tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9396650433798927552024-03-12T15:03:22.656-07:00Baehrly ReadingBig books, little books, little Baehrs, big Lord. Fumbling steps towards truth, beauty and goodness.Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-35535905710542797422015-11-15T16:36:00.000-08:002015-11-15T16:36:10.524-08:00Saint Margaret of the Textiles<br />
The other day I laughed myself silly over a delicious review-rant my friend <a href="http://www.vintagenovels.com/" target="_blank">Suzannah Rowntree </a>posted on Goodreads.<br />
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To celebrate Queen Margaret of Scotland's traditional feast day today, I'm sharing it with you (with her gracious permission).<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22465949-the-unveiling" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="The Unveiling (Age of Faith, #1)" border="0" src="https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402691633m/22465949.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22465949-the-unveiling">The Unveiling</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11463.Tamara_Leigh">Tamara Leigh</a><br />
Suzannah's rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1358490102">1 of 5 stars</a><br />
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Every now and again I'll think, "I wonder what the kids are reading these days," and off I'll go to download and read one of the titles I've heard of. Sometimes this has been rewarding, and other times...<br />
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Well, other times I'll find myself lying awake grinding my teeth over a clean Christian medieval romance novel... which isn't very clean, isn't very Christian, and is only selectively medieval.<br />
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The most galling thing about this particular novel was something rather odd, something that would hardly bother most people. And so, for a while, I tried to hold in my irritation. But some wounds don't heal with time and the end of it is that I MUST SPEAK. <br />
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There's seriously some kind of anti-textile bias going on here. The heroine is a modern-style warrior chick, so pretty soon she collides with typical (and totally reasonable) medieval attitudes about women's work. And she's like,<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755762._SY540_.jpg" width="300" /><br />
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*flails* WHERE DO I EVEN START.<br />
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Margaret_of_Scotland" rel="nofollow">Queen Margaret of Scotland</a>, an actual medieval woman who would make the heroine of this book look like a total fusspot, would be facepalming so hard you could hear it in Norway. <br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755763._SY540_.jpg" width="300" /><br />
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When Margaret arrived in Scotland, basically nobody knew how to do anything with a needle except jam it into the eyesocket of whoever was currently cheesing them off. So, of course, their castles pretty much looked like this:<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755764._SX540_.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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Except that shortly after Margaret arrived, they began looking like this instead:<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755765._SX540_.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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When Margaret entered Scotland, she was greeted by a wild warrior king and a bunch of blokes who looked like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755766._SX540_.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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But pretty soon they looked more like this:<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755767._SX540_.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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Tradition even credits Margaret with introducing TARTAN to Scotland. Which means that next time you see David Tennant wearing a kilt, youíll know who to thank.<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755768._SY540_.jpg" width="287" /><br />
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Thank you, Queen Margaret, for not thinking needlework somehow beneath you.<br />
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At about the same time Margaret was giving the entire nation of Scotland a makeover, an abbey of nuns in France were hard at work stitching one of the most important visual historical sources in the history of the world.<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755769._SX540_.png" width="400" /><br />
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So that without the Bayeux Tapestry, we wouldn't know half of what we know today about armour, weaponry, and fighting tactics of the late eleventh century.<br />
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Meanwhile, the heroine of this novel wishes she could do something important with her life, IE, running around with the blokes waving swords and stuff.<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755770._SX540_.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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Burning down castles full of priceless tapestries, for instance.<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755771.jpg" width="200" /><br />
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Slaughtering and carrying off talented textile workers from peaceful communities.<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755772.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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And you donít even want to know how much time and effort went into making Thomas a Becket's cope. It was never the same after he was martyred.<br />
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So basically, darling, unless youíd rather get around in an outfit consisting entirely of strategically-placed twigs...<br />
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<img class="escapedImg" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1446163481i/16755773.jpg" width="200" /><br />
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...grow up and learn to enjoy using a needle.<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/13906136-suzannah">View all Suzannah's reviews</a>
Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-28577155992371550762015-10-12T02:55:00.002-07:002015-10-12T04:11:07.525-07:005 Books for Brave Girls<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVz1Tl9cYmGGbOnmcJFECZk2b2N2rgrsaVDf7FKp26i_f9fHJHLdMGyJN2Jd7YWoMSO4P5mD9Y8AYibN0wd0zvHEv9E7YZ4KqQnRRUa5-lMF7PfbMKsnLJ_Zmv0v9S_yxFKuNvQnzUc8g/s1600/5+Books+for+Brave+Girls.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVz1Tl9cYmGGbOnmcJFECZk2b2N2rgrsaVDf7FKp26i_f9fHJHLdMGyJN2Jd7YWoMSO4P5mD9Y8AYibN0wd0zvHEv9E7YZ4KqQnRRUa5-lMF7PfbMKsnLJ_Zmv0v9S_yxFKuNvQnzUc8g/s400/5+Books+for+Brave+Girls.png" width="268" /></a></div>
We talk a lot with our girls about being brave. We talk about how we practise being brave by not freaking out over little things, so when big things come along we will have a habit of everyday bravery.<br />
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My favourite kind of book for my girls is one in which the heroine has to triumph not only over things external to herself (like Nazis), but internal obstacles (like timidity, pride, or selfishness). Because these are the things our daughters struggle with daily. And, let's be real: so do we.<br />
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We want our daughters to be the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler" target="_blank">Irena Sendlers</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl" target="_blank">Sophie Scholls</a> of the future. Right now they're not faced with smuggling Jewish babies out of the ghetto or secretly publishing anti-Nazi newspapers. Right now they have to get along with each other and deal with the disappointments that come with everyday life. And believe me, this is hard enough for little girls who were born 22 months apart (not to mention the twins, who were born 3 minutes apart)!<br />
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Here are some of my favourite books for encouraging a love of bravery in your girls, featuring heroines who don't find bravery an easy thing.<br />
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<b>1. The picture book heroine</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lizzie-Nonsense-Jan-Ormerod/dp/061857493X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444347847&sr=1-1&keywords=lizzie+nonsense" target="_blank">Lizzie Nonsense</a><br />
by Jan Ormerod<br />
Age: 0+<br />
Lizzie lives in the outback, cheering up her mother and baby brother and helping keep them safe while her father is away cutting and selling sandalwood. So lovely. Read my detailed review <a href="http://baehrlyreading.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/waiting-for-papa.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<b>2. The historical heroine</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Lights-Burning-Abbie-Avenue/dp/0876144547" target="_blank">Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie</a><br />
by Peter & Connie Roop & Peter Hansen<br />
Age: 3+<br />
Abbie Burgess was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper, living off the coast of Maine, who took over her father's duties for nearly a month during a terrible storm in 1856. This simple telling communicates the warmth of the Burgess family and Abbie's sacrifices to keep the light burning.<br />
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<b>3. The everyday heroine</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_16?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=understood+betsy+by+dorothy+canfield+fisher&sprefix=understood+betsy%2Cstripbooks%2C386" target="_blank">Understood Betsy</a><br />
by Dorothy Canfield Fisher<br />
Age: 5+<br />
Everything frightens Elizabeth Ann, but when she is sent to stay with her cousins at Putney Farm due to a family illness, everything changes - including her.<br />
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<b>4. The royal heroine</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Princess-Margaret-Leighton/dp/0374338280/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444347620&sr=1-1&keywords=journey+for+a+princess" target="_blank">Journey for a Princess </a><br />
by Margaret Leighton<br />
Age: 10+<br />
A ninth-century Saxon Princess (King Alfred the Great's youngest child) has to overcome both shyness and enemy threats on an epic pilgrimage to Rome. This is a novel about how to identify true love and your place in history.<br />
Unfortunately, this is currently out of print, but you can read it for free online by setting up an account at <a href="http://www.openlibrary.org/" target="_blank">Open Library </a>(that's what I did).<br />
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<b>5. The adventure heroine</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pendragons-Heir-Suzannah-Rowntree/dp/0994233906" target="_blank">Pendragon's Heir</a><br />
by Suzannah Rowntree<br />
Age: 14+<br />
This is a glorious, page-turning historical fantasy adventure through Arthurian legend. It dares to explore big questions related to bravery, like whether it's ever ok to "do evil that good may come". I could identify with Blanche, who at first would rather read about a sword fight than participate in one, but grows to love honour more than comfort. Highly recommended for fans of Narnia and Middle Earth: this novel will take your daughter back to the very myths that inspired them.<br />
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<b>More recommendations</b><br />
For all ages:<br />
The Wise Woman by George MacDonald<br />
Verity of Sydney Town by Ruth C. Williams<br />
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry<br />
Phoebe the Spy by Judith Berry Griffin<br />
Dare the Wind by Tracey E. Fern and Emily Arnold McCully<br />
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For older readers:<br />
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen<br />
Mr. Standfast by John Buchan<br />
Salute to Adventurers By John Buchan<br />
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Finally, if you're one of the few who haven't read <i>Little House on the Prairie</i>, do start there. My top five slots could all have been taken up by <i>Little House </i>books.Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-22070519836333810632015-03-26T21:52:00.001-07:002015-03-26T21:52:39.104-07:005 Questions for Suzannah Rowntree<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First, by way of introduction...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She fences, she crochets, she can dance a mean reel. She knows what infralapsarianism is, she eats orange peel, she's.....SUZANNAH ROWNTREE!</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.createspace.com/5302858" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh68huzFwLvT1z-aBGIrY3aPro55Du6sLM0ZPd-ZzGC6UlAu3IGxDZ31j8NMwLj8mvlDdKjrNiVZGMgEKvY7nbvws93ATgDNdFLb8gY6FBP_icx3XfkxQ0e1gcNVeZCFydBufVtgkj3jXI/s1600/MediumPHCover.png" height="400" width="266" /></span></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh68huzFwLvT1z-aBGIrY3aPro55Du6sLM0ZPd-ZzGC6UlAu3IGxDZ31j8NMwLj8mvlDdKjrNiVZGMgEKvY7nbvws93ATgDNdFLb8gY6FBP_icx3XfkxQ0e1gcNVeZCFydBufVtgkj3jXI/s1600/MediumPHCover.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm really keen to ask Suzannah some questions about her debut novel, </span><i style="font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pendragon's Heir</i><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which, frankly, I enjoyed more than I've enjoyed any novel in years. </span><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1138307130" style="font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.38; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">Read my review here</a><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It's an epic Arthurian adventure - bright as an illuminated manuscript, youthful as childhood dreams, and weighted with a deep longing for heaven redolent of the writings of C.S. Lewis. It's smart and well-written and moving and loads of fun</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I highly recommend it for people who like their </span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap;">sword fights with a bit of St. Augustine</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thanks to modern technology, you can start reading it in a matter of seconds, or order a lovely illustrated paperback to display to your friends: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Paperback: <a href="https://www.createspace.com/5302858">https://www.createspace.com/5302858</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ebook: <a href="http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/530467">http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/530467</a></span></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suzannah, thanks for visiting my humble blog. </span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pardon me if my questions are long-winded and rather giddy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Question the First: One thing I was amazed by was your ability to say what you wanted to say using using concepts and motifs already found in the Arthurian legendarium. I mean by that your ability to both construct a satisfying three-act structure plot and win our hearts to things you are passionate about, without introducing alien concepts that feel awkward and false. It's almost like you saw the Arthur legends as a box of puzzle pieces, all mixed up, that can be put together in different ways and still by some ma</span><span style="font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.38; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;">gic make a coherent picture. Can you talk about this? (I'm particularly hoping you'll speak about Sarras, which really astonished me and sent me back to the legends to parse out what was Rowntree and what was not.)