Book review: Lieutenant Hornblower by C. S. Forester

The twenty-ninth book I read in 2016 was the second book in the Hornblower series by C. S. Forester, Lieutenant Hornblower.  In contrast to the first book in the series, which was a collection of shorter episodes, Lieutenant Hornblower is a true novel; also in contrast, rather than seeing things from Hornblower's perspective, the point-of-view character is Lieutenant Bush, a new arrival to the H.M.S. Renown, on which Hornblower is serving.  His narrative took me aback at first: Who is this Bush guy, and why are we spending so much time on him instead of Hornblower?  The note about the author at the end of the book, however, informed me that in the first Hornblower book written "introduced the now legendary characters Hornblower, Bush, and Lady Barbara," so clearly Bush is Maturin to Hornblower's Aubrey and will feature largely in the remainder of the series.  As such, I can imagine the excitement of reading about when Bush first met Hornblower in contemporary fans of the series, if I can't share it.

Hornblower and Bush are both junior lieutenants on an ill-fated voyage.  When the captain is incapacitated, it opens the door for less senior officers to direct the course of the ship and claim either glory and a chance at promotion or ignominy and disgrace.  Just when it seems everything's going to come up roses for Hornblower, a final ironic twist of fate intervenes, at least long enough for Hornblower to apply his native ingenuity and will to a very different problem.

Novel-length Hornblower is immensely satisfying, as is seeing Lieutenant Bush come around from his initial skepticism to full-blown Hornblower approval.  There is only a single nagging question left unanswered, despite being asked on multiple occasions.  Will the truth ever out?

Book review: The Titanic's Last Hero by Moody Adams

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, I read a post on a blog telling a story about that night which I had never heard before:

As the Titanic was sinking, Pastor [John] Harper was heard shouting, “Women, children, and unsaved into the lifeboats!” And as the Titanic began to break in two, many persons jumped into the icy water, including Pastor Harper. Before the hypothermia became fatal, Pastor Harper swam frantically to people pleading with them to believe in the Lord Jesus so that they could be saved in accordance with Acts 16:31. Pastor Harper swam to one young man and asked him, “Are you saved?” The young man replied that he was not. Pastor Harper tried to lead the young man to Jesus Christ, but the young man was near shock. Pastor Harper then took off his life preserver and threw it to the young man, saying, “Here then, you need this more than I do!” He then swam away to other people, but several minutes later, Reverend Harper returned to the young man and succeeded in leading him to Christ’s salvation. Of the more than 1,500 persons who went into the icy waters that tragic night, only six were rescued by the lifeboats. One of them was this young man, who was floating on debris. Four years later, at a Titanic survivors meeting, this young man stood up and in tears told how Pastor Harper had led him to Jesus Christ. He further told how Pastor Harper tried to help others, but because of the intense cold, he eventually grew too weak to swim. His last words before he sank beneath the waves were “Believe on the Name of the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

Well, you know how reliable things can be that you read on the internet, so I decided to look into it. That led me to the twenty-eighth book I read in 2016, The Titanic's Last Hero by Moody Adams.

First off, calling it a "book" is a bit of a stretch.  It's more of a glorified pamphlet that was put together by John Harper's church as a memorial.  The first chapter, twelve pages, tells the story of what happened that night on the Titanic, and the second, thirteen pages, gives a biographical sketch of Harper's life before he got on the boat.  These are followed by several testimonials by people who knew Harper, a poem, and four surviving sermon outlines Harper prepared.

So is the story true?  We have only the word of the man who was rescued from the water, who told his story four years later and didn't leave his name to history.  I'd rather see a movie about John Harper than Jack and Rose, though.

Book review: Design for Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

As promised, the twenty-seventh book I read in 2016 was the second book in Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, Design for Murder.  Annie and her apparently ludicrously-profitable specialty bookstore are called upon by the cast of "Dallas" to run a Murder-Mystery Week for a Tour of Homes in a nearby town on the mainland.

All right, it's not actually the cast of "Dallas," but it's definitely the kind of stereotypical Southern community that go around stabbing each other in the back, sleeping with each other's spouses, and throwing drinks in each other's faces.  Fittingly, the murder mystery is an adaptation of "Who Shot J.R.?" in which everyone who knows the victim has a motive to want her dead.

