I first read this last July and enjoyed it very much. I
just heard that a sequel is due in June, and so I pulled it out and read
it to Jane, who also enjoyed it very much. I won’t say much about it
(you can read the earlier review) but there are a few points worth
mentioning.

First, it’s a Discworld book; but it’s also a juvenile. I’ve generally only seen
it in the young adult’s section of the bookstore; so even if you’re a Discworld
fan you might have missed it. Hie to a bookstore (or, more likely, to
Amazon.com) and order it! (Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg have cameos.)

Second, it contains one of his best lines in a long time–one
of the ones that doesn’t hit you until you’re already a couple of
sentences past it: “The universe is a lot more complicated than it looks
from the outside.” Think about that for a while.

Now, this you gotta see. Courtesy of Lileks.

This is the fourth of Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and if you’d
asked me some months ago, before I started reading them to David, I’d
have told you it was my favorite. It might still be…but I was
surprised to discover that it’s not the book I thought it was.

Or, rather, it is…but the events that I remember and that made the book
special for me and that I thought filled the whole book are actually all
jammed into the last thirty or forty pages.

Anyway, this is the book where Taran, through self-sacrifice and
hard work, finally becomes a man. This is the book where he discovers
his limits–which are wider than he thinks in some places and which pinch
unexpectedly in others–and makes his peace with himself. He becomes a
man who can see what needs doing, and will do it, as best he can; who
does not make excuses; who is brave, honest, and skilled, all three. Not
a bad package, I think.

Michael Friedman has a post on special effects that mentions one of my favorite movies, The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T. If you’re looking for Seuss on the big screen it beats the offerings of the last couple of years all to pieces.

I’d intended to post a review or two tonight; possibly, I still will. But it’s been an interesting evening, from an Internet point of view.

The first thing that happens is, when I download my e-mail, I discover that my weblog here has been hit with about thirty or forty pieces of comment spam. They are all obviously from the same person–but each one is from a different IP address. So not only did I have to ban forty IP addresses, and delete the forty bogus comments, I’ve no assurance that the same party won’t continue with their tricks. And short of turning off comments altogether, there isn’t much I can do about it.

Actually, there’s some add-in software I can install that will make my blog less of a target, but I’m waiting for MovableType 3.0, which is currently in Beta. I was going to install the add-in a few weeks ago, and then decided to wait for V3.0, which has spam-blocking stuff built in. At the moment I’m reconsidering.

Then, while in the middle of deleting bogus spam comments, I observed that I’d gotten a new non-spam comment on this recent post. It’s from a fellow who simply can’t understand how a seemingly intelligent person like me can possibly believe in Christianity. Charitably, he finally attributes my inability to question my religious beliefs to my geographical setting and points me at a number of pro-atheism websites.

The man’s entitled to his opinion, certainly, and he’s even entitled to say so in my comments section–that’s what it’s for. And I don’t believe he was intentionally rude; I think he was honestly mystified. But I have to say, the distinction between honey and vinegar seems to have eluded him.

And then, just to put an absurd cap over the whole thing, I got an e-mail from a college freshman asking me point-blank to help with a homework assignment. It was remarkably tempting to send back the wrong answer, but I restrained myself and simply replied, “No can do.”

My father did that once, actually. He was taking a multiple choice test, and noticed that the guy sitting next to him was copying. So he wrote down the wrong answer to every question, making no attempt to hide his work at all–and then at the last moment went back and fixed all of them and turned his paper over.

The May issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now available for your reading pleasure.

As usual, if you’ve been following the blog over the last month you’ll have seen all of my reviews and all of Deb’s, but Craig Clarke’s got some interesting stuff for you.

Lynn Sislo comments on an article about a young preacher who has been charged with heresy by his denomination. It seems that the preacher has been teaching that non-Christians might still be able to go to heaven; the denomination’s position is that that’s false doctrine and that he ought not be teaching it.

I don’t mean to speak to which of the parties is correct (though I’ll note that Holy Scripture and nearly 2000 years of Christian tradition are on the denomination’s side). Nor do I intend to speak to Lynn’s contention that if the preacher is really called by God that he has no reason to care what the denomination says (though I could say a few words about human frailty, as well as the fact that if God called the preacher, he equally called the preacher’s superiors). Nor will I go into the various means the Church has used over the last 2000 years to determine the truth of various doctrines.