</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj29yUUkB7qRP7eDi-8EhvuJ3SUWnVqS1DIUbY9GUQRI9UkykAuZ0RfAGXeCo4KX2e72eOtti8YBqKAAruhPuoxwEGRkzCCIaZkz1FTPXoxjjJGSLrT3kMlfZeVJDTi9FhyphenhyphenASOT7XA8IJg/s1600/Profile+medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj29yUUkB7qRP7eDi-8EhvuJ3SUWnVqS1DIUbY9GUQRI9UkykAuZ0RfAGXeCo4KX2e72eOtti8YBqKAAruhPuoxwEGRkzCCIaZkz1FTPXoxjjJGSLrT3kMlfZeVJDTi9FhyphenhyphenASOT7XA8IJg/s1600/Profile+medium.jpg" height="320" width="211" /></span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started out by spending a whole lot of time thinking and wrestling with the actual themes of the Arthurian legend. After all, how was my version of the story going to mean anything unless I had a good idea of just what was going on in the originals? (That, and not knowing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Malory was trying to say drove me crackers). I had plenty of time to think and meditate and read up on the Arthur legends—and I had the help of people like CS Lewis and Charles Williams, who had done good work on explaining the original themes. It was these themes I used to build my own story.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then, there were definitely times when I had to sit down and think, “I have this character from the legends who I don’t know what to do with, so I need to figure out what he means and how I’m going to tie him into the plot.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Actually, it’s odd that you should describe the plot/theme density of my novel using the imagery of a box. One of the best articles I have ever read on the craft of writing—though I don’t believe anyone should make a regular practice of reading up on the craft of writing—was titled <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2009/07/06/heroic-hollywood-thinking-inside-the-box" target="_blank">“Heroic Hollywood: Thinking Inside the Box”</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This article (I recommend it to all of you) directs authors to use various themes or images from their stories as a “box” from which to unpack as many interconnected motifs as possible. This results in a book (or film) in which every plot point, character, symbol, motif, or event performs multiple functions within the story. This is simply good tight plotting, and it results in a very coherent and cohesive story. So in a way I did use the Arthurian myths as a toolbox from which I was able to assemble the pieces of my story.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not perfect, though. I never did manage to fit in Perceval’s sister Dindraine. Which is a shame, because I love how Malory uses her and Galahad’s relationship to demonstrate a kind of sanctified and pure version of the courtly love tradition that runs amok wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the book :D.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With regards to Sarras, that was actually a very late addition to the book—it came to me in a stroke of blind inspiration while I was plotting the 4</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 9px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> draft—the one you beta read for me last year. As early as Draft 2, Morgan and Blanche had a series of confrontations in Part 2, but the setting was a bit different. What brought Sarras into play was a series of mental pictures that came to me—first, the green grass and ruined stone of the church in Port Arthur as well as pictures of Gothic ruins in Europe; then the thought of exploring a whole garden-city, then finally the sudden connection of such a place with a) Charles Williams’s vision of The City in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All Hallows’ Eve</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, b) my novel, and c) the mysterious Sarras town of Arthurian myth. It was true inspiration, by which I mean that it was a mysterious and poetic connection that came into my mind not by any rational process but by a leap of intuition. I credit it, and a number of other equally arational inspirations, to the Holy Spirit, to whom be glory and honour.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not until that moment had I intended to include Sarras in the story. However, I’ve spent a goodish bit of time since then just marvelling over how well it fitted into the existing web, and wondering how I could have finished the book without it.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlGlPAuTDjKB9woCJnJdU0b7Vta5_dpUZOJKU1OoxzlTzKuxakMMPbEmrxjMSXtxLm6CAHvasaFjOZ4MmPPyxEgmvcNZTG-H6Cm4uWWu3X7GSmUKdtaGZ0_CcdQDAhIEBuST1obEy9jmY/s1600/31132862_837327c532_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlGlPAuTDjKB9woCJnJdU0b7Vta5_dpUZOJKU1OoxzlTzKuxakMMPbEmrxjMSXtxLm6CAHvasaFjOZ4MmPPyxEgmvcNZTG-H6Cm4uWWu3X7GSmUKdtaGZ0_CcdQDAhIEBuST1obEy9jmY/s1600/31132862_837327c532_o.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The roofless church at Port Arthur, Tasmania<span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Question the Second: I remember Douglas Wilson saying something in the film "Collision" about debating Christopher Hitchens, along the lines of "You can't cram for this, you can't prepare for this, you have to have been thinking about and studying this stuff your whole life." While reading your novel, I felt I was in the hands of someone who was absolutely drenched in the medieval worldview. I suddenly "got" things about these ideas of quest, chivalry, honour, the Grail, that I had only sensed namelessly before. Can you share about your research process for this novel? Is this something you can cram for?</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wow, thank you! I was certainly aiming to convey some of the medieval worldview. Now that you mention it, another advance reader, Isaac Botkin, who also produced three illustrations for inside the book, said,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“The characters act like I would assume warriors in the age of Patrick, Columba, and Augustine would act.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“…I realise that Arthur is most likely a fictional character, and that the exploits of the knights of the Round Table are most certainly fictional. But legends have to come from somewhere, and there </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a king in Britain in the early 500s, there was a strong Celtic church then, there was a vigorous theonomic crown by the time of Alfred, and a clear sense of building Christ’s earthly kingdom and fulfilling the great commission. Some of the ideals of the Table I’m willing to accept as extremely probable (almost unavoidable) historical fact. Also bear in mind that Arthur’s men are looking back on the time of Christ as recent history. …The Roman empire has just fallen, there are still barbarians everywhere, but the freedoms and advances of Christian civilisation are staggering. The hopes for success and discouragement in moral failure must have been severe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Which is why I love your book. I wasn’t sure at first, because I’m not really excited about homeschooled girls writing novels about knights and princesses, but I am excited about you writing about this amazing time in history.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:D I have to say there were definitely times when I felt a bit uncomfortable writing about knights and princesses!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My research for</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Pendragon’s Heir </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">purposefully did not include a great deal of study into realistic matters such as wounds, fighting styles, economy, or indeed anything at all about actual conditions in sixth-century Britain (the traditional setting of Arthurian myth). I did try not to embarrass myself with obvious mistakes, but my whole focus was on reproducing medieval fiction, not on reproducing medieval fact.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But where did this medieval worldview come from? In one sense I’ve been a passionate medievalist as long as I can remember, and that has to count for something. But I’m actually going to tell you that there is a way to “cram for this”: You HAVE to read primary sources. You most particularly especially MUST read the fiction of the people you want to understand. Nothing else will do. Without primary sources and original fiction, no amount of cramming—and no amount of reading history books—will help.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzDOFlZXxjYmwdfc93DGJjyaLXixDZXUUpxt-XZzeDRvIE1sx4iMOOvpZYCtcD6zcm6efr7imoyPO7DS_xi9_xy6UDFdesqnVuBFQzKCGLzL8gOBZL61SZG6sm3iH1hHIS9XZgTrqKZA0/s1600/6056231275_cf618ec226_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzDOFlZXxjYmwdfc93DGJjyaLXixDZXUUpxt-XZzeDRvIE1sx4iMOOvpZYCtcD6zcm6efr7imoyPO7DS_xi9_xy6UDFdesqnVuBFQzKCGLzL8gOBZL61SZG6sm3iH1hHIS9XZgTrqKZA0/s1600/6056231275_cf618ec226_o.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Medievalism - courtesy of St Giles Church, Cheadle, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and Suzannah's Pinterest <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/rosagaudea/pendragons-heir/" target="_blank">inspiration board </a>for <i>Pendragon's Heir</i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m passionately insistent on this point. I’ve read too many books that purport to be “historically accurate” but which fail because while the author has his terminology and factual details correct, he has failed to really understand the mindset of the people he is writing about. Reading the histories and the fiction of the people themselves is the only way—I say the ONLY way—to understand who they were, what was most important to them, and what they hoped to achieve with their lives. For this purpose, fiction is about three times as revealing as history.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">S</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">o I did not research medieval society and economy. I did not intend to reproduce a faithful picture of these things. I might someday, but that was not my aim with this book. My aim was to reproduce something as close to a medieval romance—as close to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Le Morte D’Arthur</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">—as I could possibly manage within the confines of the twenty-first century novel.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Therefore, as research, that was what I read: medieval romances, and commentaries on medieval romances. What I have produced is not remotely factual, but I believe it is deeply true.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Question the Third: Can you tell us the authors who most influenced your...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Prose style/aesthetics</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sense of plot/structure</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Characterisation</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mission/vision for fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Arghhh.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Probably the safest bet is to say that my six favourite authors—Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, Wodehouse, Buchan, and Spenser—are the ones who influenced me most overall. All my reading has been rotting down in my mind for so long that I don’t know exactly which bit of it came from which author anymore. That said…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Prose style/aesthetics: I admire Tolkien, do not believe myself capable of imitating him, but probably do so unconsciously, especially in my higher-flown passages. If I could write like one of my favourite authors it would be John Buchan, and I have adopted a few things from him, especially a sneaking love of understatement, but I haven’t quite managed to master his glorious simplicity. In the dialogue for </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pendragon’s Heir</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I did consciously attempt to reproduce an suitably modern-sounding version of Malory’s diction, inspired by the speech of Merlin in Lewis’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That Hideous Strength</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">—every one of Merlin’s lines in that novel is a tiny masterpiece. But in the end, the author I copy best seems to be GK Chesterton. I love his shameless alliterations, and I alliterate myself at every opportunity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Plot/structure: Structure is one thing I feel I’m a bit of a beginner at. That said, most of what I know probably comes from observation of other people’s plots, plus Peter Leithart’s book </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide to Six Shakespeare Plays</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Generally speaking when it comes to plots I just try for three acts, an exciting finish, plenty of foreshadowing—and the the plot/theme density I talked about above. One day I should really get around to something a bit more elegant.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Characterisation: This is about people, and of course the basic handbook on People is Scripture. I do find other things helpful—Myers-Briggs typing helps me with variety and consistency, and vaious other personality-pigeonholing tools and sorters help too. I also snitch elements of characters I know in real life (and yep, that does mean that there is a real-life partial inspiration for Perceval walking around out there. Sorry, ladies—he’s taken). With the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pendragon’s Heir</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> characterisation in particular, I had a huge amount of fun playing with the original characters from the Arthurian legends. So, OK, you have Arthur, the awesome kingly figure; why does he seem to lose his grip for a while toward the end of the story, allowing Gawain and Mordred to control him? You have Gawain himself, the hero of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in that tradition a very ideal knight; so why does his love for Lancelot turn into such bitter hatred at the end? You have Morgan le Fay, who spends her whole life trying to destroy her brother and his kingdom; why does she turn up at the end to help save his life? Writing </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pendragon’s Heir</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was an amazing opportunity to flesh out these mysterious characters with their mysterious contradictions, and I spent a lot of time chewing them over. It was great fun.