So who does the provincial Southern police chief suspect?  Why, Annie Laurance, of course!  I hope Hart eventually finds a motive for Annie and Max to get involved in these investigations that's not clearing their own names; every police chief everywhere being a fat, corrupt, xenophobic Boss Hogg is already getting ridiculous after two outings.

Now that Annie is no longer coming up with reasons not to be involved with Max, she is less annoying, but Hart's contrivances still grate.  She clearly missed her calling as a writer for an interior design magazine, as she has never met a room she doesn't describe in fawning detail.  (Cream and rose must have been hot colors in 1987.)  When Annie finally gets to one of the Homes to be Toured, we get three paragraphs of English Sheraton cabinets, Meissen and Sevres china, French Empire card tables, and Chippendale mirrors before anyone gets any dialogue out.

More annoying is Hart's "I am eccentric, you are weird, he is crazy" attitude toward her characters. Early on, we see Max turning down a job he considers beneath him: digging up dirt on a property owner to blackmail him to sell his land to a developer at a bargain-basement price.  "Why don't you go after your money the old-fashioned way, Jenkins?"  he sneers.  "Why don't you earn it?"  Which, frankly, is rich, coming from a heir to a fortune who can't be bothered to take the South Carolina bar exam because it's just too much work.  But Max, Hart assures us, is a Good Rich Person, as opposed to everyone else on the island, who are Bad Rich People, though what evidence she has for that other than his inclination to spend his money at a whim on Annie rather than on some form of employment is never made clear.  And Annie herself falsifies the entries to her Murder Mystery game so that someone she knows can lay claim to part of the prize, an act that we're apparently supposed to think is kind rather than fraudulent.

Book review: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester

After hearing good things about it for many years, Tommy and I finally started watching the Hornblower movies starring Ioan Gruffudd and shown on A&E around the turn of the millennium.  Having watched the first few disks, I decided to seek out the original books as well.  Thus, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower became the twenty-sixth book I read in 2016.

Although the first chronologically, Midshipman was the sixth of the Hornblower series C. S. Forester wrote, having begun in medias res with Hornblower in command of his own ship and then gone back to fill in the beginning of his naval career.  Hornblower's series is set during the Napoleonic Wars, thus making him a contemporary both of Jack Aubrey and of William Price, and contemplating the period through so many fictional characters is a delight.  Hornblower is written as more of a straightforward adventure story than the more soap-operatic focus of the Aubrey-Maturin series on its protagonists' personal lives, and nameless extras are killed off with gleeful abandon in the background where Jack Aubrey's crew is made up of more individuals whose demises strike closer to home.

Comparing the book to the beginning of the series of TV movies which are based on it, Hornblower comes off as a bit less of a moral paragon in the book than as portrayed by Gruffudd.  The greatest liberties were taken with "Hornblower, the Duchess, and the Devil," in which the part played by the titular Duchess was vastly expanded, no doubt because it's an embarrassment to a modern studio to have a series without a major female character.  For simplicity's sake, many of the same things happen to the same cast of characters in the TV version, which strains credulity a bit, whereas Forester has no problem introducing new characters in his stories.  (Of course, he didn't have to pay multiple actors, either.)

I quite enjoyed the book and am looking forward to the rest of the series.

Book review: Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear

The twenty-fifth book I read in 2016 was the second book in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, Birds of a Feather.  I'm already wondering how far the author can go connecting mysteries to World War I; so far, all of Maisie's investigations have their origin point in the Great War.   In this book, a self-made man who rose from rags to riches in the grocery business hires Maisie to locate his heiress daughter, who has a history of running away from home.  What seems to be a frivolous case turns quickly foreboding when former friends of the missing woman start turning up murdered.

On the plus side, there's not another flashback to Maisie's salad days.  In the negative column, the whole "Maisie is psychic" angle gets played up even more.  Now her affinity to the spiritual realm is even cited as a reason Maurice took her on in the first place, when the extended flashback in the previous book didn't mention her gifts in that area until after she was already well advanced in her education.  And Billy is an opium fiend!  Only not really; he was accidentally overdosed when he was injured in the war and has suddenly started using again though no fault of his own: it was the war, you see....

I'm going to spoil the resolution a bit, so here's a bit of space if you don't care to be spoiled.

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So the whole thing has to do with the white feather tradition and a bereaved family member blaming those who shamed young men into joining up by giving them a feather, implying cowardice, for not being in uniform.  But as Maisie herself admits, those who didn't enlist voluntarily would have been drafted eventually anyway.  We seem to be supposed to sympathize with the murderer (it was the war, you see...), but it's hard to figure why the villain/victim decides to kill so long after the deaths in question.  It's hardly sudden passion.

