Sign of the Times

An actual section at the book store:

"New Teen Paranormal Romance"

I love Christian Book Stores

First let me say that the Family Christian Book Store is lame-o-city! It's almost as if the aisles are extra wide because there are too many books that they are afraid to stock. Now, admittedly, I was there looking for Jim McGrath's The Burial of Jesus. One look told me that I was not going to find it. But I thought I would poke around anyway.

There, right next to the study guides, was the Apologetics section. They are still peddling Josh McDowell, he he. But The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict could not distract from the glory that is One Minute Answers to Skeptics ...

What do they do with the 58 seconds after muttering, "Is, too!"

The Belated Book Meme

Here is the imfamous Book Meme

The rules: boldface the books on this list that you've read, and italicize books you started but never finished. (My score: 28 out of 100, 23 of my own volition)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (on tape)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte~
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee~
6 The Bible - God
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens~
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Oh, come on. How many people have read "Two Gentlemen of Verona?"
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - dude, I've never even heard of this!
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot~
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald~
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A Children's Book?

I have read that the Harry Potter books should only be judged according to the standards of its young audience. Aside from the obvious corollary to this - that adults should be prohibited from reading the books - there are further flaws in the argument.

First, assuming that a twelve year old does not care about poor plotting, absent character development and self-contradictory settings is patronizing and, I believe, a complete dodge. Megan McArdle expresses it better than I do:

"But the best children's fantasy does something else: it gives one the illusion that
the magical world is as consistent and real as one's own world - that it exists,
just barely out of reach."

More important is the question of what our children should be reading. There comes a point where you have to get over the stunning fact that your child is actually reading a book and think about what he or she is actually reading. Twelve year olds love professional wrestling and Bart Siimpson, too, but if you are thrilled that Billy is at least watching TV, you should have your parenting license revoked (yes - I use the v-chip and don't have cable) . A good book exposes a child to systematic thinking, consequences, clear expression of ideas and rhetorical skills. A poor one discourages critical thinking or the awareness of the motivations of others. J K Rowling does not fail utterly in these regard but to say that young adult literature is best judged by young adults is short-sighted in a way that highlights many of the problems in parenting of the last few decades.

*** Harry Potter Spoiled ***

She did it. J K Rowling flubbed the ending. I think part of the problem stems from the fact that after writing a book filled with thrilling adventures and near escapes, it is nearly impossible for the ending to be anything but an anti-climax.

In the case of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, she pulls a couple of fast ones. She inserts two - count 'em, two! - scenes to try and cleanup difficult situations. One addresses the Harry-Voldemort connection by bringing the narrator... I mean Dumbledore... in a dream-sequence/near-death-experience complete with white fluffy clouds. Then she throws in a suffering, injured baby whom we are instructed to ignore. Maybe I am just dense and don't "get" the universal symbolism here.

The second plot device involves Harry's viewing of the late Severus Snape's memories. Ah, Snape! Would you believe the character pivotal to the cliffhanger at the end of the previous book hardly appears in the finale at all? Yes. Instead the reader is force fed some twaddle about how Snape had been protecting Harry all these years because of his life-long love for Harry's mother and the piece of her that lives on in Harry. What?! Where was the ambiguity of Snape's view of Harry in the previous several thousand pages? Snape's distaste for Harry and the traits that Snape believed Harry shared with his father were completely untainted in the rest of the books by Harry's supposedly sharing of "Lily's eyes." There may have been a tidbit thrown in somewhere that I don't remember but the gross arc of Snape's character development made this sudden twist seem arbitrary. It is like introducing an evil twin in the final scene. If you are writing a book driven by discovery of clues, the reader must reach the last page saying, "Of Course! Why didn't I see it all along."

Rowling's failure (along with that of Philip Pullman) has pretty much soured me on writing anything myself. The danger of becoming that which I despise is just too great.

P.S.: Among the many failed Harry Potter predictions posted on the internet these past weeks was mine, predicting that I would not read the damn book. I bought it the first day at 9 am and stayed up 'til 1:30 am last night to finish it. At least the curse is now lifted!

The Inevitable Harry Potter Post

*** Warning - Multiple Possible Spoilers ***

I planned not to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. After a few months, I relented and checked out one of the six copies on the library shelf. Not a great book. Just like the others nothing much happens until the last 20 pages. Liked the girl friend bits. Was really annoyed about Snape!!!

Will I read the Deathly Hallows? I don't plan to (see above). If I find out the ending, which seems inevitable, will I even bother to read this one? I have been avoiding most of the hype because I am working on a writing project of my own and don't want to "contaminate" it. That said, Rowling has a lot to pull off here. She has to explain Snape's actions plus Dumbledore's confidence in him. Snape is the most interesting character in the whole book and she could easily screw that up. Let's face it, she is no literary goddess. I draw your attention to the Goblet of Fire. I know she apologized but she is under extreme pressure here, too.

Why am I dwelling on the potential for this to end with a thud? Three words: The Golden Compass. This series started out quite good. I cried when God died (I was mourning my own father's death but still ...) The spectres scared the bejesus out of me - much eerier than the dementers, which weren't too bad themselves. Then in the last book, we learn what the temptation is - teen sex! What? That is it? And then the spectres turn out to be created whenever the s0-called subtle knife is used to cut an opening between dimensions. Give me a freakin' break. It was so lame I simply could not believe it.

So, since Rowling's first six efforts have produced many ups and downs (maybe she should take out the bad stuff and just write shorter books - heehee) I approach the seventh, pivotal work with much trepidation.

Just so you know

Wondered Through a Bookstore

Some random thoughts on walking through a Books-a-Million store this afternoon (Southeastern chain bookstore).

- the Christian Fiction Section - giggle giggle

- "Christianity for Dummies" - double giggle giggle

- Christian Living/Inspiration/Bibles - the religion books take up two whole aisles. If I were a Christian I would not necessarily be encouraged. Do they really want to get into bed with the marketing dept? Old Question, I guess.

- the Social Science section - Why are there two sections, one for Women's and Gay studies and 20 feet away another on "traditional" topics.

- more Social Science section - Why is it that half the titles in the "traditional" SS section belong in the Politics section.

Lead Like Jesus?

I saw this book on a co-workers desk and had to wonder what a book with this title would be like. Here's the rough outline I plan to send to my publisher:

How to Lead Like Jesus
by Scott Ferguson author of Cooking with Buddha

Step 1: Be God Incarnate - It really impresses 'em at staff meetings if you can turn the coffee in to mocha. Rising from the dead may be best saved for shareholder meetings.

Step 2: Surround yourself with 12 guys who are completely clueless about your goals and strategy. You can probably round up at least twelve from Sales.

Step 3: Speak in parables to maintain the pristine state of those you hired in Step 2. Can you imagine the memos?

Step 4: Assign a PR guy in Damascus to try and straighten it all out after you "retire".

** Okay, I haven't actually read Lead Like Jesus. It is by the same author as The One Minute Manager. Since I barely held my lunch through three chapters of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and only by some miracle actually finished Who Moved My Cheese, I think I would rather spend my money (and time) on a double latte half-caf while writing snarky blog entries.

(Originally posted on myspace)