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mission/vision for fiction: This is something else I’m very passionate about. When it comes to influences, the main one would be Scripture again. How does Scripture use fiction? For what purposes? Christ and the prophets used fiction to surprise their audiences with truth from an unexpected angle. Then, there are the Reformation-era apologists for fiction. Sir Philip Sidney, Torquato Tasso, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyan all defended their decisions to use fiction to teach. All of them claimed that doctrines were more pleasant and more easy to understand when couched in the medium of fiction. Anthony Trollope in the nineteenth century made the same defence, but it was left to CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien in the twentieth century to arrive at a really full-orbed vision of fiction as a means of retelling the Gospel. Tolkien’s landmark essay </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Fairy Stories</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the work that first introduced me to the concept of mythopoeic truth, and it has remained my vision and my standard ever since.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Question the Fourth: There are so many things to be really proud of in this book. The prose, for one, which is strong without being minimalist, and evocative without being full of annoying flowery curlicues or constant colour descriptions (a pet peeve of mine - if you can't talk about colour as well as Rosemary Sutcliff, please spare us). Is there something you are particularly proud of? Something that came easily and surprised you, or something that took a great deal of slow and steady craftsmanship and now you can stand back and breathe a contented sigh?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The thing I’m most proud of is something I first heard from you. I think it was something along the lines of, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Most of the time, when you read a very absorbing book, you come away discontented with your life. That wasn’t the case with your book. I came away so excited about building the Kingdom of God, I had a smile on my face the whole day after I finished it.”</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-0a6397e8-109a-aa37-b49a-f5669602816d" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Later, another beta reader had exactly the same reaction. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I love your theme of Logres as the City of God on earth in its early stages of construction. This book makes me want to get out and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">do</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> something.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, a bit different but related, another reader told me: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I strongly identified with Blanche…Her battle with fear and selfishness was very familiar to me…And she passes! Wow, was I delighted! It’s possible for young women to be strong and brave and deeply principled after all! It felt like a great victory, and one that strengthened my resolve to be a heroine.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With this feedback, I realised I had accomplished something very important. A lot of people in our crunchy home-educating circles believe that fiction is unimportant or even dangerous, that it tempts readers toward “escapism”—a desire to flee the world of God’s creation into a self-indulgent world of the imagination…with fantasy being the worst genre of all. I understand this concern. Personally, it troubles me when I see readers become so absorbed in good books that they beat a retreat from the real battles in life and start living a half-life, a life of longing for an unreal world. It happens.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, I believe that good fiction, read wisely, is a powerful weapon in our fight. It is such an incredible thing to have not one but three different readers tell me of their own accord that my novel has strengthened and encouraged them for real life in the real world. That’s what I’m most proud of. I have to say I’m not exactly sure how I achieved it, but I’m more pleased about this than I am about anything else in the book.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwlOSIVZPsw744TX1fX4_zTm_mWg6kqX6hTUkvRvFoSAT0ulvI2IToZNz1vEj-Q_lBta2lRELULP5ARlAVuBTdL41jCWgxbARKk6DIv3f0jRamD2euf3KHJx5KExPC0aMY1uDXvZL_-cU/s1600/7394761796_f3cb7a435b_c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwlOSIVZPsw744TX1fX4_zTm_mWg6kqX6hTUkvRvFoSAT0ulvI2IToZNz1vEj-Q_lBta2lRELULP5ARlAVuBTdL41jCWgxbARKk6DIv3f0jRamD2euf3KHJx5KExPC0aMY1uDXvZL_-cU/s1600/7394761796_f3cb7a435b_c.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Craftsmanship takes time, so "Don't rush it," says Suzannah. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">"...Y<span style="line-height: 20px; text-align: start; white-space: pre-wrap;">ou will never, ever regret taking a bit longer to make sure you have written something worthwhile."</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Question the Fifth: You now have become well-connected with this burgeoning and very active community of indie authors, many of whom are home-educated, young and female. What advice would you give people like this who are tossing around an idea for a first novel? What advice would you give the movement as a whole (if it is a movement) to become a real literary force to be reckoned with?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For those who are considering writing their first novel: Don’t rush it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t rush it. I don’t want to read anything less than the best and you shouldn’t want to give me anything less than the best. I think you can produce amazing things, but I don’t know that you can produce anything particularly amazing at the age of sixteen. Or even twenty-one. Our culture does not tend to produce maturity that early.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I once read of a professional novelist, critically-acclaimed and popular with the reading public, who was asked why so many well-regarded and bestselling authors never publish their first novel until their forties. This gentleman answered that it takes forty years to learn how to write well and to develop the life experience necessary to write anything worthwhile.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He’s pretty near right. I’ve never regretted taking ten years to write </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pendragon’s Heir.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I’m not telling you you have to do the same, but I am telling you that you will never, ever regret taking a bit longer to make sure you have written something worthwhile. Ignore all your family and friends telling you to hurry up and publish the thing just because they’re excited about you being an author. Wait until you know that you have written something worthy in every respect to stand beside the greats.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t publish just because you can. Publish because you’re ready.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For those who are already publishing and want to become a literary force to be reckoned with: Whatever you do, don’t stop improving. Don’t let early success go to your head.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Life is busy. With twenty five-star reviews on Goodreads from people who thought your novel was the best thing in the world, it’s easy to think you’ve arrived. You’re probably wrong. Maybe what you are is good at marketing a fourth-rate product to people who don’t know any better. Or maybe what you are is a goddess of Plotting or a patron saint of Characterisation, but could use a bit of help when it comes to Themes or Sociopolitical Realism.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What we need is to seek out critique partners who will understand and be sympathetic to our vision as authors, but who will pull no punches when it comes to pointing out our failings. If you know someone like this, treasure her up and make sure she’s slugging you in the eye on a regular basis. If you don’t know someone like this, you can’t have Christina. She’s mine :D.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh, I'm very selective about who I slug in the eye. You have to be very special indeed. Thanks for your thoughtful answers, Suzannah. </span></b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">The rest </span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap;">of</span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you can read my </span><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px; white-space: pre-wrap;">review <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1138307130" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Author bio:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Suzannah Rowntree isn’t travelling the world to help out friends in need, she lives in a big house in rural Australia with her awesome parents and siblings, trying to beat her previous number-of-books-read-in-a-year record. She blogs the results at</span><a href="http://www.vintagenovels.com/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">www.vintagenovels.com</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and is the author of both fiction and non-fiction. Pendragon’s Heir, her debut novel, released March 26.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pendragon’s Heir synopsis:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blanche Pendragon enjoys her undemanding life as the ward of an eccentric nobleman in 1900 England. It's been years since she wondered what happened to her long lost parents, but then a gift on the night of her eighteenth birthday reveals a heritage more dangerous and awe-inspiring than she ever dreamed of—or wanted. Soon Blanche is flung into a world of wayfaring immortals, daring knights, and deadly combats, with a murderous witch-queen on her trail and the future of a kingdom at stake. As the legendary King Arthur Pendragon and his warriors face enemies without and treachery within, Blanche discovers a secret that could destroy the whole realm of Logres. Even if the kingdom could be saved, is she the one to do it? Or is someone else the Pendragon's Heir?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-67504123083656222442015-03-18T17:41:00.000-07:002015-03-18T17:41:04.171-07:00White Nights: the forgotten suspense classics of Ethel Lina White<div style="clear: both;">
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ethel Lina White (1876-1944)</td>
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I'm always on the lookout for books to read in the middle of the night while breastfeeding infants. After extensive testing, I have found that the perfect book is one which is just sufficiently exciting to keep me from falling asleep mid-feed (and waking hours later with a crick in my neck), while not being too gripping to get back to sleep promptly. The 20th century suspense novels by John Buchan, <a href="http://baehrlyreading.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/just-my-cup-of-tey.html" target="_blank">Josephine Tey</a> and Mary Stewart fit the bill nicely.</div>
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I was on the lookout for similar light vintage thrills when I discovered the Welsh crime novelist Ethel Lina White. Innocently, I picked up her suspense masterpiece <i>Some Must Watch </i>from a discount bin outside a local news agent. It was shockingly good--but <u>much</u> too chilling for midnight reading.</div>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is how you will act for a few days after reading <i>Some Must Watch</i>.</td>
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I've now managed to hunt down about half of her novels (The Passing Tramp has managed to <a href="http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-third-eye-1937-by-ethel-lina-white.html" target="_blank">read some I haven't</a>), and her unpretentious craftsmanship has won my wholehearted admiration. One of the things I love about her is the way these unabashed potboilers brim with themes that provoke and surprise by their, well, goodness.</div>
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White's thrillers show us that there are no small lies; that great people ignore ordinary people at their peril, pride and vainglory meet their demise at the hands of the humble; that evil is real and lives just around the corner; that gossip can kill; that appearances deceive, but sometimes in the very reverse of the way we expect. (It's probably quite reasonable to postulate her familiarity with the book of Proverbs at least, given the Methodist Chapel-pervaded culture of late 19th century Wales.)</div>
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White is enough of a craftsman to convey these things without stale didactism. You might not even spot them, while you are busy appreciating her delicious vintage characters and cracking good plots. It is no small achievement to write thrillers that are morally satisfying while being nail-bitingly suspenseful with a terrifyingly potent vision of evil.</div>
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Here's a quick guide to the ones I've read so far.</div>
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<h3>
Some Must Watch</h3>
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A red-haired heroine ("ginger for pluck") must survive a stormy night trapped in a Welsh manor along with an assortment of highly-strung characters - one of whom is a serial murderer. Or is the murderer outside, trying to get in?</div>
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This one is practically perfect in every way. It even observes the Aristotelian unities. YES!</div>
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You can read a more in-depth review from the incomparable Suzannah at Vintage Novels <a href="http://www.vintagenovels.com/2013/03/some-must-watch-by-ethel-lina-white.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</div>
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The Wheel Spins</h3>
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This one formed the nucleus of one of my favourite Hitchcock films, <i>The Lady Vanishes</i>, and you can also find it published under that (vastly superior) title. Typically, the film takes White's catchy premise somewhere quite different (and equally entertaining). This premise has proved so appealing that Hollywood has adapted it several times, most recently and without credit (grr!) in the film <i>Flight Plan</i>.</div>
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A self-absorbed socialite seems to be the only person to notice the disappearance of a mousy fellow passenger on a train journey through Europe. Is it a conspiracy, and will our heroine have enough spunk and decency to stand up for an ordinary little spinster whom everyone wants to forget? White has given us a heroine with overtones of Jane Austen. Read another Suzannah review <a href="http://www.vintagenovels.com/2014/11/the-wheel-spins-by-ethel-lina-white.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</div>
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A Step In the Dark</h3>
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I think I just died and went to potboiler heaven. A young widowed writer of cheap thrillers seizes her chance of a fairy-tale future in Europe...and finds herself in a nightmare. Her only hope of escape may be her own powers of invention. Does she have the nerve and skill to write herself free from her island prison?</div>
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If I say any more about this very Hitchcockian cautionary tale I will spoil it. I loved the way romantic tropes are turned on their heads in this one, and White proves with the heroine's two little girls that she can write children really, really well. This one is so good I'm giving you the Gutenberg <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1402041h.html" target="_blank">link</a> right now. So go read it.</div>