Book review: The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith

The twenty-fourth book I read in 2016 was the fifth of Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie novels, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday.  Since I read book four, which I panned, I ran across a review of one of the books that suggested that McCall Smith intended for Isabel to come across as a modern Emma Woodhouse.  It's certainly a reasonable suggestion, since he has, in fact, written a modern Emma, which is on my to-read list, and while I'm not convinced it's an altogether successful gambit (largely because Isabel is older and should Know Better, while the original Emma has her youth and inexperience to excuse her unbearable tendencies), keeping it in the back of my mind did allow me to read this book without hating the protagonist as much as I have in previous forays.

In this installment, Isabel is enlisted to look into the mystery of a doctor whose career ended when he was accused of covering up inconvenient data in a drug trial.  If I say it amounts to as much as the mystery of Harriet Smith's parentage, you'll understand me.  She is also jealous of a new friend of Jamie's, loans Eddie money under false pretenses (or are they?  Really, who knows or cares?), and carries on an internal debate whether or not to be small and petty to the man she forced off the board of the magazine she bought last book.  All understandable acts of a spoiled teenager but less charming coming from a forty-year-old.

Book review: Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

"Superladies?  They're always trying to tell you their secret identity ... think it will strengthen the relationship or something like that.  I say, 'Girl, I don't wanna know about your mild-mannered alter ego or anything like that.  I mean, you tell me you're, uh, S-Super, Mega, Ultra Lightning Babe, that's all right with me.  I'm good.... I'm good.'" -- Frozone

"Sorry, blondie, I don't do backstory."  -- Flynn Rider

Because Tommy bought many of my Lord Peter Wimsey and Precious Ramotswe books as Christmas and birthday presents, Amazon tends to offer him similar books as recommendations.  One of these recommendations was Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear.  He asked if I'd heard of it, I said no, and he decided to order it for me anyway.  So it became the twenty-third book I read in 2016.

Published in 2003, Maisie Dobbs is nonetheless set in London between the wars, just like the Peter Wimsey books.  We open with the titular heroine opening her office as a professional investigator.  In due time, she is hired for her first case, what seems like it may be a routine job following a wife whose husband suspects her of unfaithfulness.  Of course, since this is a detective novel, it turns out to be nothing so prosaic.  Maisie is competent and inventive, even if her primary schtick of discerning people's moods and emotions by aping their physical posture is a bit out there.  We are chugging along blithely for sixty-four pages when we run head on into a leviathan of a flashback.

Granted, the author has to know her protagonist's backstory.  But frankly, I was doing fine with it all being a bit vague: Maisie has an aristocratic benefactor and a European mentor; there's reference to a tragic love story as a nurse during the WWI years; she is currently romantically unattached and good at her job. But, no, Winspear has put a lot of thought into Maisie's past, and we're going to get it all, plopped down in the middle of the tracks like a landslide.

It's not terrible.  Enid is an arresting character, but she is truly the only part of Maisie's backstory that isn't predictable.  Pris, Iris, and Simon are straight out of BBC Central Casting.  But they're necessary for the big tear-jerking reveal at the end of the book, if not for the actual mystery they interrupt.  The thing is, I respect Maisie less for her by-the-book rags-to-riches story.  I can't help but think that Simon and Maisie's tragic romance would have been more affecting if it had been left more to the reader's imagination to fill in: less detailed -- and less stereotypical.  

Winspear was, at least, smart enough not to tell her story chronologically and open the book with Maisie-at-thirteen.  There's no way I would have made it through those 134 pages of 'Maisie grows up' if she hadn't already hooked me with Maisie grown-up.

Book review: The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith

The twenty-second book I read in 2016 was The Careful Use of Compliments, the fourth book in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series.  As you may recall from my review of the third book of the series, I don't like Isabel Dalhousie.  In fact, I stated my intention not to pay more than $5 at Half Price Books for future installments just out of morbid curiosity.

Well, I've been looking at Half Price Books for months now, and while the rest of the Dalhousie oeuvre has been readily available, book four has been playing hard to get.  The result of all this coyness was that, when I found The Careful Use of Compliments on the shelf, I snatched it up with an alacrity all out of proportion for the amount of pleasure I expected it to give me.

