in Portland. It’s a series of short pieces on the lives of nine not very well-known saints, and was written in 1955. I was interested to read about the various saints, and particularly Blessed Jordan of Saxony, the second master of the Order of Preachers, but the author annoyed me a bit. The style at the time he was writing was to downplay any obviously supernatural occurrences in the lives of the saints—to either omit them altogether, or to include them with a bit of a sheepish expression. Given the far-fetched occurrences in some of the medieval hagiographies (did you know that St. Martha of Bethany ended her days in France, where she rid a community of a river dragon?), some filtering clearly needs to be done, but Watkin takes it a bit too far, I think. On top of that, he has an unpleasantly condescending attitude toward the medievals, referring to them as being like children. They had both their characteristic virtues and their besetting sins; ours are no doubt somewhat different. But that doesn’t mean we’ve any grounds for arrogance.

The Dominicans, by William A. Hinnebush, OP.
This is something of a biography of the Dominican order as a whole, from its founding in the early 13th century until the time of writing in the 1970’s; I read it as an assignment from my Lay Dominican formation group. It’s a short book, and rather dry, and useful, I think, more as a foundation for further reading than as a satisfying read in and of itself.

St. Edmund Campion, by Evelyn Waugh.
This is another book I picked up at Powells, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Edmund Campion was a student at Oxford early in the reign of Elizabeth I, and for a time was the protege of one of her counselors, the Earl of Leicester. But as the sanctions against Catholics grew worse, and as Campion’s convictions grew, he fled England and was eventually ordained a Jesuit priest. After some years of study and of service, the order sent him back to England with a number of others, to minister to the those who refused to abandon their Catholic faith. To say mass or hear confessions was punishable by death, and he returned knowing that he would likely be caught and killed in short order—as, indeed, he was.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.
Having enjoyed St. Edmund Campion, I decided to give one of Waugh’s novels a try, and so picked up Brideshead Revisited a week or so ago. I never know what to say about real novels; but it kept me reading, and though it isn’t primarily a comic novel there was one passage that had me laughing harder than I’ve laughed at a book in ages. (For those who have read it, it’s the one where Cordelia discovers that Rex believes all of the absurd lies she’s been telling him.) I might well look up some more of Waugh’s work.

Bone

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I am perplexed.

A few weeks ago, some blogger I read recommended a graphic novel called Bone, by Jeff Smith. Bone was originally published as individual comic books in the usual way, and then in a sequence of collections; but the blogger was particularly excited because the entire thing was now being published in one volume.

I’m perplexed, because I just went back to the blog I thought I saw it one, and it’s not there.

But anyway, it looked like fun, and I was in a susceptible mood, and I ordered a copy. And I have to say, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I not infrequently laughed out loud; and unlike Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, there’s nothing here I’d be unwilling to share with my kids.

I’m trying to figure out how to describe it without giving too much away, and I’m failing. If you like fantasy, and you like things that are funny, it’s well worth your time.

Mormonism

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My friend Michael Cleverly sent me a book entitled Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction, by Richard Lyman Bushman (along with
God’s Mechanics, which I reviewed some time ago). It’s a brief book, unsurprisingly; I found it to be sympathetic yet balanced, accentuating the positives about Mormonism without whitewashing the low spots in Mormon history.

I read it with some interest, as we have many Mormon friends and acquaintances, Michael not least, and because my previous exposure to Mormon belief has been minimal. I once read a book on Mormonism, plucked from a friend’s bookshelf in a fit of boredom, that was written by an evangelical Christian of the Dispensationalist variety. It was a highly polemical work, and I’ve never regarded what I read in it as particularly authoritative. So far as that goes, I found the author’s Dispensationalism almost as odd as what he had to say about Mormonism. Consequently I received it gratefully, as an opportunity to correct (or verify) the things I think I know about the religion.

I don’t intend to talk about Mormonism as such here, though I may later; I’ll simply say that it’s different in many ways from what I believe, but that we Catholics could learn a great deal about dedication from them.