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Fear Stalks the Village</h3>
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With its cozy village setting and large cast of quirky characters, there's more than a bit of Agatha Christie going on in this mystery and it will please those who like their crime served with tea and plenty of 1932 English ambience. At its heart, it's a treatise on the deadly effect of gossip on a picture-perfect community, but I defy you to predict how it will resolve.</div>
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She Vanished into Air</h3>
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This one was utter nonsense and I cannot recommend it to any but the most desperate of White fans. I can only imagine that she had a pressing bill to pay. She managed to produce 14 thrillers between 1931 and her death in 1944, so she's allowed to have an off day, right?</div>
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While She Sleeps!</h3>
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Apparently, this one was written partly as a farce and White seems to be poking fun at elements of her own style while keeping the thrills coming. Miss Loveapple is an amusing and memorable heroine and I honestly could not guess whether she would choose romance or her cozy single life up to the last page. There's the occasional sense of whip-lash from the back-and-forth between frothy and menacing, but still enjoyable.</div>
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Wax</h3>
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I resisted reading this one for a while because I couldn't see how even White could do anything even remotely classy with a thriller set in a decaying waxworks museum. But she did. A large cast of morally-complex characters populate this weirdest and creepiest of White's works with multiple layers of twists.</div>
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Folks, let's put Miss White back in the limelight after more than half a century of neglect. To be punny about it, she's scarily good.</div>
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<a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#whiteel2" target="_blank">Works by Ethel Lina White at Project Gutenberg Australia</a>.</div>
Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-66880468660380667802015-02-24T02:33:00.000-08:002015-02-24T02:33:01.445-08:00Home education and chronic illness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Is this for you?</h2>
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First up, let me tell you who this post is <i>not</i> aimed at. Please know this was not written for you if you suffer from chronic illness, you are satisfied with your schooling choices, and you clicked on this in a state of incipient outrage, thinking "Oh, great. Lady, I am barely functioning and now I'm supposed to feel guilty for not homeschooling my children?!"<br />
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You are walking a hard road, I know. Please trust my sincerity when I say that my intention is to encourage and not to discourage.<br />
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I <i>am</i> writing this post in response to persistent questions from the following two groups of people:<br />
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<li>People like my friend with CFIDS who loves the idea of home education for possible future children, but is fearful of her ability to do so due to health issues.</li>
<li>Parents who desire desperately to bring their children home to educate them but are fearful of their ability to do so due to health issues.</li>
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If this is you, welcome. Now, what can I possibly say that would encourage you? I'd like to make three statements for you to ponder.<br />
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<li>You can home-educate your children. </li>
<li>You may not be able to home-educate the way you imagined. </li>
<li>Your children will learn from your illness, not in spite of it.</li>
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Let me explain myself.</div>
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<b>1. You can home-educate your children.</b></h4>
How can I say this? On a personal level, because I was home-educated by someone with a chronic illness, and I've known others who've done so, with wonderful fruit in their own and their children's lives. Read <a href="http://raisingolives.com/2009/02/before-the-beginning/" target="_blank">this testimony</a> by Kimberley, a home-educator whose own mother home-schooled through cancer (there's more <a href="http://raisinghomemakers.com/2011/hi-im-a-foot/#sthash.OKY6NUEl.dpbs" target="_blank">here</a>).<br />
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Now. Here's the important qualifier:<br />
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<br /><b>2. You may not be able to home-educate them the way you imagined.*</b></h4>
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<i>(*It's worth noting that this seems to be true of every home-schooler I have ever known.)</i><br />
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It's common for people in your situation to believe that they are disqualified from home-educating because of one of the following:<br />
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<li>You don't have the energy to take your children on field trips.</li>
<li>You don't have the time and focus to implement the perfect curriculum.</li>
<li>You've forgotten all your high school maths (and maybe also what day it is).</li>
<li>Sometimes you have to stay in bed all day.</li>
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Because of my mother's illness, she simply wasn't able to spend time drilling me in maths memorisation or doing awesome chemistry experiments, both of which are by nature things she would have enjoyed. Do I feel like I was short-changed by my education due to missing out in these areas? Not a bit of it. If you have doubts, you can read my traditionally-schooled, academically-focused husband's <a href="https://onjordansbanks.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/should-you-go-to-university/" target="_blank">perspective</a> on my education.</div>
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By now you are either all upset at me and/or you're wondering how on earth my parents managed to give me what my husband and I (and others) consider to be a first-rate education. </div>
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<br />Two strategies for home-educating with a chronic illness</h3>
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I'm going to share two key strategies my mother used as she home-educated me through her 15 years of illness, which started when I was about 3.</div>
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<b>1. Have simple but significant goals for your children's education.</b></h4>
My mother focused her efforts on teaching me a small number of vital skills. Briefly, they could be summed up as:<br />
<ol>
<li>Character attributes. The ones my parents insisted on were obedience, respect, cheerfulness, and diligence.</li>
<li>Self motivation. I was never allowed to say "I'm bored". Tasks would be assigned to me if I did, and I usually preferred to come up with my own ways to occupy my time, which suited my mum just fine!</li>
<li>Discernment. This was crucial, otherwise I could have simply become excellent at frittering away my time. I was taught to evaluate my interests and materials for quality, suitability and usefulness, from a worldview shaped by the Bible.</li>
<li>Aspiration. To make big plans/ideas and to pursue them using the above skills.</li>
</ol>
<br />
Investing in these attributes/skills meant that she could be reasonably confident in my use of time and pursuit of my interests, with minimal (but wise) supervision from her.<br />
<br />
<h4>
<b>2. Delegate.</b></h4>
Yes, that's right. This may seem counter-intuitive, but you don't have to do everything yourself. While my education was very much home-based and parent-directed, I received outside tuition in skills my parents didn't possess and which are hard to learn in any other way than in a hands-on context. In my case, it was music (harp, piano, singing), dance, French, and horse-riding/horse care. When I was 14 I experimented with enrolling in Adult Ed classes and used the information and skills I learned there to springboard into further self-directed learning.<br />
<br />
If you are too ill to get out much, you absolutely need to avoid becoming a full-time chauffeur to your child/ren. There are good private tutors who will come to your house. There may be trusted relatives or other families who will give your child a lift to a lesson.<br />
<br />
Consider this: delegating to family members, especially older relatives, can be richly rewarding for your family. Do you have an elderly relative who knows how to crochet, tat, knit, sew, kickbox? Is there an uncle with an interest in military history? God designed human beings to thrive as they pass on and receive knowledge in a mentoring/discipling relationship. Gardening, cooking, painting, preserving, wood-working, building...these skills are often lost between generations for no other reason than that it just didn't occur to anyone to initiate that kind of mentoring relationship.<br />
<br />
I know, I know -- you may have a rotten relationship with your extended family. That may be one reason that home-educating appeals to you - you long to build a better, closer kind of family. It may go against the grain, but respectfully asking a family member to share their specialist knowledge/skills with your child is almost certainly going to be a step in the right direction. The worst they can say is no, right?<br />
<br />
A really low-stress and achievable method of delegation is audio books. When I was a child, I listened to many classic books this way. When I learned to read, I went straight to Jane Austen's <i>Northanger Abbey </i>to find my favourite bits for myself which I already knew from the recording. Borrow them, buy them, subscribe to <a href="http://www.audible.com/" target="_blank">Audible</a>. If you don't know what books to choose, find a good list (like <a href="http://www.vintagenovels.com/2011/07/books-for-boys.html" target="_blank">this one </a>or <a href="http://www.vintagenovels.com/2011/08/books-for-girls.html" target="_blank">this one</a> from my friend Suzannah).<br />
<br />
Ok, here's my third and final thought.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>3. Your children will learn <i>from</i> your chronic illness, not in spite of it. </b></h3>
As Kimberley says,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white;">"</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;">Through cancer God taught our family that our focus should be relational, first relationship with God, then with others. We are called to love and care for people, we should work to improve the lives of people, we must appreciate and enjoy people. It seems simple when you read it, but it’s uncommon in this world. It’s much more common to sacrifice people and relationship for a bigger home, a nicer car, a better education and even recognition, or a certificate of completion."</span></blockquote>
As they are at home with you, your children will learn from watching how you deal with your illness. If you use what energy you have to focus on the big things rather than feeling guilty about what your kids <i>aren't</i> doing, your children will learn from that. If you are a Christian and you are trusting God through the grief, pain and disappointment of ill health, your children will learn from that.<br />
<br />
Your children don't need to be shielded from your illness. Just like Kimberley and her family were blessed through her mother's fight with cancer, they can learn lessons through your illness that will teach them wisdom, compassion and courage. I learned that my mother's deep desire to have a close relationship with her only child and to give her a lifelong love of learning could not be thwarted by 15 years of serious and often misdiagnosed ill health. I know that if I face serious health issues in the future, my attitude will be shaped by having seen God's grace to my mother and our family in action.<br />
<br />
Friends, if you long to do this, if your deep desire is to bring your children home for their education, and you are bursting with questions, see the links below to women who blog about their experiences in this area, with lots more practical advice than I've given here. I'd also be very happy to put you in contact with people like my mother who can share their stories.<br />
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<div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRMO98VJQY2Uv82iFk26iIZeZIvVwuBQKDewhv_Xl4nuzVXxFnCjsx6JzeLH8Fs-Yl3SGBMa__3doz_kyJibcceF0vbEnKhVpwl1bPEoanIqbJdCj5R4gWYCCqD9W4c_gBPJfC8nVmPoQ/s1600/Dec24$16.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRMO98VJQY2Uv82iFk26iIZeZIvVwuBQKDewhv_Xl4nuzVXxFnCjsx6JzeLH8Fs-Yl3SGBMa__3doz_kyJibcceF0vbEnKhVpwl1bPEoanIqbJdCj5R4gWYCCqD9W4c_gBPJfC8nVmPoQ/s1600/Dec24$16.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My mother and I climb Marion's Lookout <br />
(in Tasmania's Cradle Mountain National Park)<br />
in her post-Chronic Fatigue era.</td></tr>
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Links:<br />
<a href="http://homeschoolencouragement.com/6-tips-homeschooling-chronic-illness/" target="_blank">6 Tips for Homeschooling with a Chronic Illness</a><br />
<a href="https://www.brightideaspress.com/2012/08/homeschooling-when-mama-has-a-chronic-illness/" target="_blank">Homeschooling when Mama has a Chronic Illness</a><br />
<a href="http://gricefullyhomeschooling.com/2013/02/homeschooling-with-chronic-illness-update.html" target="_blank">Homeschooling with Chronic Illness</a><br />
<a href="http://benandme.com/2011/05/homeschooling-with-chronic-illness-10.html" target="_blank">10 Tips to Help You Succeed </a><br />
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<br />Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-49771938281532346032013-09-01T17:04:00.001-07:002013-09-01T17:04:56.568-07:00Politics and Providence on the Prairie<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2013/08/07/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/RWL-137-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://c.o0bg.com/rf/image_960w/Boston/2011-2020/2013/08/07/BostonGlobe.com/Ideas/Images/RWL-137-001.jpg" height="400" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Laura Ingalls Wilder in Missou<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">ri</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I'm a late convert to Little House. (Am I really a homeschooler if I didn't read/quote/re-enact the books countless times growing up?) My husband and I read the series to our oldest daughter last year. All three of us discovered it at the same time. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There were a lot of tears. Most of them were not Eve's. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The surprise for us was the high (dare I say literary?) quality of the writing. Now, I don't mean that in some high-falutin' way. Our 3-year-old was just as drawn in. But this is the mark of a real classic, in my opinion. We read it on many levels, all of them satisfying (I'd rate <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, Shakespeare's plays, and the novels of Jane Austen and John Buchan highly in this regard). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> It turns out our introduction to Little House has come just as the books are showing up in the news again, in a few different ways.
