Divergent and The Book Thief

I don't read much YA fiction anymore, but when I do...better not go down that path, I'm starting to sound like The Most Interesting Man in the World (who, it turns out, originated in a beer commercial. I really need to watch more TV to learn such important info.) For the last year, I've been discovering the classics, with great relish, but there are a few modern novels that have managed to stick out among such august company. Two of them are about to be released as movies.

The first of these, Divergent, I remember very little about, except for liking it quite a lot at the time. So, I won't vouch for its literary quality, but I do know it holds a higher standard of morality than most dystopian fiction, including The Hunger Games (if not a comparative level of originality.)

The other, The Book Thief, was very original, though I felt the ending lacked closure. I think I might like it better as a movie than a book, though I have an instinctive dislike of child actors (excepting Christian Bale, who shoots child acting into the stratosphere). I review it here.

Longish

Miley Cyrus and the Victims of Pretty

 I never watched Hannah Montana, but like any teenage girl in America, I couldn't help but be aware of the teen phenomenon that was Miley Cyrus. I have a vague memory of something involving pop music and lots of pink. That was a long time ago. As the years passed, Cyrus has tried to shed her Disney image, but the new persona gained little attention until her sexually provocative performance at 2013 VMA awards. Since then, I've heard about little else. The internet is abuzz.

The reaction wasn't quite what Miley was looking for. Or perhaps it was. During the show, the camera showed reactions ranging from amused to indifferent to disgusted.

As for me, my reactions aren't quite as extreme. It was shocking, sure. But not surprising.

Les Miserables – When It’s Good, It’s Very, Very Good - Part 1

SO long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved...books like this cannot be useless.
~Preface to Les Miserables

Les Miserables is a somewhat daunting task. At 959 pages, it’s the longest book I’ve ever read, barring the Bible. (Fans affectionately call it The Brick.) Settling back after the tedious first few chapters, I prepared myself for a long haul. To my shock, I finished it in sixteen days. Honestly, I’m not sure how I did it, though I do know several days I put away a hundred pages.

Another part of the mystery is that Victor Hugo had a severe case of verbal diarrhea, so I did a bit of blah-blah-interesting bit!-blah-blah reading. If there was something to be said of a thing, good old Victor was bound to say it. Large chunks are devoted to the battle of Waterloo, the operation and ideological premise of monasteries, and 19^th Century French politics—which have little to do with the story. If you have an encyclopedic knowledge of French history and politics in the 17-1800s, that’s terrific, but if you don’t, this can get tedious. Those are the two extremes: terrific and tedious.

C.S. Lewis on the Blindness of Our Age

We all know that person. They're obnoxious. They ooze arrogance. It's so blatant that their friends have begun to avoid them. But oddly, despite its glaring obviousness, they just can't see it. "What's everybody's problem?" they ask indignantly. We have a furious desire to shove their face to a mirror, screaming "Can't you see?"

In a recent conversation with my friend Elora Shore, we talked about the sins of particular eras. Some, racism in particular, we found hard to pardon. How could anyone be so blind to such an obvious fault? I paused. After all, why shouldn't the entire world, and all of history besides, think like me? I realized that that was precisely what I was thinking, and the arrogance and ethnocentricity of it surprised me. We went on to talk of other things, but the question stuck in the back of my head.

When 24th Century historians look at us, what will they find impossible to understand? With a paranoid conception of the future, I imagined invisible time travelers peering in my window and felt slightly panicky. Will they think I'm old-fashioned? Is it possible to find out now? How can we see ourselves without the skewed lens of what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery? I want to be ahead of my time.

Endeavour - Home - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode.

Professor Alistair Coke Norris’s death in a hit and run accident seems open and shut—but this is Morse. After some poking around, and informing the mild-mannered wife (Poppy Miller), it’s revealed that he to vote on a sale of college land that, predictably, involves some shady dealings. Also predictably, C.S. Bright is not happy about this turn of events. While at first amusingly Wodehousian, Bright is becoming more and more irritating and obstructive to Morse and Thursday. (By the way, this is getting a little wearing. Isn’t there anything else he does?)

