Reviewing Elizabeth Goudge's "The Dean's Watch" and "Gentian Hill"

After discovering Elizabeth Goudge through Green Dolphin Street—originally the movie, then reading the book itself—I decided that this was definitely an author whose bibliography I would exhaust. Goudge’s writing is unique, complex, and thoughtful. The plots are secondary to the characters, almost each of which is developed in exquisite (sometimes excruciating) detail. The writing is dense, sometimes dry, and so her books aren’t given to binging several in a row.

As I’ve slowly made my way through her bibliography, I’ve finally made it far enough to start recognizing a pattern. Mentally, I can stack her books in distinctive piles:

There is, of course, the Wow I Can’t Believe This Book Actually Exists It’s Like the Holy Grail of Reading pile, which contains Green Dolphin Street and The Rosemary Tree.

Unfortunately, there is also the I Really Tried to Like This For Your Sake, Elizabeth, But Let’s Be Honest I Don’t pile…God So Loved the World, The Child of the Sea and The White Witch are hesitantly, tentatively placed here. A Book of Comfort is also here, not because I didn’t have parts that I enjoyed, but rather that there was just so much that was dull and humorless and failed to strike any chord with me, that I would forget that I’d even read if I hadn’t written a blog post about it!

Finally, there’s the Elizabeth You Have Betrayed Me pile, where the books are not only “meh” but downright impossible for me to think about with a trace of fondness. It’s a small stack, but one that seems to have a general rule that governs it: the children’s books. That’s right, Little White Horse and I Saw Three Ships. That’s where you belong!

And now I have two more books to add to their respective piles.

The Mystery of the Missing Mystery

At the end of December I was nigh-certain I was going to "fail" my self-inflicted appointed reading goal, having been consistently ten books behind schedule since The Brothers Karamazov. (Why I thought that would be a good selection to start out last year, I don't know.) So in desperation, I turned to re-reading some of the Juvenile Fiction I've been meaning to review on this blog. 

It was the T.C.D.C. to the rescue.

"What's a 'teesie-deesie'?" you may ask.

Reviewing “A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe

 

This has been a rough year. I have hardly read any good books. And not for lack of trying.* If I have often thought of and felt books to be my friends, I have been cruelly betrayed many times these past several months. Old, trusted “go-to” authors have inflicted bitter disappointments such as Agatha Christie’s The Clocks and H. Rider Haggard’s The Yellow God. Even ancient writings like The Nibelungenlied made me less inclined to cradle the volume in my arms (as I am wont to do) than throw it across the room (as usually would be unthinkable!).

I have been searching for solace in reading, and haven’t found a safe haven. It’s a feeling hard to describe, but not usually quite so difficult to find. The feeling of comfort when one lays open a few pages of paper and looks at them, and somehow is transported out of one’s life and enters the existence of someone else.

But as Escapism has consistently eluded me this year, I decided that perhaps I was approaching the problem in the wrong way. I was trying to avoid reality. But books are more than an escape; they delve into reality so that we can understand our lives in a new, different, better way.  So I reversed my course completely, and read A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe. 

Practical Christianity: Traveling on Business

The main reason I wanted to discuss William Wilberforce’s 1797 essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes was the following passage, which I found both intriguing and comforting:

Practical Christianity: A Work in Progress

Among the (many) excuses people have for not exploring Christianity, there are two that are polar opposites, yet equally effective at keeping God at arm’s length:

1.      “Christians are perfect, and I’m simply not good enough.”

2.      “Christians are hypocrites. They pretend to be all goody-goody, but turn out to be just as bad as the rest of us.”

While William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes is an essay aimed at exposing the hypocrisy mentioned in point 2, he does manage to address these two claims: 

Practical Christianity: Rational Affection

One thing that struck me while reading William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes was how logical, almost scientific, his language and arguments were. He uses a lot of logical analogies to illustrate his points. He points to astronomy and the natural world, and even mentions Isaac Newton at one point. He also references historical, political, and international events to trace a pattern of human nature and behavior, thus laying a groundwork for his theses. 