Having got past that realization, I can at least report that reading this book has clarified in my mind exactly why I hate Isabel.  She's a manipulative narcissist who's too smart for the room and is constantly inventing little games for other people to fail: 'You said that, so now I will say this, and if you really love me, you will respond with that, but since you responded differently, I know that you don't really love me.'  Such a character could conceivably still make an interesting heroine, but McCall Smith seems to expect everyone to think Isabel is absolutely the bee's knees.

For example, the B-plot of this novel revolves around Isabel performing an act of breathtaking pettiness which the author clearly thinks should have readers on their feet cheering.  The book opens with Isabel receiving a letter from the editorial board of the magazine she edits saying that they've voted to replace her, due to political machinations by an academic board member hoping to use the editorship as a springboard to career success.  Even given that Isabel doesn't need the money or the job, this is still A Bad Thing, and I felt her humiliation.  Her response to the situation, however, (and I don't feel bad about spoiling this because it's telegraphed so clearly from the moment the issue arises and she mentions that the magazine's owners would be please to sell it if they got an offer) is to use her own sizeable fortune to buy the magazine, reinstate herself as editor, fire all the board members, and replace them with her own personal friends so that no one will ever dare say anything mean to her again.  Isabel Dalhousie is a Horrible Person.

The A-plot, what would have passed as the mystery if McCall Smith hadn't given up on the very premise, involves some paintings which may or may not be forgeries and is actually quite unobjectionable in comparison with some of Isabel's previous pointless "investigations."  I have no quarrel with it.  Isabel's baby is an annoying plot device, and McCall Smith descends to some pretty unfair character assassination to convince us (or himself) that Cat is a Bad Person whose feelings about her ex-boyfriend having a baby with her aunt can be callously dismissed.

Book review: Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg

The twenty-first book I read in 2016 was Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters by Mallory Ortberg.  It was a birthday gift from my friend Leslie.

Mallory Ortberg is the co-creator of a website I've never heard of, which is consistent with the tone of the book (the website part, not the I've-never-heard-of-it part).  It's basically a series of imagined text conversations, mostly between fictional characters from classic literature. (Some not; more on that in a bit.)  It's irreverent, mildly mean-spirited, and heavily potty-mouthed (because you can tell how "authentic" someone is by how many times they curse in casual conversation).

If you are a former lit major, the book will give you that pleasant self-satisfied glow of erudition, because you totally know who Glauce is and why it's funny that the number Dido is texting has been disconnected.  I found the Les Mis chapter-ette particularly hilarious as it made fun of Marius for being a spoiled rich kid who doesn't even know what he's rebelling against at the barricades.  You can get that one just from having seen the musical.

However, some of the text messages aren't ascribed to fictional characters but to actual personages, particularly poets.  I found those rather unfair.  Pick on J. Alfred Prufrock if you like, but making fun of Wordsworth because he was wandering lonely as a cloud is unsporting.  I don't think there's a poem in existence you can't make sound ridiculous by inserting it into everyday conversation.  And no one pokes fun at Emily Dickinson on my watch.

Book review: Imperium by Robert Harris

The twentieth book I read in 2016 was Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris.  This is the first in a historical fiction trilogy based on the career of Cicero.  As such, it's set during the same time period as Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder series, and it's interesting seeing the same historical personages interpreted in some very different ways.  Rufus is much more of a party boy in Harris's novel, and Cicero's family barely rates a mention in Saylor's books, though both authors can agree in their dislike for Crassus.

The scopes of the series, of course, are entirely different.  Saylor presents Cicero as an occasional employer/nemesis in a series of gritty urban detective novels, while Harris focuses on Cicero as the main character in a political thriller.  The first half of Imperium is a gripping courtroom drama, as Cicero takes on the wealthy and the well-connected in a trial which will either make or break his career; the second half shifts into a political story of favors, negotiations, and schemes as Cicero tries to win election to the office of consul in the face of opposition he stirred up in the trial which brought him fame.

Harris's Cicero flirts with being a hero but inevitably enters into compromises that undermine his appeal to the reader.  Even when he is doing the noble thing, one must constantly remind himself that he's doing it for his own political advancement.  He begins the book by prosecuting a corrupt governor who looted and oppressed the people of his province and becomes a hero to the Roman people, but later he defends a governor little less corrupt to advance his career.  It is not surprising that Saylor's Gordianus finds his Cicero self-serving and without principles, though Harris is more sympathetic toward the difficulties Cicero faced and the deals he had to strike to climb the ladder of power as a "new man" with no pre-existing connection to the powerful and jealous Roman aristocracy.

