Book Series I've enjoyed

Here are three book series I've enjoyed over the past several years.

Honor Harrington by David Weber
--On Basilisk Station is the first book and is free from the publisher, Baen. I think there are 18-20+ books in this series which started in the 90s. Many of them were released free on CDs included with some of the hardback edition. I've read most of the books with legal electronic copies and got the rest from the library. I've read the first dozen or so books twice and would send money to the author if he had an electronic tip jar.

I guess the genre would be epic space opera. I like the development of Honor as she grows from a new space captain to a commodore then admiral. Generally, Weber has developed a really rich world with different star nations/empires/confederations. There are differences in political systems, technological innovation, social structures etc that are interesting and believable. The space battles are technical without losing dramatic tension in the details. Relationships are maintained and developed over books and when some characters die, it's easy to feel moved by the loss of a dear personality. I do think the series loses some umph after a while, but it's quite good for the first 8-10 books which is impressive on its own.

The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham
--Daniel Abraham was part of the team that wrote Leviathan Wakes. That scifi noir book had a bit too much of a horror element for my taste, but my electronic copy from the library included the first book of the Dagger and Coin series at the end. The Dagger is a reference to violence while the Coin references business maneuverings.

In this Lord-of-the-Rings-type fantasy world with a more interesting mix of races, one young man fraudulently comes to military and political power while another young woman fraudulently comes to economic power as a representative of a powerful banking house. I find this juxtaposition of economic power vs military/political power to be rare in fantasy books, and it's done well in this series. There are also several sub-themes about religious belief and fallibility of certainty, the power of the unempowered, and faithfulness/loyalty.

Odyssey One by Evan Currie
--First, I'm only on the second of the 4 or 5 books in this series. The space battles are gripping and epicly long (because they are told from many different perspectives). But of course, this is not sufficient for me to recommend as a partially read series.

This is a spoiler, but it comes early in the first book, so I feel less bad about doing this. The Odyssey is the first spaceship sent from Earth into deep space. And on this maiden voyage it picks up another human from a planet far away and a culture tens of thousands of years older than humanity on Earth. I find this proposition really intriguing and am enjoying the slow unfolding of how this could be.  I also enjoy the cultural interchange between the Earth humans and the space human.

Apparently, the first book Into the Black has an early, poorly edited version, and a second better edited version. I read the second edition and didn't find the editing a problem, but there have been many complaints about the first edition--so don't get that one.

Broken but not hopeless

In reviewing a lot of children's books over the past year, I've been saddened by the messiness, grossness, the evil that my children need to be exposed to.

Today, I was coloring with my daughter and introduced her to coloring skin. We used a peachy pencil, and a dusty tan pencil, and a brown pencil and we talked about how people had different color skin. And we compared our arm colors, and we talked about other children she knew who were darker than she was. And it was just a fact. To her, it's like daddy has blue eyes and she has brown eyes. 

But we've read a number of books that share about the American history with skin color and how it wasn't so factual. One thing I've been impressed about a number of these books is how exuberant they can be in the face of evil. I'm thinking about books like Hallelujah Flight which tells about an early trans-continental flight by 2 African-American men or Willie and the All-Stars about a boy growing up during WWII who wants to play professional baseball only to be told he won't ever because he's the wrong color.

We've read a couple books about children with limited access to books and the librarians who trek miles to help them. That Book Woman tells the story from the 1930s of an illiterate boy in Appalachia who learns to read over the course of  the visits from "that book woman". The book made me cry. Waiting for the Biblioburro also talks about an itinerant librarian but is set in contemporary Colombia. The burros are charmingly named Alpha and Beto. Our house is filled with books, and our children are unlikely to experience the privation these books refer to. Yet they need to know. They need to know that it's not so easy in most of the world and hasn't been for most of history.

But I also want them to know that their circumstances do not define them. That's something I so value in the children's book genre; they are by and large hopeful. Though these none of these books are grounded in a theology of hope, I think the hope is there because in Jesus there is the truth of hope. In the Easter story, where Jesus dies and defeats death, the darkest hopelessness, hope gets teeth. It's not just wishful thinking. Evil doesn't win the war even if it wins a few battles. 

Our nighttime routine with our daughter is to read a devotional with her, pray some set prayers, and then we ask her, "What can we thank Jesus for today?" Lately, she's wised up and tells us "Everything!" so that we can get it over with and get on to reading a library book. While we do help her unpack what her everything is, I hope she can also see the truth of it, that we can be thankful for everything and in being thankful we are hanging on to hope regardless of the circumstances. 

In my spare time...

The last six months or so, I've been curating children's books for Zoobean.com which will be open to the public in mid-May. Here's a blog post I wrote for them on some of our favorite illustrators:

Sometime during the seven years I trained as a linguist I went from a world-traipsing museum-goer to a life of words, words, and more words. Oh, and the occasional gesture and eye-gaze.

In my new life with little ones, I've been reintroduced to visual art and have encountered some wonderful artists disguised as children's book illustrators.

Here are a few artists that have stood out over the past 600-odd books we've looked through.

1) Zachary Pullen
We first encountered Pullen in The Toughest Cowboy: or How the Wild West Was Tamed. This was a fun book, but Pullen's art was better than John Frank's story. So I hunted for other work by Pullen and found Friday My Radio Flyer Flew which he authored and illustrated. Home run! (Speaking of which, he's also illustrated Lipman Pike: America's First Home Run King.)

Pullen paints wonderfully detailed caricatures from frequently odd, close-up angles that invites the reader. young and old, to enter into the world of the book.

2) Jane Dyer
We first noticed Dyer in Talking Like the Rain: A Read-to-Me Book of Poems. Her watercolors paired so well with the thematically arranged poems.

