Black Blizzard
I picked this one up at the library on a whim. It’s a tight little Japanese manga thriller written/drawn around 1950. It builds some amazing suspense considering the simplicity of the drawings and the narrative.
The Princess and the Goblin
I read this book alone about a year ago. This time I read it aloud to my children. Its very clear why so many find George MacDonald’s writing to be inspirational(C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to name a few).
A beautiful fairy story(see Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories). A world you want to enter into and explore populated by characters that though they seem like metaphors for bigger ideas still hold onto a depth of character. A story with themes that are truly transcendent and timeless.
The Giver
So I have to admit that I’d never heard of this book until I saw a trailer for the upcoming movie. That was enough to make me want to read the book, which I did over the course of a few sittings. It’s a relatively short book and an easy read. Not altogether different from other dystopian stories. I’m not sure if it really added anything new to the genre.
It ends strangely. I’ve read similar stories that end in despair, such as 1984 and Brave New World. Fahrenheit 451 ends with a muted sense of hope. But The Giver seems to want the reader to ponder the ending by keeping it somewhat unclear.
Visions of Vocation
A frustrating book to read alone. Writing this little paragraph does not do the book justice. I wish I could sit face to face with you and talk about it’s ideas and concepts, none of which are just mind games for the intellectual elite.
The book talks about various aspects of the work we do. Far from the utilitarian approach(I work so I can get money to…). It describes our vocations as a kind of poetry; a struggle to make right what is so clearly wrong with the world. And yet there is a resignation to a proximate success. But not a resignation so complete that we stop struggling in our vocations.
The book plucked many heart strings for me. But I feel like I could really use a second read through with a group of like-minded people in a dark corner of coffee shop or pub.