For starters, Laura Ingalls Wilder's first draft of the series, her memoir entitled <i>Pioneer Girl</i>, is being made available to the public for the first time. Also, the whole Little House series has just been repackaged into one volume sans illustrations (more's the pity!) to appeal to 'serious' adult readers. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And finally, <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/08/09/little-libertarians-prairie-little-libertarians-prairie/DrtramwsrcrdTTIFvdzkOO/story.html" target="_blank">this article in the Boston Globe</a> showed up. The writer's big idea is that when Rose Wilder Lane assisted her mother in fictionalising her memoir into children's stories, she did so through a deliberately Libertarian grid, transforming her family's harrowing frontier experiences into shiny, corn-fed propaganda, as a well-aimed blow at the social-welfare progressivism of FDR's "New Deal." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Now, I have no problem with saying that Rose was a Libertarian. She was. And Edith Nesbit helped found the Fabian Socialist movement, and Frances Hodgson Burnett used her children's novels to promote Eastern Mysticism. Children's authors do not inhabit some anodyne land of Nursery neutrality. They see the world through one lens or another, just as we do. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's what I take exception to: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">1. Politicising a beloved series of books which has united people from all over the map, literally and figuratively. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2. Accusing the books of whitewashing the frontier experience. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> I'm not going to go point by point through the article, but as an example -- </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lane must have known, as she redrafted her mother’s handwritten memoirs, that this notion of pioneer bravery—and the very real fortitude of the family—would prove an irresistible American theme. The result was a series of books that helped instill a deep national code of frontier values, including the notion that isolated Americans can thrive because the government leaves them to draw only on their personal energies and ethics. It’s an appealing idea, and it has become woven into our image of the pioneers. But it’s not the full story of what happened out there on the prairie. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">She also speculates that Rose made up a canny appeal that Pa Ingall's uses to quell a riot in The Long Winter, calling it "free-market speechifying". She completely misses his point, which was to persuade a foolhardy store-owner to feed the starving community on credit -- not to instruct everyone in the benefits of capitalism. (Indeed, I think most people would agree that the Little House books are remarkable for their <i>lack</i> of overt didacticism.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Little House books barely mention the obvious, which is that the impoverished Ingallses never could have gone to Dakota Territory without a government grant: Like most pioneers, their livelihoods relied on the federal Homestead Act, which gave settlers 160 acres for the cost of a $14 filing fee—one of the largest acts of federal largesse in US history. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Did she read the same books I did? Does anyone want to go count the number of times the land-grant set-up is clearly explained in these stories? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Woodside contrasts the Little house books, in which Rose supposedly "recast the stoic, sometimes confused pioneers as optimistic, capable people who achieved success without any government help" with Laura's unvarnished original manuscript: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Wilder’s memoirs offer a picture of the costs and risks of isolation that never made it into the book series: A baby brother who died at 9 months. A miserable year working and living in an Iowa tavern. A pair of innkeepers who murdered guests and buried them out back. Another pioneer couple who boarded with them during the Long Winter whose attitudes were far more whining than stoic. </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What about the horrifically unhappy family Laura boards with as a young schoolteacher? You know, the wife that goes half-crazy with the cold and isolation and waves a knife around at her husband in the night 'cause he won't take her back East? What about the lynching? The child bride? The massacre? The two guys who died in the blizzard because it didn't occur to them to huddle together? The monster locust attack? Pa's inability to make farming any kind of success? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Surely it is just as possible that Laura and Rose had personal or literary reasons for their selection of certain anecdotes and story-lines over others, rather than primarily political ones. I can't help but suspect that it is Woodside herself who has a political axe to grind. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally and most significantly, Woodside reduces everything to a binary grid: self-reliant versus government-reliant. But there is another option. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Ingalls family doesn't have to choose between relying on the government or themselves because, at back of it all, they acknowledge the sovereignty of someone greater. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In one of the most poignant moments in the series, the Ingalls family bow their heads over their Christmas meal, which is 6 months late due to a freak season of blizzards which has kept an entire community in a desperate and harrowing condition of freezing and starvation for almost half a year (<i>The Long Winter</i>). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What words does Pa choose to grace this meal?
"We thank Thee for Thy bounty."
</span>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-3133650112201098032012-11-28T15:49:00.000-08:002012-11-29T03:37:17.674-08:00Just my cup of TeyYou reach the ripe old age of 31 and you think you've already discovered all those good, obscure, out-of-print (or-almost-out-of-print) authors. And if you haven't read all of them yet, you at least know their names.<br />
<br />
Then you find out you were wrong.<br />
<br />
My first inkling of Scottish author Josephine Tey came from my friend <a href="http://www.inwhichireadvintagenovels.blogspot.com.au/" target="_blank">Suzannah</a>. I quickly got <i>The Daughter of Time</i> (1951) out of the library, and I was hooked.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tey/josephine/portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tey/josephine/portrait.jpg" height="320" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elizabeth Mackintosh - aka Josephine Tey and Gordon Daviot</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I don't know how I missed her before. No less a personage than Peter Hitchens (that would be the more-famous Christopher's redeemed brother) has <a href="http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/a-good-read-and-an-encounter-with-those-wicked-russians.html" target="_blank">praised her books</a>, most particularly <i>The Daughter of Time</i> (which the Crime Writers' Association voted as the best crime novel of all time in 1990):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Josephine Tey’s clarity of mind, and her loathing of fakes and of propaganda, are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land. Her story-telling ability is apparently effortless (and therefore you may be sure it was the fruit of great hard work. (As Ernest Hemingway said ‘if it reads easy, that is because it was writ hard’) . But what she loves above all is to show that things are very often not what they seem to be, that we are too easily fooled, that ready acceptance of conventional wisdom is not just dangerous, but a result of laziness, incuriosity and of a resistance to reason.</blockquote>
To these qualities I would add her attentiveness to the twin themes of justice and mercy - two concepts that both crime writers and Christians must come to terms with. In the life of any literary sleuth worth his salt (and Inspector Alan Grant, her balanced and urbane detective, certainly is), there come times when he has to make tough calls about innocence and guilt. A detective novel can make an easy pulpit from which to preach relativism. Tey doesn't. The only novel I've read of hers that ends badly (won't tell which one) does so to prove the point that when we humanistically take ethical situations into our own hands, we make a right old mess of things.<br />
<br />
Providence is often pivotal in Tey's novels. In <i>The Franchise Affair </i>(1951), the faithful prayer of the protagonist's aunt seems to turn the course of the novel. And, though I found it to be the least satisfactory of her novels which I have read so far, the premise of <i>Miss Pym Disposes</i> (1946) is explicitly based on the axiom "Man proposes, but God disposes"<i>. </i><br />
<br />
I know nothing of Tey's personal theology. Coming from Scotland (her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh) and given the above themes, I think a case could be made for a strong Presbyterian/Calvinist cultural influence.<br />
<br />
Treatment of romantic love can be a deal-breaker for me. I really enjoy the mysteries, locations and plucky heroines of <a href="http://inwhichireadvintagenovels.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/the-novels-of-mary-stewart.html" target="_blank">Mary Stewart's novels</a>, but the dangerous-love-interest trope leaves me yawning. Tey's romances are more solidly built, and with a lighter touch. They feel like they could actually result in a happy marriage. (A neat bit of trivia: Mary Stewart paid homage to Tey's <i>Brat Farrar</i> (1949) in her mystery-romance <i>The Ivy Tree</i>.)<br />
<br />
However, Tey isn't completely kosher (is there a Presbyterian equivalent?). Her interest in the pseudo-science of physiognomy/anthropological criminology - an offshoot of social Darwinism - is tiresome. For instance, did you know people with slate-blue eyes are 'oversexed'? But since even the very best of authors (yes, John Buchan, I'm looking at you!) was not immune to this cultural claptrap, I can forgive her.<br />
<br />
What will you find in a Josephine Tey novel? An intriguing premise, likeable characters, fast-paced plotting and all of the delightful jolly-hockeysticks dialogue one expects from British 1920s-40s pop novels.<br />
<br />
If Mary Stewart novels are your guilty pleasure, I recommend Josephine Tey's novels: all the pleasure and none of the guilt.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tey/josephine/" target="_blank">Here are some e-texts at the University of Adelaide.</a><br />
<br />
<br />Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-62085010033874274692012-09-22T03:56:00.000-07:002012-09-22T03:56:20.328-07:00A project or twoOur lovely newborn daughter, Lilia, thoughtfully deferred her birth until halfway between the birthdays of her Mama and Papa. This gave us time to finish two projects that I'd been dreaming of.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, I am not a sewing/crafting/knitting woman. I don't rule out being one at some point in the future, but I am not one now. This is why I am inordinately stoked that we got to make something ourselves for our girls and why I feel the need to tell you about it.<br />
<br />
<h3>
The Mobile</h3>
Our former next-door neighbour gave us their mobile when Eve was born, but it was a shaky, noisy, flashy mobile (yep, Eve loved it), and ever since it squealed its last I've been dreaming of something a bit more...Etsy.<br />
<br />
After a burst of "<a href="http://pinterest.com/cebaehr/mobile-for-baby/" target="_blank">pinning</a>", I came up with an idea that would utilise my husband's origami skills. He consented and selected this lovely <a href="http://www.origami.cz/Bin/star.html" target="_blank">three-dimensional star pattern</a>.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIMgmlpSiMtZL6V9t8Y4GSklyrhdBABHL5wC1NqFhfwzh3vVWY0IDxIrPqCsXtCz45yWu7_qJANdEialjFes0vEgVD6yvhl3MNrFyz_T8ndwFrUuRmlUpL3z6Tpoi8L5_yXC_z203SWPI/s1600/IMG_0205_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIMgmlpSiMtZL6V9t8Y4GSklyrhdBABHL5wC1NqFhfwzh3vVWY0IDxIrPqCsXtCz45yWu7_qJANdEialjFes0vEgVD6yvhl3MNrFyz_T8ndwFrUuRmlUpL3z6Tpoi8L5_yXC_z203SWPI/s320/IMG_0205_1024.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lilia's mobile</td></tr>
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I am beyond happy with this project, especially since it cost us absolutely nothing in cash (I had an old embroidery hoop on hand from my single days and my husband has copious amounts of origami paper from his). I got to sit around in my overly-ripe state and read Anthony Trollope's "The Warden" aloud while Peirce cyphered origami instructions in Slovakian. What could be cozier?<br />
<br />
<h3>
The Paper Dolls</h3>
<br />
My almost-2-year-old, Meg, has been feeling rather left out that her older sister can play with paper dolls and she can't. I had long suspected that magnetic paper dolls might be the answer, but I couldn't really find the $40 to buy them locally.<br />
<br />
<i>Crafty blogosphere to the rescue! </i>Sarah Jane Studios has <a href="http://sarahjanestudios.com/blog/2012/05/magnetic-paper-dolls/" target="_blank">a winsome set of paper dolls</a> for $3 which she suggests you print out on magnetic paper. (Of course, there are plenty of free paper doll patterns online - Betsy McCall has some <a href="http://tpettit.best.vwh.net/dolls/pd_scans/betsy_mccall/large_format.html" target="_blank">gorgeous vintage ones here</a> - but since I was saving so much money by making the dolls myself, I was happy to send a few dollars to Sarah, who runs a home business designing beautiful fabrics.)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOjhw3M_lv7exymR4Jx4EEKrrFZPbpw7Rktl3U8cocX2S1X19c96e_lfE5Ui-yl9KBeJL5VkSek6iusPt0La43hSBdgFAls1JZUJ5I2QGqPyPqoLJbMg7ChQ_35XlGJXVBTewcADuLydY/s1600/IMG_0215_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOjhw3M_lv7exymR4Jx4EEKrrFZPbpw7Rktl3U8cocX2S1X19c96e_lfE5Ui-yl9KBeJL5VkSek6iusPt0La43hSBdgFAls1JZUJ5I2QGqPyPqoLJbMg7ChQ_35XlGJXVBTewcADuLydY/s320/IMG_0215_1024.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="http://sarahjanestudios.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/magnet-dolls12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://sarahjanestudios.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/magnet-dolls12.jpg" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://sarahjanestudios.com/" target="_blank">Sarah Jane Studios</a>' magnetic paper dolls - well-lit photo from her site on left, chaotic photo from my home on right. (These got stuck together somehow while I was uploading them. Since my techie husband is out right now, that's how they are staying.)</td></tr>