Then, browsing in the non-fiction section of the library we came across Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons. Rosenthal uses cookies to define abstract terms like modest, fair, and content. Dyer's watercolors of children and animals complement Rosenthal's text in a way that provided a context and opportunity for me to discuss important concepts with our four-year-old. Because she's starting to become aware of ethnic and linguistic differences and her own ethnic heritages, I also appreciated that the children depicted were from a number of different ethnic backgrounds.

3) John Himmelman
Himmelman's extensive experience observing and documenting the natural world is obvious in his renderings of animals. As my father-in-law commented about Chickens to the Rescue, Himmelman has perfectly captured "chicken-ness" on every page. The antics of the thirty-odd chickens are so engaging even my two-year-old frequently dumps the book into my lap for another go at them. We've read several of Himmelman's other children's books, but this is our hands-down favorite. This summer, I plan to take a look at his non-fiction "Nature Upclose" series.

In my late teens and early twenties, I chased down the abstract paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich, and as much as I enjoyed that, it was sort of a personal quirk and definitely a solitary pursuit. In these children's books, I've been able to share the experience of beauty and truth with two little people I love. It's fun to have them point out what they notice, eg. my two-year-old always points out the upside down chicken in Chickens to the Rescue, and for them to remember things we talked about the last time we read the book. One day I'll introduce my kids to Kandinsky and Malevich, but for now we're having a whale of a time with Pullen, Dyer, and Himmelman.

Note to self

Lenten musing 5

From this morning's lectionary reading

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me,
for in you my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge,
till the storms of destruction pass by.
I cry out to God Most High,
to God who fulfills his purpose for me.
~A Miktam of King David, Psalm 57

A quote I've been carrying in my Bible since I finished college

It is necessary for the Spirit of God to burn into our hearts this mystery, that the most important work we have to do is that which must be done on our knees, alone with God, away from the bustle of the world and the plaudits of men
~O. Hallesby, Prayer

From the book I'm currently browsing through

Prayer frees us to be controlled by God. To pray is to change. There is no greater liberating force in the Christian life than prayer. To enter the gaze of the Holy is never to be the same.
~Foster, Freedom of Simplicity

Simplicity and the single treasure

Lenten musing 2

"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light" (Matt. 6:22, KJV). If all within us is honed down to the single treasure of Christ and his Kingdom, then we are living in the light of simplicity.
...
With our eye focused on Christ the Center, we are to live with glad and generous hearts. This is simplicity.
~Richard Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, p. 36

One of the features of Lent is a paring back of "life": withdrawing from certain foods, habits, experiences. Not knowing all the history, I can only speak to the effect this appears to have. Paring back in this can help us to focus anew on "Christ the Center". For me, I've stepped away from seeking political and economic news for the season. My usual habit is to skim three national newspapers a day and links from political bloggers. I found that the first influence of my every day was the news and most of it was pretty angry or anger inspiring. That seemed a bit out of kilter with what I thought should be the first influence of my day.

Foster's Freedom of Simplicity happens to be my current browse book and it seems fitting for the Lenten season. On some level contemporary life is not simple. Yet Jesus calls us to his rest and makes it sound like there is space in the kingdom for simplicity. I think Foster is getting at that kind of simplicity, not some fairy tale pastoral ideal (and pastoral life isn't that simple). As Christ moves to the center of our lives, I think we begin to dwell in simplicity of focus. It's not that I shouldn't read the news, but can I learn to read the news while focused on Christ? I think I'd like to see that happen.

Why I'm observing Lent

Lenten musing 1

I come from a Protestant background that is not without tradition in the sense that the two churches I attended as a child had their own way of doing things and their own rhythms, but they were never articulated as such. I don't know that I had met anyone who observed any part of Lent until I went to college, and at that point I was not a fan of the "organized" part of "organized religion". So as far as I could tell, Lent was a religious ritual that was nice to see in a highly secular setting, but not for me.

So why am I observing Lent now?

A couple books have been really influential in moving me toward the liturgical church calendar. The first was Girl Meets God in which Lauren Winner wrote about her conversion experience from observant Judaism to Christianity. There's a bit in her book where I think she was talking about joining a Christian community around the world that was reading the same passages and prayers according to the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican prayer book. Given that the local church dropped vastly in my esteem in college, the idea of wanting to join in a worldwide body of Christ was really new yet appealing. In the intervening years between college and reading that book, I had spent time in the former Soviet Union and I realized that my time in that country would come and go, but the local church body I participated in would continue (hopefully) beyond my stay. Church practices that keep me connected to believers around the world pulls me out of my small individualistic perspective and I think that is healthy. So part of why I am observing Lent is to join with brothers and sisters around the world in doing so.

The second influential book was Marva Dawn's Keeping the Sabbath Wholly. This book talks about the blessing of the Sabbath that God gave the Jews. But the one message that really stuck with me is how the Sabbath provides a rhythm of celebration and work. I am one of the least sentimental people I know, so it takes real effort for me to connect with what I consider non-pragmatic things. So I come to an appreciation of holidays and rituals really late in life--like in the past 5 years. What I have come to appreciate does end up having a pragmatic slant, but that's just me. What I've been realizing is that every day can't be work and "progress". In fact, to do good work regularly, we need rest; to enjoy the day to day and the ordinary in life, we need the exceptional and extra-ordinary. Holidays and holydays help us out by refocusing us and highlighting important things that we may otherwise lose in the everyday.

Easter has been rising in importance to me as a believer, and Lent as a precursor helps me experience Easter as a season. In the meditative subtraction of Lent, the celebratory glory of Easter stands out more. And for a pragmatic curmudgeon, that's a pretty big deal.