But Bright’s political sycophancy becomes a real danger when one of Thursday’s old adversaries, Vic Kasper, turns up. From the moment the two set eyes on each other, it’s obvious they have A History. Following that revelation, this episode is more about Thursday than Morse (though perhaps it always has been.) Morse learns even more of his mentor’s old secrets. Somehow, though, these tidbits seem less interesting than the knowledge of Italian, war-time reminiscing, and dinner-table banter in earlier episodes.

Endeavour - Rocket - Episode Review

My review of last week's episode.

With appropriate timing, this week’s Endeavour features a visit from royalty. After last week’s episode, Rocket’s comparatively lighter tone is welcome.

The prospect of a visit to Oxford by Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, who is to unveil the British Imperial Electric Company's new "Standfast" Mark Two missile, has Chief Superintendent Bright, slated to provide security, on red alert. But when an unpopular worker is found murdered in a secluded area of the shop floor, Endeavour must pursue the truth -- and then justice -- from the sidelines…and in the intoxicating presence of Alice Vexin, an old acquaintance from his days at Oxford.

Featuring a plot involving factory owners, unions, and Middle Eastern businessmen, my political correctness detector was running on full spin. Perhaps it was unfair, but after the rampant PC in Lewis, I wanted to see how Endeavour measured up. And while it wasn’t as gutsy as good old very anachronistic Morse, neither did it descend to blatant caricaturing.  The factory is owned by the Broom family, a group composed of five vindictive individuals. There’s the mother, a domineering, spiteful but practical businesswoman. The daughter, Estella, similar to the cold, enigmatic character of the same name from Dickens’s Great Expectations. Two awkward brothers, another brother dead four years back, and a shifty father round off that happy family.

Never Say Die - Modernity and Morality - Part 2

Part 1

As a culture, we either avoid death or surrender to it—we are either blind optimists or self-centered pessimists. Speaking of death is often described as morbid. Speaking of it ceaselessly is either depression or being highly artistic, depending on one’s college degree. The optimists find themselves, in their last moments, scrabbling madly for a hold on life, staring at the wall in wide-eyed, hyperventilating terror. The pessimists go into a dark room and blow their brains out. What is the answer? What is the correct way to deal with death?

On one hand, there is no avoidance.

Death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.

Ecclesiastes 7:2, NIV

But…

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

1 Corinthians 15:55, KJV

Death is not there to be avoided, it’s there to be beaten—it has been beaten. Jesus took death down. Like a line-backer. This is the truest realism, not the despairing acceptance of meaninglessness. If it’s cowardice to avoid death, is it not cowardice to surrender to it? Is it not stupid to eschew all good things because of a hyped up idea that it’s sentimental? Isn’t that just intellectual dishonesty? Sure, it’s wrong to accept an idea because it makes you feel good, but isn’t it also wrong to reject an idea because it makes you feel good?

The Free-Born Mind - Homeschooling and the Government

Many years ago, my dad was standing behind a lady in the grocery store. She had several children, and was asked where they went to school. “We homeschool,” she said.

Dad did a double-take. What was this…home school? He mentally separated the two words. Some sort of private school? But no. She meant, literally, school at home. In our small out-of-the-way country town, it was the first time my dad had even heard of another option.

Many years later, I sit here, a homeschool graduate. Needless to say, we now look on homeschooling quite differently than my dad did twenty years ago. We’ve had to get over the occasional “So are you going to homeschool them all the way through high school?” asked with an incredulous expression. There’s the one family member who insists on quizzing me and my siblings on various subjects. We endure our state senator calling us “a threat to what it means to be an American.” Still, it’s not like we’re being acted against legally. 

For the Romeike family, it’s another matter. In 2008, the family fled their home country, Germany, and received asylum in the U.S., but the Administration has overturned that decision. The Huffington Post writes:

“In Germany there is basically religious freedom, but it ends at least with teaching the children,” Uwe Romeike says in a video produced by the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Christian organization providing the family’s legal support.

…

The Romeike case is unusual in a system backlogged with people trying to escape violence and persecution. The Romeikes are comparatively well off, and come from a country that hosts more than twice as many refugees as the U.S. 

 But because they home-schooled their five children (a sixth was born in Tennessee), they faced high fines and tension with local authorities. At one point, police forcibly corralled the oldest children into a van and delivered them to school.