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My wonderful mum made lovely drawstring bags out of some fun floral fabric we had lying around, and I bought two small cookie sheets/trays ($3.28) from Big W to use as a backdrop and container for the dolls.<br />
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Meg has been very proud and excited to have her own paper dolls, and we made a set for Eve as well. I gave them to the girls the day Lilia was born.<br />
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Cautionary note: the biggest expense was - you guessed it - the magnetic paper, which I purchased at OfficeWorks. $20 for a packet of five sheets. This becomes depressing when you look online and see that the same product would have cost you about $8 from Michaels in the US. However, I'm still very happy that I was able to make two sets of magnetic paper dolls for my girls for under $30 total.<br />
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And it was fun.<br />
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I promise I'll get back to posts about books soon. On the non-fiction front, I'm enjoying Dinah Roe's biography of an important Victorian family, "Rossettis in Wonderland", and slowly but surely working my way through Augustine's "The City of God" (and I mean <i>slowly</i> - don't look for a post on that one before next year!).<br />
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Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-25923172736241642462012-08-14T06:03:00.000-07:002012-08-14T06:03:02.011-07:00Reading Jane Austen with my husband<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says ‘I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory,’ he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontes’ heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot’s.”</span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">- G.K. Chesterton</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My husband just finished reading all of Jane Austen's novels. I'm impressed that he had the discernment to see past the uber-feminine stereotypes of Jane Austen's work that are common in our culture and really enjoy the novels for what they are: well-crafted works of art that are popular because they are insightful, funny, balanced and human.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He's in good company. Along with C.S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, G.K. Chesterton, and many others, he is now A Man Who Likes Jane Austen. (Theologian Peter Leithart has attempted to lead Uni students in chants of "Real Men Read Austen" - a quick google search reveals mugs and t-shirts with this mantra, just in case you're interested.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let me back track. At the time when I met my husband, his immediate off-the-cuff comment about Austen was something like this: "Oh, yes - women sitting around in nightgowns."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I thought he was referring to all those candlelit scenes in the films where the characters brush their hair and speculate about what so-and-so is really thinking (which happens much less frequently in the novels). It took me about a year to realise he thought all Regency dresses looked like nightgowns. They kind of do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, while we were engaged, he started with <i>Emma</i>. I don't remember him having an epiphany about it, but after our marriage we settled into a rather nice habit of me reading to him while he does after-dinner cleanup (his idea, I promise!), and somehow, we selected <i>Mansfield Park</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"What should we read next?" I asked, when we finished it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His reply? </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Let's just read another Austen because we haven't enjoyed anything else as much."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Peirce's ranking (though he says "they're all great"):</span><br />
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<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mansfield Park</i></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Emma</i></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sense & Sensibility</i></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Persuasion</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Northanger Abbey</i></li>
<li><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pride & Prejudice</i></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reading through the whole Austen body-of-work (excepting <i>Emma</i>) over a year or so was such a delight - though sometimes I felt a bit like a glutton. Seeing her world through the eyes of my husband was great fun and really surprising. For instance:</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He didn't understand why Darcy fell in love with Elizabeth and to this day maintains its unlikelihood. (What! Did I give Lizzie a silly voice in my read-aloud?!)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He absolutely refuses to see why people don't like Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He thought Edward Ferrars should just get a job (he's right).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He nearly went batty listening to Willoughby's big explanation scene and wanted to excise it from the novel.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the delights of great literature is the way it grows with you - how you can enjoy different aspects of it at different stages in your life. I used to think that Austen's novels were all about courtship, each one ending with a wedding, but now I realise how much they are about marriages, and how surprisingly little weddings themselves actually feature at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But getting back to the subject of this post... Just in case you didn't buy my opening paragraph, I thought I'd leave you with a few quotes from some of Jane Austen's more famous male admirers (and some of my other favourite authors): Trollope, Chesterton, and Lewis.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"The faults of some [of Austen's characters] are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel."</span></span> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: -webkit-auto;">- Anthony Trollope</span></blockquote>
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"The Novel of the nineteenth century was female; as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male. ... The strength and subtlety of woman had certainly sunk deep into English letters when George Eliot began to write. Her originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as well or better than she. Charlotte Bronte, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Bronte could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know--like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. ...</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected women from truth, were burst by the Brontes or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew more about men than either of them. - </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">G.K. Chesterton</span></blockquote>
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<span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"It is perhaps worth emphasizing what may be called the hardness - at least the firmness - of Jane Austen's thought exhibited in all these undeceptions. The great abstract nouns of the classical English Moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used; good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, 'some duty neglected, some failing indulged', impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blamable trust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world. ... All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naively so. The hardness is, of course, for oneself, not for one's neighbors. ... Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen's is at once less soft and less cruel. ... It remains to defend what I have been saying against a possible charge. Have I been treating the novels as though I had forgotten that they are, after all, comedies? I trust not. The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible. 'Principles' or 'seriousness' are essential to Jane Austen's art. Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. 'Total irony' - irony about everything - frustrates itself and becomes insipid. ... If charity is the poetry of conduct and honor the rhetoric of conduct, then Jane Austen's 'principles' might be described as the grammar of conduct." -</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> C.S. Lewis</span></blockquote>
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Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-65775181340701469062012-07-24T05:38:00.001-07:002012-07-24T16:25:43.696-07:00Book Review — Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>"Robert gave the box-room door a resounding kick, merely for his own satisfaction, for he knew that only the kick of a giant would have made any impression on its strong oak panels, and sat down cross-legged on the floor to consider the situation. Betsy was roaring in the bathroom, Timothy was yelling in the broom cupboard, Nan was sobbing in the linen room, and Absalom was barking his head off in the small cupboard where the boots were kept."</i></blockquote>
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This is how Elizabeth Goudge introduces the four pseudo-orphaned Linnet children (and their dog) in the opening of her 1964 novel, <i>Linnets and Valerians.</i></div>
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I thought this was going to be one of my favourite Elizabeth Goudge novels, and certainly my favourite of her children’s books.</div>
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But it was not to be.</div>
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The wonderful, Goudgian characters and settings, given in richly allusive language, are all present and correct -- but my favourite feature of her writing is missing: a Christian worldview. I’m not meaning to cast doubt on Goudge’s Christianity, but in a few of her books I feel like her worldview just goes AWOL, and this is one of them.</div>
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Consider the novel’s treatment of the following themes:</div>
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<li>Paganism: Protection against evil for the children comes in the shape of such guardians as bees and rue, relics of English paganism. Anybody who knows Goudge’s stories also knows she was perfectly capable of writing of God’s sovereignty and compassion with great poignancy and power. In this book, she just decided to swap out the Living God for a herb.</li>
<li>Redemption: For the evil-doers (and I’m talking some mean customers), redemption comes because they suddenly sense they’re beaten and decide to skip town and/or be good from then on. Who knew it was this easy?</li>
<li>Forgiveness: Again, it’s something that just happens in this book, on the spur of the moment and without any real effort because everyone’s so happy they can’t remember that they’ve been put through absolute heck for years. This is called forgetfulness. Forgiveness is hard.</li>
<li>Witchcraft: The turning point in the book for me was when the good guys decide to actively use “white magic” (herbalism, charms, rituals, etc) to combat the villain’s very black magic. Make no mistake, this is not an allegorical/representational “magic” to signify the supernatural (as in Lewis’ Narnia). God and the Church also exist in the book, but in a pallid, this-is-what-we-do-on-Sunday-before-we-eat-roast-beef sort of way.</li>
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Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot to enjoy in this book. The scenes of Uncle Ambrose home-schooling the children (along a classical model) are some of my favourite Goudge scenes ever. The Edwardian Devonshire village and parsonage are among the most unabashedly delightful settings I’ve encountered in literature (and the descriptions of food...oh, my. Pass the yorkshire pud, please!). These details would make the book an ideal 'comfort read'.</div>
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But because of the serious worldview problems...let’s just say this won’t be on my children’s reading list any time soon. There’s much better stuff for them to cut their teeth on - stories that will tell them the truth about the big things: </div>
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<li>Forgiving those who have wronged you is hard work. </li>
<li>“Let us do evil that good may come” is never a good idea. </li>
<li>Real protection and redemption are gifts of our Saving and Sovereign God.</li>
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All lessons that Goudge knew - and wrote about elsewhere - very, very well.</div>
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For these and other truths, read: </div>
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<li>George Macdonald’s stories, especially <i>The Lost Princess: A Double Story</i></li>
<li><i>The Chronicles of Narnia</i> by C.S. Lewis</li>
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To turn your children into Anglophiles, read these books* by Rosemary Sutcliff:</div>