No, what I want to talk about is an interesting contention of Lynn’s. She says this about the article:

I like this part:

…said the Joint College in a statement March 29. Despite “repeated, compassionate and loving overtures,” it added, Bishop Pearson refused to quit preaching that doctrine.

“Compassionate and loving overtures” to force a preacher to stop preaching according to his beliefs, which are more compassionate than the official version.

It’s that phrase, “more compassionate than the official version.” What Lynn is saying, clearly, is that it’s more compassionate to say that non-Christians can go to heaven than it is to say that they can’t. And I’m trying to understand the logic here, because it purely doesn’t make sense. Where does compassion come into this?

It’s not as though the preacher’s contention that non-Christians can be admitted to heaven actually admits them to heaven, or that the denomination’s contention that they can’t be actually bars them from heaven.

Either there’s a heaven, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans what either the preacher or his denomination says. If there is a heaven, as Christian doctrine teaches, then either non-Christians can be admitted or they can’t. This young preacher is either right or wrong. But whether he is right or wrong has no bearing on whether God admits non-Christians to heaven or not. So in what sense can he be held to be compassionate? Compassion that doesn’t lead to acts of mercy is just a cheap feeling.

Now, on the other hand, let’s suppose for a moment that there is a real heaven, and a real hell, eternal joy on one side, eternal torment on the other. And let’s suppose for a moment that Christians go to heaven and non-Christians don’t. I don’t care for the moment whether you believe this or not–just, for the sake of argument, suppose that it’s true. Let’s think about the implications.

The preacher is saying, “It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not, you can still go to heaven and have eternal bliss.”

His denomination is saying, “That’s not true. If you’re not a Christian, you’re subject to eternal damnation.”

Now remember, we’re assuming, for the moment, that his denomination is correct. In that light, which of the two is the more compassionate? Is it more compassionate to tell people what they want to hear, and make them feel good, at the possible cost of eternal suffering? Or is it more compassionate to tell them things they dislike, and make them angry at you, in the hopes that some among them will win through to eternal bliss?

I know which of those two positions has the greater personal cost.

I don’t know what’s in Lynn’s mind. But when I hear this sort of thing, that somehow it’s more compassionate to tell people that their actions do not have eternal consequences, I always feel that I’m being maligned–that the speaker assumes that I like consigning people to hell–that it’s a bowl of cherries to me. That I think that the God that I believe in loves me and those like me, but hates the people whose actions I disapprove of.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t pretend to any moral superiority; God offers salvation and the hope of heaven to every man and woman. The Christian who calls people to God is like a man in a power boat, rescuing flood victims from the roofs of their houses. When he says, “If you’re not a Christian, you can’t go to heaven,” all he’s really saying is, “The waters are rising. If you don’t get in the boat, you’re going to drown.”

Meanwhile, our popular young preacher is telling folks to stay on the roof, the flood waters aren’t going to go that high. Maybe he’s right. Me, I’d rather be in the boat.

And frankly, I’d rather you were in it with me, because I really don’t want to watch you drown.

My kids think I am the nerdiest mother ever since I began teaching, or I
should say, reteaching myself basic algebra this spring. My 16 year-old son
mutters things about mumblemumble mom doing mumble algebra for mumble fun
and, like, mumble get a life, jeez mumblemumble. My daughter is a little
less subtle. She just declares to any and all that she has the weirdest mom
in the whole world. Do I care? Not in the least.

There is a story behind this. I didn’t just wake up to some odd biological,
midlife, menopause-related crisis with a burning desire to solve equations
for x or to delve into the mysteries of the quadratic theorem.

First of all, my daughter is LD and needs mucho help with homework. She
actually gets mathematical concepts quite well; it’s figuring out what the
problems are saying and what is the stupid question that is hard for her.
Copying from one spot to another, as in copying down a problem and then
recopying it as you do the work, is another difficulty. So quite often I am
explaining and checking math. That’s ok when we’re talking long division or
fractions. Percentages are a snap. So is factoring and figuring out common
denominators. But you start combining letters with numbers in any equation
and I start getting just a wee bit befuddled. Faking it doesn’t work either.
Tried that—-she got every problem wrong. I got a snotty email from the
teacher. And next year she’s in high school with real algebra, not just the
watered down, wussy 8th grade version. Yikes!

Second, I am unemployed right now. I have a fair amount of free, quiet time.
There are only so many times you can clean the house. The dog is not a good
conversationalist. Boredom sets in.