He uses a phrase that I thought was interesting “rational affection.” We don’t often think of affection—an emotion—as “rational.” We don’t expect to be able to logically figure out who we’ll fall in love with, or to explain with a pros-con spreadsheet why you are friends with a specific person. Yet when it comes to our love of God, Wilberforce treats it as a rational act. Our loving God is not on our own initiative—we’re not doing Him any favors. Rather, our loving God is a natural, logical reaction of gratitude for Christ’s salvation, of appreciation of all the blessings He gives us, of acknowledging who God is, and of awe in how great and truly different He is from us. 

Practical Christianity: The Trap of Good Deeds

In his essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, William Wilberforce explains that one trap for “nominal Christians” (and even those believers that are otherwise strong in their faith) is the problem of works. True righteousness has nothing to do with what we have done, and everything to do with what Christ has already done. “But they rather conceive of Christianity as opening the door of mercy,” but once a Christian has stepped through that door the rest is “up to them.” 

Practical Christianity: The Purpose of Imagination

The things we care about are often the things in the closest proximity. William Wilberforce uses the example of feeling more keenly the tragedy of an accident on the street just outside, than the tragedy of thousands of people being slaughtered on the other side of the world.

And the things that are in closest proximity to us do not even have to be real. Our imaginations allow us to feel more emotion for the characters in the book we’re reading than for real incidents going on farther away. In fact, because these characters in a sense live inside us, they are in the closest proximity anything could be…and therefore might be more powerful than things going on in our own homes. 

Practical Christianity: Ignorance Is No Excuse

William Wilberforce’s 1797 essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, confronts the lukewarm attitudes of religion in his culture. It really resonated with me, more than two hundred years later, because there are so many parallels or foreshadowings of present-day culture.

One thing that is constant throughout history—thus putting my life on an equal footing with Wilberforce’s—is the presence of sin. Sin is often simply defined as “evil” or “wickedness” or “doing bad things,” but I would argue that sin’s scope is a little wider than your stereotypical “bad” things like criminal acts, but extends to anything that is against God.

Practical Christianity: William Wilberforce’s Thesis

In the upcoming entries I plan to discuss some of these “nuggets of wisdom” I found in William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes.  But first it might be helpful to know the purpose of this essay.

“The main object which he has in view is, not to convince the Sceptic, or to answer the arguments of persons who avowedly oppose the fundamental doctrines of our Religion; but to point out he scanty and erroneous system of the bulk of those who belong to the class of orthodox Christians, and to contrast their defective scheme with a representation of what the author apprehends to be real Christianity.”

The point of this book was for Wilberforce to expose the shallow religious façade that had become so prevalent in Britain at the time. Times have changed drastically since then, and while I can’t speak to the state of British religious views personally, from my observations in America we’ve drifted even farther from Christianity in its truest sense. 

Practical Christianity: Introduction

Awhile back I slogged through a very long and very dense essay titled A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes. For brevity’s sake (and to belay carpal tunnel syndrome) I will nickname it Practical Christianity. Published in 1797, this essay was written by William Wilberforce, whom I had best known beforehand as being an instrumental player in abolishing the slave trade in Britain.

This work is in public domain and so I downloaded a free version on my Kindle. I read it during my breaks at work, which hindered me from reading it very fast, and in the end I think that was a good thing because this is one book that one cannot simply breeze through. 

Reviewing "The Little Book-Room" by Eleanor Farjeon

I really liked Eleanor Farjeon’s Humming Bird, a novel geared toward adults. In a completely different way, I also like The Little Book Room, a collection of Farjeon’s short stories for children—most of which are fairy tales.

Like any collection of short stories, some chapters are better than others. Some were sort of sad, like The Miracle of the Poor Island, which reminded me of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Others (and these were the ones I preferred) were witty and tongue-in-cheek, similar to E. Nesbit’s Melisande. Here are my three favorite entries: 

Reviewing "Humming Bird" by Eleanor Farjeon

Whether or not to continue reading a book that seems “just so-so” is a delicate balance. I’ve heard arguments from both side of the spectrum:

On the one side, there’s the sentiment that “Momma Didn’t Raise No Quitter”—that even bad books (for whatever reason, whether boring or poorly-written or offensive) should be read to completion. I tend toward this side because sometimes I want to review these books to point out the specific things that make these books “bad,” and it wouldn’t be fair-minded to give a poor opinion of only a piece of a work.