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<li><i>The Armourer’s House</i></li>
<li><i>The Queen Elizabeth Story</i></li>
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Finally, some Goudge books that will turn you into a fan:</div>
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<li><i>The Dean’s Watch</i></li>
<li><i>The Rosemary Tree </i>(<a href="http://inwhichireadvintagenovels.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/rosemary-tree-by-elizabeth-goudge.html" target="_blank">read my friend Suzannah's review</a>)</li>
<li><i>The Scent of Water </i></li>
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<a href="http://www.acrossthepage.net/2011/03/linnets-and-valerians-revised/" target="_blank">Another view</a> on <i>Linnets and Valerians</i>.</div>
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*These contain elements of 16th century English paganism - herbalism, “the Good Folk” - but they are in the spirit of “let’s have fun leaving a dish of milk out for the fairies”, rather than "let's entrust our lives to their protection"!</div>
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<br /></div>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-70468983139294051482012-07-10T05:53:00.000-07:002012-07-10T05:54:25.117-07:00Waiting for Papa — book review of "Lizzie Nonsense"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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While my husband is <a href="http://www.pilgrimhillnews.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/celebration.html">adventuring in Papua New Guinea</a>, it seems apropos to talk about one of my absolutely most favourite picture books - <i>Lizzie Nonsense</i> by Jan Ormerod.<br />
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This is a lovely gem of a picture book about a family who live in the Bush in Federation-era Australia, told from the perspective of the oldest of the two children, Lizzie. It focuses on what life is like for Mama, Lizzie and Baby as they wait for Papa to return from selling sandalwood in town (50 miles along sand tracks).<br />
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My own recent experience of waiting for Papa to come home has been rather eye-opening. Eight days is a considerable time when the longest period you've been separated from each other previously is three nights. (Yes, I'm aware of how ridiculously blessed that makes me. My cousin whose husband is in the Navy was telling me on Skype that she'll be facing separations of up to 6 months.)<br />
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Lizzie's experiences in the book may not include the following:<br />
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<li>Being upset that Papa was not reachable on mobile phone for most of the trip.</li>
<li>Finding out just how far sprinkles go disperse throughout the house after a nutritious afternoon snack of fairy bread (Americans can google that one).</li>
<li>Confronting a sudden lack of motivation to do laundry.</li>
<li>Discovering EXACTLY how much tidying up Papa does every day without mentioning it.</li>
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And now back to the book....</div>
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This is one of the few children's books I've discovered at the library which I felt I actually wanted to own. So many picture books are badly drawn, or stylish but "thin". Sometimes the illustrations are very attractive, but don't interact with the text in a meaningful way.</div>
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In contrast, Ormerod's watercolour illustrations are just lovely (but not "pretty") and her simple text rewards repeat reading. Lizzie is inventive, fanciful, and capable. Mama is brave and sweet, and there's an undertone of poignance for the adult reader who senses how much she may have given up to live this life. I also love the obvious conjugal felicity of the husband and wife, which balances the awareness of hardships.</div>
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While brief, it conveys a wonderful sense of place and family. It's not surprising that Ormerod seems to have based it on the life of her own grandmother.</div>
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My daughter Eve absolutely loved this book as a 2-year-old and chose to dress up as Lizzie for my 30th birthday party, though I imagine the book is probably aimed at children around age 4-6.</div>
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<br /></div>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-4166034289107669002012-06-29T07:19:00.000-07:002012-07-06T05:16:10.213-07:00Learning from Anna's mistakes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete fulfilment of what he had so long desired, was not completely happy. </i><i>...It showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that </i></div>
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<i>happiness consists in the realization of their desires. </i>- Anna Karenina, 1877</div>
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When I think about the benefits of reading fiction, I often think about my experience of reading <i>Anna Karenina</i> when I was in my late teens.<br />
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I was falling in love with paperback Penguin classics for the first time (though I refused to read the 'introductions', the aim of which seemed to be to spoil both independent discovery and simple enjoyment of the novel). </div>
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I'd grown up with thousands - yes, thousands - of textured, earthy-toned, loamy-smelling books from the 1800s. But novelty is often given undue importance at age 17. In my case, a fresh, creamy-paged paperback with a venerable penguin on the spine was a strong incentive to read books I probably wouldn't have otherwise tried. </div>
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Now, I have very little interest in or time for adultery narratives, which is what I think Tolstoy's <i>Anna Karenina</i> is filed under in a lot of minds. I cannot imagine ever reading <i>Madame Bovary. </i>Flaubert's work is less interesting to me than the stove manual my husband read to me two nights ago (and let me tell you, I don't do manuals - there's a reason he had to read it to me). <i>Brideshead Revisited </i>wouldn't have been on my horizon until a very trusted friend convinced me to read it (and she was right to do so...but more on that some other day).<br />
<br />
But <i>Anna Karenina</i> took my breath away. I spent the next decade telling my mother she should read it, and I'm happy to say that just last year she did, and loved it.*<br />
<br />
Now, the thing I want to say is not that <i>Anna K </i>is a great book/Great Book (Kitty! Levin! Karenin! Oh, there's so much to this book!), but that it served more than what one might call a purely 'literary' purpose in my moral formation, if you will.<br />
<br />
When I opened the book I firmly believed that adultery was wrong, wrong, wrong. When I closed the book, I knew that it was also painful, boring, relationship-fracturing, parasitical, and engendering of endless and irremediable regrets. (As an aside, let me say that it is also totally unappealing from the standpoint of such conjugal bliss as I am now blessed to enjoy!!)<br />
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And this, I believe, is one of the best features of great literature - that through it, we can gain wisdom. We can learn from other people's mistakes. Even fictional people in 19th century Russia.</div>
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And let me tell you, this is a book in which the characters make a lot of mistakes. Some of the consequences you see coming - charging towards the characters like the novel's infamous steam train - some of them you don't. Some of the characters are redeemed when you have lost hope for them, others cling stubbornly to their foolish, pointless, uglifying choices just when you expect the reverse.<br />
<br />
So this is just one reason why I won't be seeing the new film adaptation of <i>Anna K</i> coming out this year. This story should never shoe-horned into a stylised melodrama with doll-house sets. Anna should not be gilded over into Keira Knightley's passionate-but-doomed-by-society-proto-feminist in asymmetrical Klimt couture.<br />
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What are viewers of Joe Wright's film going to learn? All the things they already 'knew' about those judgemental people in the bad old days, I'm guessing -- nasty old biddies peering through their opera-glasses at poor Anna!<br />
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When we succumb unquestioningly to what C.S. Lewis called 'chronological snobbery', we lose so much of our heritage - both of wisdom and folly - as God's fallen image-bearers.<br />
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A Great Book can cry aloud to us on the street corner, in a faint echo of the Lady Wisdom <a href="http://www.esvbible.org/Proverbs+1/">in Solomon's Proverbs</a>:<br />
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<i>“How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?</i></div>
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<i><a alt="esv_11" class="va" href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=939665043379892755" rel="v20001022" style="color: #284f57; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px;"></a>How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing</i></div>
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<i>and fools hate knowledge?</i></div>
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<i>If you turn at my reproof,</i></div>
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<i>behold, I will pour out my spirit to you;</i></div>
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<i>I will make my words known to you."</i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">*My mother tells me that the unabridged audio-book read by David Horovitch at</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"><a href="http://Audible.com/">Audible.com</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">is</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">something really special.</span></div>
</div>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-70864851978564240262012-06-13T22:05:00.000-07:002012-06-14T16:49:07.505-07:00Book Review — "The Road from Coorain" by Jill Ker Conway<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://belchetz-swenson.com/portfolio/big/jkc2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://belchetz-swenson.com/portfolio/big/jkc2.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A portrait of memoirist and academic Jill Ker Conway<br />
by Sarah Belchetz-Swenson, <br />
which hangs in Australia's National Portrait Gallery <br />
(http://belchetz-swenson.com/)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Quite frankly, the only thing that induced me to open the covers of this book was the fact that I'd never heard of it. Neither had any other Australians I mentioned it to. Yet my husband remembered it as a highlight of his Uni World Lit class.<br />
<br />
This gave me pause. Uni students in America were required to read a memoir of life in Australia by someone I'd never heard of? And my husband actually liked it?<br />
<br />
I found this to be a riveting memoir. Jill Ker Conway (born in 1934) is the engaging kind of memoirist who makes her life really interesting to readers...without being the annoying kind of memoirist who comes across as being endlessly fascinating to herself (a feat, since a lot of us secretly find ourselves fascinating, don't you think?).<br />
<br />
While the book jacket wants us to think that it is a portrait of Jill's bush childhood, it is, in essence, a memoir about the events which shaped Jill's decision to leave two great loves: her native country, and her mother.<br />
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I wonder if this lies at the heart of why the book has not taken off in Australia in the same way it has internationally. Australia can be ambivalent towards its distinguished ex-pats. We love that they have the goods to really make it out there in the world, but we tend to be suspicious of their authenticity as a result.<br />
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But don't let me turn you off reading the book. This is not a depressing or self-pitying memoir at all. This is the story of a young girl whose "feminist" mother tried to abort her (two planned sons were enough), but who became the life and hope of her family: the one who cared for the farm while also achieving the educational goals her parents had dreamed of for their sons - long after they had abandoned those dreams in the wake of devastating tragedies.<br />
<br />
This is a girl who took up the notion of duty with teeth-grinding seriousness despite the imperfections of her family and who kept a sense of wonder and excitement in learning about the world despite the many disillusionments of academia.<br />
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A few themes which struck me, and made the book valuable for me to read:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>Insights into education —</b> Jill goes from doing her 'school' at home - which she completes in just one afternoon a week - on her parents' sheep station in remote NSW, to adjusting to an all-encompassing institutionalised schooling with its opaque priorities:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The routines governing time were also puzzling. One just began studying one subject after everyone had been induced to sit still and be quiet, and suddenly a bell rang, the teacher departed, and we rushed in the gymnasium for an activity called physical exercise. This I could not fathom. I knew how to do hard physical labor, but I was bored by the calisthenics and too clumsy to play the games. The purpose of all the activity was clear to everyone but me, and no explanations were ever given... Our parents had taught us to be the best at everything we did, but the things we were supposed to excel in had always before had some practical purpose."