Book review: The Collapse of Parenting by Leonard Sax

"Sometimes you have to wait before you eat the doughnuts.  Sometimes you don't get to eat the doughnuts at all.  That's life."

The nineteenth book I read in 2016 was The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups by Leonard Sax.  There is nothing new or groundbreaking in this book.  It diagnoses the same sorts of problems many other right-of-center parenting books point to: lack of parental authority, the unexamined conceit that that which is newer is also therefore better, a culture which celebrates disrespect, etc.  Sax is a good writer, though, and tells some enjoyable anecdotes along the way, even if The Simpsons got there first way back in December of 1995:

Book review: Eruption by Steve Olson

The eighteenth book I read in 2016 was Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount Saint Helens by Steve Olson.  The eruption of Mount Saint Helens was a formative event in my childhood.  I remember the news stories, the old man who wouldn't leave the mountain, the live Christmas tree we bought in 1980 with a thin coating of ash on the needles.  And I've always been a sucker for real-disaster stories.  I used to read the plane crash or earthquake feature stories in Reader's Digest, where a group of disparate people started their morning having no clue what was in store for them that day, and try to guess which ones would survive: "This paragraph says she thought about going to the grocery store while driving to the airport, so she must survive because otherwise no one would know what she had been thinking."  So that made me a natural reader for this book about the eruption.

When it comes right down to 'who lives and who dies' the morning of the eruption, the mountain was remarkably fickle.  Some people camping very close to the mountain survive, thanks to an intervening hill which provided some shelter from the pyroclastic flow; others farther away but with a clear view to the volcano die almost instantly.  Some campers manage to hike out of the transformed landscape; returning after the eruption, they find that their friends were killed when a log fell on their tent, but the dogs with them somehow survived unscathed.  Two men are riding horses; one takes shelter in a cave and dies; the other dives into a river as the explosion passes overhead, hikes several miles toward a nearby town ... and then dies anyway, unable to find help.

Irony abounds in the story of a conservation group lobbying to save old-growth forest from logging. A few days before the eruption, they lead a hike through a certain section of untouched forest, hoping to persuade the government to declare it a preserve, off-limits to loggers, so that future generations can see its virgin beauty.  In seconds, the eruption flattens each and every one of those ancient trees far more completely than any logging company.  (The conservation group switches to support preserving the destroyed forest as a historical site after the eruption so that the power of the volcano can be seen and appreciated.)

If you're interested in Mount Saint Helens or natural disasters in general, this is an enjoyable read, but the author reaches a bit, in my opinion, to find an axe to grind and a handful of villains to point to. The governor of Washington state at the time comes off very poorly in his telling, and she may well deserve to.

Olson's attempt to paint the CEO of the Weyerhaeuser logging company as a bad guy is less successful.  Much is made of the company's refusal to stop operations in the area before the eruption, but as even the author admits, the wholly-inadequate designated "safe zones" were drawn up by government officials, not the company.  In addition, one has to remember that no one knew when, or if, the volcano would actually erupt.  It had been threatening for two months.  If the company had idled its workers for that long, wouldn't it have been the target of complaints for an abundance of caution, depriving families in an economically-depressed area of income, particularly if the eruption had, as it could well have, turned out to be less dramatic than it did?

In any case, the Sunday morning eruption spared the lives of many men who would have died if the volcano had blown during a working day, a fact for which we can be thankful.  George Weyerhaeuser did not speak to the book's author about the disaster, but despite Olson's best efforts to paint Capitalism Red in Tooth and Claw, he comes across as a decent guy: his company gave the father of a man considered dead but whose body was never found two years off with pay to try to locate his son's remains.

The reality of the situation is that, despite humanity's best efforts, natural disasters happen.  It's hard to say what anyone in authority "should have" done to make things better, without a timetable of exactly when it was going to happen, how bad it would be, and which areas would be affected, things no one could possibly know.  It's worth pointing out that one of the first people to die was a scientist at an observation station directly in the path of the explosion: if "more science" were the answer, one would think that the scientists wouldn't have put their own in harm's way.  There are no fingers to point here.