On the other side is the equally valid philosophy that “Life is Too Short to Read Bad Books.” In general I do this by not even beginning books that don’t interest me, no matter how much other people may recommend them. Horror novels or novels that are gruesome or depressing don’t appeal to me, so I skip them in favor of other genres.

The best approach is probably a middle-of-the-road one, but there is something to be said for sticking to a book one is not necessarily enjoying. Yes, there have been times I wished I could demand a temporal refund, that there were hours of my life wasted. But there have been other times that the end of the book (or, at least, a good halfway through) was a vast improvement and made all the slogging through initial chapters worthwhile.

Feudin’ in Floridy: Lois Lenski’s "Strawberry Girl"

When I was about ten my family moved into a duplex with my grandma. One of its best features was that it had a big backyard. One of the downsides to this feature was that the yard was not fenced in, and therefore was combined with half a dozen other backyards to form a sort of vast green space.

Due to some logistical issues my family ended up living in my grandma’s basement for about seven months while we waited for the previous occupants to vacate our side of the house. Perhaps because of the cramped quarters, or perhaps because there was nowhere to store it, my Dad set up our swing-set before we were even properly moved in.

The other neighbor kids had started to think that we had built the “playground” for them. They would come and use it all the time without asking. Some lady even brought her grandkids to push on the swings. Not that we begrudged them using it (being new in the neighborhood, I was desperate for new friends and was all too willing to share my swingset with them), but my parents became concerned that someone was going to get hurt—fall off the swing, for instance—and then because it was on our property we’d be sued.

So, a fence went up. Actually, the main reason for the fence was because we had dogs who were used to being left outside in the summer. But the neighbors did not take it well, feeling that we were “hogging the playground” to ourselves!

All of this reminded me of a book I had read not too long before the move: Strawberry Girl. This novel by Lois Lenski was fairly well-known when I was a girl, but recently I decided to reread it to see what my younger self found so appealing.

When in Doubt, Try JFIC

It’s been somewhat of a dry spell in my reading life lately. (Granted, my “reading life” is rather redundant, as reading is inextricable from my “regular” life.) I fell seven books behind in my Goodreads Annual Challenge. SEVEN! Unheard of! Perish the thought!

Not helping was the fact that I accidentally left Henry VIII as the last of the Shakespeare plays for me to read--and it was SO boring! This would have struck me as impossible, considering the rather colorful life of Henry VIII, except I remembered that Shakespeare was writing during the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I…and therefore probably cut out the juicy drama in order to preserve her patronage and his head. I will say that it was somewhat amusing, Shakespeare trying to please everyone by making all the characters (Queen Katherine, King Henry, Anne Boleyn AKA “Bullen”) over-the-top noble and innocent rather than crafty and power-hungry politicians. And the end of the play is basically “Hey look Elizabeth I has been born and is now blessed with awesomeness forevermore!”

That said, I was glad to have finished off that most recent, and ultimately disappointing, stack of books next to my bed, and so excited to pull some other books off the shelf that showed more promise.

Along with Manxmouse that my mom read aloud to me, there have been a few books from my childhood I’ve been thinking about recently. These were books I read just as I began to read independently, and I remember reading them over and over…except I couldn’t remember the name of one of them. I knew it had a little girl in it who was excited about going to school…it was set in “olden times” (viz., 1900 or older).

With a little more digging in my memory (“I think the cover was green…), and with an open search browser, I was able to hunt down the title of the book: Schoolhouse in the Woods by Rebecca Caudill.  

Reviewing "Absent in the Spring" by Agatha Christie

Absent in the Spring is one of the six novels Agatha Christie wrote under the nom de plume of “Mary Westmacott.” While it’s arguable that some of the books Christie wrote under her own name aren’t mysteries, all of the ones I’ve read (and I’ve read quite a few) have been either mysteries, thrillers, or had some sort of puzzle to solve.

This novel shares many characteristics of a usual Christie mystery: an exotic location, some rather stereotypical foreign characters contrasted with equally stereotypical, O-So-Very-British ones, and prose that follows the inner monologue of the focus character.