</blockquote>
Her later discovery of how to make her university environment serve rather than squelch her love of knowledge is very interesting.</li>
<li><b>Interactions with Christianity — </b>Learning about T.S. Eliot's conversion forces her to question her negative assumptions about Christian belief. Later, after seeing the famous cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Spain:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It was clear that I had to learn more about medieval Christianity because it had produced a world more beautiful than any I had ever seen."</blockquote>
</li>
<li><b>Understanding the tragedy of her mother — </b>Jill wants to find a way to understand her mother's "descent into hell" (my husband and I have used this phrase ever since reading Charles Williams' novel of the same name). She senses that something larger than just their individual family situation has worked towards the demise of her mother's character. To her credit, she refuses to jejunely throw the blame on Men, or a Repressive Society. Christians will find ample basis in our common fallen condition (based on a historic space-time Fall) for the kind of disintegration she describes.</li>
<li><b>Refusal to conform to the dominant cultural camps —</b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"My schooling had been supposed to be training an elite for leadership, but it had really been training me to imitate the ways and manners of the English upper class. To talk of Australian elites was to realise that the people I and my brothers had known in school were working not on Australia's social and political problems, but on gaining recognition from an external British world. ... My friends on the left were no different. They were hostages to the worldview of the British working class... Australia was different."</blockquote>
In the end, an unwillingness to fit into this dominant intellectual grid of 1950s Sydney - in which each camp romanticises/absolutises different aspects of British society - leads to Jill's decision to leave Australia to study History in America.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I realised that my plans to write a new kind of Australian history couldn't be fulfilled at the University of Sydney... I didn't want to join my radical friends in railing against a heedless society. I didn't want to write old-style institutional history of the British Empire and Commonwealth. ...the Harvard History Department...seemed to know how to explain the development of a new culture, and I was ready to learn from them."</blockquote>
</li>
</ul>
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I'd recommend this beautifully-written book for people who just really like memoirs, or those who are interested in reading the reflections of an intelligent woman who grapples with the questions of Australia's culture and history and doesn't settle for easy answers. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiILhm_k49GjKKStJDg7jbDL1Cik6b2ePxglJE4YaUPNUVdHgeaojQb_llcuax0Yg76oNAlet0_UY0Jn0s_Ky1XszKfDVZlmYMrALxSohVqUUzZOfIp8lHhM8gfdHRcRM1iSjFRL1QZCVc/s1600/9780679724360.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiILhm_k49GjKKStJDg7jbDL1Cik6b2ePxglJE4YaUPNUVdHgeaojQb_llcuax0Yg76oNAlet0_UY0Jn0s_Ky1XszKfDVZlmYMrALxSohVqUUzZOfIp8lHhM8gfdHRcRM1iSjFRL1QZCVc/s320/9780679724360.jpg" width="297" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-61572010437031316662012-06-05T15:46:00.001-07:002012-06-05T15:46:23.753-07:00Big books<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAycKJjRueo15VbtSrfHGywVImQvdtHBjhteHvy7jiGRA3XKA36fOk863Ku9KRQtKf2XI92zP6Czpsi7Wor8fAKjZ85aqxf7NO9vQli2G13ATxNqxv9yhTcG1AxJCK7FC4TwQ8zKmV8uM/s1600/Dante_Alighieri_%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAycKJjRueo15VbtSrfHGywVImQvdtHBjhteHvy7jiGRA3XKA36fOk863Ku9KRQtKf2XI92zP6Czpsi7Wor8fAKjZ85aqxf7NO9vQli2G13ATxNqxv9yhTcG1AxJCK7FC4TwQ8zKmV8uM/s1600/Dante_Alighieri_%25281%2529.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dante Alighieri</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I'm starting a list of "big" books. The books that I haven't read, but kind of <i>bump into</i> all the time in the books I have. Here's where I'm starting:<br />
<br />
Aristotle's <i>Poetics</i><br />
Plato's <i>Republic</i><br />
Augustine's <i>The City of God</i><br />
Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i><br />
Calvin's <i>Institutes of the Christian Religion</i><br />
Milton's <i>Paradise Lost</i><br />
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My modest aim is to finish at least one this year.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, I also imagine these popping up in our future learning together as a family (aka homeschooling), and I want to give myself a head start.<br />
<br />
Any to add?<br />
<br />
Translations to recommend?<br />
<br />
<br />Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-42310187695775401132012-06-04T04:09:00.002-07:002012-06-08T18:24:19.260-07:00What I read in 2011<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSHDOF5hqjRcTy0juTCyUY-cHMVjXc3-iMa-meS-IPp5xzxLlsF08TxqWpmL6gWL00W_XveYo3hPaSON-ygkv4I0G2Hu1l-exi2D9XBQYWQ2zcvvxi8c9skVYTPKwLkZllmXR2TV5sibM/s1600/IMG_3006.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSHDOF5hqjRcTy0juTCyUY-cHMVjXc3-iMa-meS-IPp5xzxLlsF08TxqWpmL6gWL00W_XveYo3hPaSON-ygkv4I0G2Hu1l-exi2D9XBQYWQ2zcvvxi8c9skVYTPKwLkZllmXR2TV5sibM/s320/IMG_3006.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eve reads to Meg in 2011</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I love reading lists.<br />
<br />
Looking at a friend's yearly reading retrospective is a bit like that distracted sideways bend some of us do to scope out the bookshelves in other people's houses...but much less awkward.<br />
<br />
I have a sanguine hope that there will be a forthcoming post about which books were the highlights of my year.<br />
<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Miscellaneous non-fiction </b></span><b> —</b></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Musicophilia: Tales of Music & the Brain - Oliver Sacks</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">5 Cities that Ruled the World - Douglas Wilson</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Loving the Little Years – by Rachel Jankovic</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Raising Babies - by Steve Biddulph</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Parenting in the Pew - Robbie Castleman</li>
</ul>
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<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Books about Christianity and the Christian worldview —</b></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<br />
<ul>
<li>Truth with Love: The Apologetics of Francis A. Schaeffer - by Bryan Follis</li>
<li>Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth - by Douglas Wilson & Douglas Jones</li>
<li>Family Driven Faith - by Voddie Baucham</li>
<li>The Plain Man Looks at the Beatitudes - William Barcley</li>
<li>Escape from Reason - Francis Schaeffer</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Biographies —</b></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life - Brian Moynahan</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy - by Eric Metaxas</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life - Colin Duriez</li>
</ul>
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<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Fiction </b></span><b>—</b></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Silas Marner - by George Eliot</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Children of Men - by P.D. James</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Foolish Immortals - by Paul Gallico</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">True Grit - by Charles Portis</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Framed - by Frank Cotrell Boyce</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Daughter of Time - by Josephine Tey</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Rendezvous with Rama - by Arthur C. Clarke</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Refugees - by Arthur Conan Doyle</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Miranda Going Home - by Eleanor Spence</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">The Rider of the White Horse - by Rosemary Sutcliff</li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">Mansfield Park - by Jane Austen <i>(reread with Peirce)</i></li>
</ul>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
...by John Buchan:</div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The 39 Steps</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Witchwood</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Greenmantle</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">...by P.G. Wodehouse:</span></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Laughing Gas</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Leave it to Psmith</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">...by N.D. Wilson:</span></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">100 Cupboards</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Dandelion Fire</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Chestnut King</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Dragon’s Tooth</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">...by Jill Paton Walsh:</span></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Wyndham Case</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A Piece of Justice</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">...some “golden age” mysteries:</span></div>
<ul>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Mystery Mile - by Margery Allingham</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Man in the Brown Suit - by Agatha Christie</span></li>
<li style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Lonesome Road - by Patricia Wentworth</span></li>
</ul>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Books I gave up on </b></span><b> —</b></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<ul>
<li>What Maisie Knew - by Henry James</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 13.0px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-29686801292790257802012-06-02T04:29:00.003-07:002012-06-02T05:08:54.099-07:00Maybe just get the Ferrari?My husband's favourite magazine is - wait for it - <i>Popular Mechanics</i>. Yes.*<br />
<br />
Personally, it always looks profoundly dull to me, but he mines it for all these nuggets of fascinating information and then tells me about them. (This endearing habit of making previously boring things scintillatingly interesting is one of the many excellent reasons I had to marry him.) <br />
<br />
I was struck by <a href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/can-technology-fix-the-college-debt-crisis-6547416">this article</a>, written by a law professor at the University of Tennessee, on the impossibility of higher education fees continuing to rise as they are now (at four times the rate of inflation!!).<br />
<br />
Here's a quotable bit:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">Research by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that people who major in computer science, business, or engineering get a big lifetime-earnings boost, while people who major in the humanities don’t do nearly as well. That’s not a reason to look down on the humanities, but with college growing ever more expensive, a degree that won’t add to your earnings potential isn’t an investment, but an expensive consumer item. It may be nice to have—but so is a Ferrari, another expensive consumer item. The difference is, nobody’s encouraging 18-year-olds to take on six-figure debt to buy a Ferrari.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><br /><br />Read more: <a href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/can-technology-fix-the-college-debt-crisis-6547416#ixzz1wdNzR13s" style="color: #003399; text-decoration: none;">Can Technology Fix the College Debt Crisis? - Glenn Reynolds on the College Bubble - Popular Mechanics</a> </span><br />
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<a href="http://www.skyoftech.com/demo/joomla1.7/images/stories/virtuemart/product/ferrari_dino_concept_2007_01_1024x768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://www.skyoftech.com/demo/joomla1.7/images/stories/virtuemart/product/ferrari_dino_concept_2007_01_1024x768.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">*If you know Peirce, you probably thought it was going to be an obscure historical or theological journal.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span>Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-32150575548523753592012-06-01T21:24:00.000-07:002012-06-02T04:20:42.520-07:00meet Frank Cotrell Boyce<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://hopereaders.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/frank-cottrell-boyce-unforgotten-coat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="http://hopereaders.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/frank-cottrell-boyce-unforgotten-coat.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Here's a fantastic <a href="http://www.catholicdigest.com/articles/food_fun/books/2010/06-28/a-qa-with-author-frank-cottrell-boyce">interview</a> with Catholic writer Frank Cotrell Boyce, who wrote one of my favourite recent fiction finds, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Framed-Frank-Cottrell-Boyce/dp/0060734027">Framed</a></i>. Hopefully I'll get a chance to say something more about it one of these days.<br />
<br />
Really impressed by lots of the Q&A, but especially this:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strong style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">How does your faith affect your work?</strong><br />In every single way, I think. I’ve got a very kind of specific faith idea when I’m writing my children’s books, which comes from St. Paul about thinking on the good things (“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” Philippians 4:8). Because so much of what’s aimed at our children is about how rubbish life is. They’re always being told that life is scary and life is dark. Saying “Life is amazing, and the world is a phenomenally wonderful place and full of grace” is my starting point.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><br />
It's unspeakably encouraging to me to know that a man with this ethos is writing for children today, and with some success.<br />
<br />
Plus, he has seven children, which in my books makes him very cool.Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-939665043379892755.post-19315417721106655942012-06-01T21:08:00.001-07:002012-06-02T05:06:33.787-07:00Homeschool propaganda<a href="http://www.collegeathome.com/homeschool-domination/">Here is a fun image</a>, helpfully compiling many of the amazing stats about home-education I've been telling people about for a while now.<br />
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I'm supposed to be able to embed it on this site. But that would be too much effort.<br />
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<br />Christina Baehrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13324795718291893464noreply@blogger.com0