Book review: A Charlie Brown Religion by Stephen J. Lind

The seventeenth book I read in 2016 was A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz by Stephen J. Lind.  I think every American who grew up between the '60s and the '90s has been influenced by the Peanuts gang in some way, either through the animated specials or through the comic pages. I had an extra interest in the man, as he was born in the same town as my father and later lived in the same town as my aunt and a cousin's family, and a pastor I worked with while at seminary was a huge Peanuts fan whose office was full of collectibles and who worked strips into his sermons.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" is unique among the Christmas specials for its explicit references to the religious origins of the holiday, and I already knew the story of how Schulz took a firm stand about including Linus's reading from the gospel of Luke; yet it always seemed clear to me that sometime between the making of that first special and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," something had soured in Schulz's mind and heart in regard to faith.  In the Christmas show, Linus is the expert, the one who can flatly say, "That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown," but by the Halloween special, he is a quixotic figure who believes something no one else believes, suffers socially as a result, and mistakes a beagle for the long-awaited mythical creature who never responds to his sincerity.  Events in Charles Schulz's life parallel this fictional crumbling of belief.

Schulz's faith journey began in St. Paul, Minnesota, after his return from service in World War II. While attending a Church of God, he claimed Christianity, though it is notable that he never described a point of decision nor was he ever baptised.  He became an integral part of the small congregation, however, and was eager to use his skill at comics for the benefit of the church, drawing single-panel quips for Christian publications.  Enjoying a close relationship with the pastors and serving on the board, he seemed likely to become a pillar of the local congregation.

However, Schulz married a woman with no interest in religion and with a two-year-old daughter who had been abandoned by the father, her then-husband.  Lying about their wedding date to pass the girl off as Schulz's biological child, they decided it would be easier to cover up the truth if they moved away and left behind anyone who knew them at the time of their marriage.  Thus, they ended up in California.  Schulz began attending a United Methodist church -- alone.  His wife stayed home and encouraged their five children to as well.  Interestingly, Schulz taught a Sunday School class there for years but never joined the church and rarely stayed for the service.  Although he studied the Bible extensively at home, he never spoke to his own children about his faith, not wanting to come across as pushy.  The few who became religious as adults knew nothing about their father's spirituality.

By 1970, Schulz was having an affair with a woman half his age.  By 1971, he had stopped attending church. When your own behavior doesn't match the standards you've espoused, you must either abandon your standards or your belief in your own goodness.  By 1972, Schulz was divorced, and in 1973, he married a woman who brought her daughter to his ice rink, she having left her own husband and her daughter's father.  What happened to the woman from 1970?  Who knows?  By 1989, he was describing himself as a secular humanist and insisting that people get to heaven by doing good rather than by putting their faith in Christ.

So was Charles Schulz ever an orthodox Christian, or did he just get off on being praised as a good man?  After World War II, being a Christian was synonymous in Middle America with being a good person.  Was it just shorthand in his mind for works-righteousness?  As an aside, the pastor famous for writing The Gospel According to Peanuts in 1965 himself departed orthodox Christianity in favor of universalism.  When Schulz was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1999 at age 77, he felt cheated, his plans for the long and healthy retirement he expected to enjoy spoiled.  As of 1995, he professed no firm hope in an afterlife.

I've compiled this sequence of events from the book under review, only with difficulty.  Lind jumps around topically rather than chronologically, making it difficult to align the events in Schulz's life with developments in theological content in his work.  The author also insists that Schulz did not lose his religion on the evidence that there were as many biblical quotes in his strips toward the end of his career as at the beginning, showing no sensitivity to the difference between Linus quoting the gospel story sincerely and Marcie quoting an obscure passage from the historical books of the Old Testament ironically.

Organization issues aside, I did not enjoy this book for the same reason I didn't enjoy Dick Van Dyke's memoir: because a man revered by many truly had a sad life.  Many would think Charles Schulz had a great life: he was rich and famous and well-respected both in his profession and by the general public.  But from an outside perspective, he seemed to have gained the world by losing his soul.  He became cynical, embarrassed by the certainty he once professed in his faith, smug in his own sense of himself as a good man, and devastated by facing the end of the life he had built on a foundation of sand.  I can only hope that as he faced a death that all his good deeds could not put off, he remembered the words he wrote to a old army buddy in 1948: "I am a firm believer in Jesus Christ."

Book review: Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil by James Runcie

The sixteenth book I read in 2016 was the third book in James Runcie's Grantchester Mysteries, Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil.  I've had a fraught relationship with this series so far, not liking the first book and really not liking the second, so I went into this one without much anticipation.