Yet this novel is very different. What’s fun about reading Christie is that her style is very unique—always engaging, with vivid characters and dramatic plots—but she also experiments with things: writing in first and third person, having the narrator be omniscient in one book, and unreliable in the next, allowing the protagonist to be the villain, and manipulating well-known tropes to misdirect the reader and lead up to a surprising conclusion. In Absent in the Spring, she departs from juggling various motives and storylines and focuses on a small, quiet piece. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it as much if I hadn't known Mary Westmacott's true identity, but the fact that Christie used a false name for this novel (which focuses on identity) added another facet to my enjoyment of it.

I Claim This Blog Post in the Name of Barsoom, Isn't That Lovely?

Before Life on Mars was the title of a couple television shows, it was the concept of science fiction. While perhaps overdone to the point of triteness today, it was still very much a new concept when Edgar Rice Burroughs began writing A Princess of Mars a little over a century ago.

Burroughs' Barsoom series (that's what the native Martians--er, Barsoomians?--call their red home planet) straddles the line between the science fiction and fantasy genres. Fantasy is one of the oldest (perhaps the oldest, if you include ancient myths in this category), while science fiction is by comparison a newcomer to the art of storytelling. So it strikes me as odd that these two genres, somewhat on the opposite ends of time, are often blended and confused for one another. 

Reviewing "The Snare" by Rafael Sabatini

The Snare by Rafael Sabatini is one of those books that takes a lot of patience at the start, but once you get past the preliminary setup the rest of the story is totally worth the wait.

Set in Portugal, 1810, the story begins with a lengthy  account of how a Lieutenant Richard Butler of the British Expeditionary Force gets drunk and then invades a nunnery (mistaking it for a monastery famous for its wine production). As if that breach of etiquette and diplomacy weren't enough, Butler makes it worse by running away...effectively deserting his regiment and becoming an outlaw. Upon learning of the "Tavora Affair," Butler's superiors investigate, and because they cannot find Butler, assume he has been killed by the mob of Portuguese peasants that gathered to protect their convent.

Richard Butler is not the protagonist of the book.

The narrative then shifts to Sir Terence O'Moy, the Adjutant-General in Lisbon. Butler happens to be his brother-in-law, but fortunately for O'Moy's reputation no one knows this detail.  Despite being a selfish, stupid, and frivolous person, O'Moy loves his wife Lady Una so much so that he's covered for her brother plenty of times in the past just to protect her feelings.

Reviewing Gerald Morris's "The Squire's Tales" Series

The Squire’s Tales series by Gerald Morris is one of my all-time favorite books. Aside from talking about the first book I read of this series, The Ballad of Sir Dinadan, however, I haven’t discussed it on my blog.

Until now!

To be fair to the reader, I thought it best to wait until I’d reread all ten of the books. Although, there was also the ulterior motive of wanting to read them again anyway, and also the bonus that I could read these VERY fast and thus make serious headway in my 150-Books-a-Year-What-Was-I-Thinking goal for 2018. And because for once I actually had all the series on hand (the previous time I read the entire series, I had to wait for the author to actually publish them, so had entire years of waiting and rereading the first installments), I binge-read them this time, which made for a roller-coaster of emotions…for reasons that will be made clear, if you aren’t already aware of how the original legends conclude.

In this series Morris has taken on the monumental task of retelling the Arthurian (and related medieval European) legends. Many other people have tried, and most fail utterly to do justice to the complexities of the plots, characters, and themes of these ancient stories. While retellings are never quite the same in tone or faithfulness to the original stories, Morris gets closer than most.

What Do Mother's Day and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Have in Common?

As I continue in my brilliantly brilliant plan to overhaul this blog, I seem to have accidentally deleted my original review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There are probably plenty of reviews of this classic and much-beloved story swirling around the internet, so many that my paltry offering may not be missed. However, it’s important to me to have it mentioned on my blog.

You see, this was one of the first chapter books I read to myself, and it came about in a rather devious parental way:

As long as I can remember I have either loved reading or have longed to know how to read. My preliterate years were spent pretending to read out of my favorite picture books (which I had memorized), and clearly recall that I would stare at the words—strange symbols of black on white, curls and lines and dots that I knew translated into language—and will myself to understand.

Reading was literally a magic skill.

Just as it’s hard to tell the exact moment a stack of kindling becomes fire, it’s hard to tell when I learned to read. But in any case, I did. Finally I was there! I, too, had this magic power!