Saxon is fairly well known in the homeschool circles. He uses a simple
format of 4 lessons and then a test. Each lesson teaches one small increment
or concept with 5 or 6 worked examples. Then you are given a couple practice
problems specifically on the concept taught. Finally, there are 30 problems
that review all the material learned up to and including that lesson. There
is a 20 problem test given at the end of the 4 lessons that is actually
testing things learned in the prior lesson set. So on the test after lesson
80, you are questioned on the concepts taught up to lesson 76. By reading
the explanations and then following along as the examples are worked, you
pretty much have all the teaching you need because everything is taught in
very small steps. There are no tricksy problems. All is straight forward and
above board. It takes me roughly an hour to do a lesson.

The critique I’ve heard of the program is that there isn’t enough
repetition. Some kids need the 5 extra worksheets with 50 problems each to
get the concepts and in a schoolroom situation, the teacher needs those
resources in order to teach. It also is just straight math. No “real life”
applications aside from the word problems. No hands-on learning activities
demonstrating why a certain concept is important to a particular profession.
Actually, I like that about the book. My daughter’s book from school is so
full of culturally diverse examples and cool scientific applications, it’s
hard to find the math problems in it. Curriculum committees might not find
it so wonderful, tho.

So I ordered the next book in the series, Algebra 2, and I may take this new
little passion all the way to calculus. I am finding the lack of ambiguity
in math comforting somehow. There is an answer; all you have to do is
correctly follow the steps. As an adolescent I found that frustrating beyond
belief. As a middle-aged adult, it’s kind of nice that at least in some
things in life, there are concrete answers to certain questions even if they
are questions like “what is the slope-intercept method for finding the
equation of a line on a rectangular coordinate grid?”

Keeping Watch is a stand-alone book, but the major character
is one of the minor characters in another of her books, Folly.

It has an interesting premise. Allen Carmichael rescues children from hopeless
situations. To be more exact, he kidnaps them for an organization that
places them in safe homes when either their parents or social services
refuse or can’t keep them from abusive situations. Often he helps both a
mother and the children escape. Rarely, is it just the child. And it’s all
completely illegal also making his life just a little abnormal.

This time his organization, headed by a Feminist With An Attitude, has been
contacted by a child who claims his father is going to kill him. They call
in Allen to watch the house and the child to substantiate the claim. He has
all sorts of interesting skills with technology and is able to, indeed,
verify that the child is in danger and that the father is extremely abusive.
He takes the child, with the kid’s consent, and places him in a family
chosen by his organization in the wilds of Montana. And then he decides to
quit. Living below the radar is too stressful, too dangerous and he’s got a
love interest in his life. Except the kid’s father disappears under
suspicious circumstances and Allen begins to wonder if the kid set them all
up, taking out his father after he was safely away.

The other half of the book, the background to all this, is Allen’s
experiences in Vietnam. He has lived for years with post traumatic stress
disorder and the residue of killing children in Nam. The risk of the rescue
effort is his therapy and expiation for the past.

The whole book is fascinating. There really is an organization like the one
described in it. In fact, King references it in the novel. Her descriptions
of people’s mental states are spot on without being over the top. The
waffling that Allen goes thru, not knowing if the kid is a psycho or a
victim is so believable. And it has a realistic ending. I’m thinking about
rereading again soon just because I enjoyed it so much.

At last we’ve reached the final volume of Brust’s epic three volume
novel, The Viscount of Adrilankha, and it’s a doozy: all the
swashbuckling, derring-do, and ridiculously long conversations you’ve
come to expect, plus the end of the story complete with a “Where are they
now?” section.

I hesitate to say too much about the plot, given that this is the final
volume not just of the extended novel but also of the Khaavren series as
a whole; I don’t want to give anything away. I will, however, make two
relatively general comments.

First, to my great joy and delight, Vlad Taltos is mentioned in this one,
in the context of Morrolan’s endless party at Castle Black. At least, he
doesn’t really appear as all of the action predates his birth; but Paarfi
mentions that the party is still on-going, even at the time of writing,
and that throughout its long history many of the notables of whom he has
written have frequently been found there…along with, occasionally,
other less savory elements. Which is to say, Vlad.

Second, we get an interesting insight into how truthful Paarfi is. In
Teckla, a Teckla tells Vlad of an encounter he has with a
wrathful Lyorn who can only be our old friend Aerich. In this volume we
see the encounter from Aerich’s point of view. Needless to say, there
are discrepancies….

Anyway, you should go out and buy The Phoenix Guards, the first
title in this series, if you haven’t read it already.