I don't know if it was low expectations or the fact that the tiresome love triangle had finally been resolved, but I didn't dislike this book as much as its predecessors.  It still has the problem of Sidney being a flat cypher in situations that ought to be inspiring strong emotional reactions and of the solutions of the mysteries being unconvincing afterthoughts ("Why did he do it? Well, because someone had to have done it, I guess...."), and Runcie really should have known better than to cast his main character in a film adaptation of a much better mystery novel, let alone criticize Sayers's plot.  But I finished this book (despite the schmaltziness of the final mystery, a Hallmark-Hall-of-Fame-caliber tale) not hating the protagonist as much as I did at the end of the previous book, which has to be accounted progress.

The four stories in this book take place between 25 May 1962 (the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral) and Christmas 1963 (the title of the last story).  The author asks me to believe that an illegitimate birth in this period of time occasioned not a whiff of scandal or disapproval from family, community, or church, which I'm not sure I can get on board with.  While Canon Chambers has no problem with homosexuality, he does at least don his 21st-Century-Morality superhero cape to chide others for having the incorrect attitudes; oughtn't he to be getting on his high horse to defend single motherhood as well?

Book review: Mystery of the Roman Ransom by Henry Winterfeld

The fifteenth book I read in 2016 was Mystery of the Roman Ransom, the sequel to Detectives in Togas, by Henry Winterfeld.  Faith and Eric both read the latter for school, although it turned out to be less historically accurate than I had hoped.  Still, there's enough Roman flavor that it helped Eric remember the name of the river that Rome was built on in his history lesson, and the kids both enjoyed the story.

In the sequel, the seven students of Xanthos School once again stumble across a mystery with startlingly high stakes that they and their teacher must unravel. These aren't McGurk mysteries finding missing ball gloves and the like: lives are on the line, which sometimes makes for an uneasy juxtaposition with the humor of the boys' antics.

The best part of this second story deals with a pet lion which is brought up almost off-handedly in the beginning of the book but which, in accordance with Chekhov's principle, ends up going off in a most enjoyable fashion.

Book review: Spark Joy by Marie Kondo

The fourteenth book I read in 2016 was Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up, Marie Kondo's follow-up to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

In many ways, it's hard to justify Spark Joy's existence as a separate book.  It follows the same KonMari method, just with more detailed instructions and diagrams for each step, information that one could make a strong argument should have been included in the original book.  It's easy to imagine a single volume, with fewer anecdotes about the author's childhood tidying obsession and fewer illustrations of how to fold things.  Is there really that much difference between folding a shirt and a jacket?  No, no, there's not.  They have the same shape, and I could safely have extrapolated from the illustration of one how to fold the other.

I don't feel completely taken by having bought this book, however, as it really is information that should have been the first book and so I'm glad to have access to it.  I suppose now is a good time to update the gentle reader on my own progress, such as it is.  I made it through clothes and books, yielding several boxes of books to be sold at Half Price Books for a distressingly small percentage of what I paid for them.  I have presently stalled out on papers, because I have so many of them and it takes so long to go through all of them.  The KonMarie rule of thumb on papers is "toss everything," which admittedly isn't bad advice.  There's a vanishingly small number of the drifts of paper that collect everywhere that you will ever look at again, or want to if you could find it, or, frankly, that you even remember you had kept and would miss if you just dumped it all en masse in the recycling bin.  And, yes, that includes all the drawings the kids did as toddlers that I kept, have nowhere to put, but feel guilty about tossing if I have them in my hand: so much easier to make a clean sweep!  But I'm not yet brave enough for that, for fear that I'll get rid of something really important.  Which isn't likely, but I did run across a $25 Amazon gift certificate that I hadn't used, so there's that.

Even if I've hit an impasse, there it value in having gotten as far as I have.  For the categories I've completed, I've achieved a sort of closure so that new clothing or books that pass through my hands are much easier to get rid of.  I've gone from feeling that everything I touch is like a pet brought home from the shelter which I've committed to keep for life or be a bad person to feeling free to use it and then let it go without regret. I read it; I'm done; someone else can read it.  Or I used to love this shirt, but it's gotten stretched out; let it go to Goodwill, and I'll pick up another shirt I love to take its place.

Birthday boy

Today was my dad's 90th birthday!