Miscellanous

Lots of others in the past year that I was embarrassed or too busy to list given everything else going on my life. Here are a few, to catch up.

• Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind: that rare thing in scifi world, the end of a series that really ends it well. The literary ending, anyway, not the sales ending, but the guy has to eat and you sell what people buy. More importantly, the quality of the writing and of the messages are OSC at his best, inducing me to forgive his books I hate and again conclude that he’s the most skilled LDS author I’ve ever read.
• Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph. I’m about halfway through this book of essays in Spanish (and Portuñol, sometimes), mostly as an airplane book. Short stories that take effort to read may be perfect for the 20 minutes or so at a time when you can’t turn on anything electronic. Plus it is a small pocket edition. Don’t know what to say about the actual writing. I suppose I don’t usually actually enjoy reading the stories, but they are almost all terribly thought-provoking, and you can’t help but respect his ability to tell a short story that is short and a story, and I am suitably cowed by his expansive grasp of philosophy and literature, or at least it seems that way to this dude who has read some things but whose eyes cross at most philosophy discussions.
• All the Ranger’s Apprentice books. Frankly, I loved them. Character development, unvarnished exciting plots, love found and lost by a teenager—you’ll have to read them yourself. Made me smile and cry at the right moments.
  
• All the Garrett, P.I. books. Gumshoe meets fantasy. Opinions in this household differed as to how appropriate these were for this household. OK, the first few books were all plot, one of them was cringingly, well, somewhere between outdated and non-PC and hateful, and there was always a surfeit of nubile redheaded women chasing him for unclear reasons. The actual detail was generally in the PG range verging toward PG13. According to some in this household. But they were very fun reading and gradually had better mysteries and became more thoughtful. By the last one, I think Our Hero’s words about himself—"Mama Garrett’s boy done growed up"—could have referred just as well to the author.
  
• Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed. A former college roommate recommended this (via Facebook). I was surprised to like it since I remember disliking one of her books. Several interesting passages that made me think.
  
• Charles Dickens, The Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. "Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster." I had seen movies and plays but I had never read the original. With apologies to a friend who loves to read Dickens, I had never much loved what I had thought of as his ponderous, prolix prose. I had mostly been proud of his perspicacious insights into neuropsychiatric illnesses in his characters. The Christmas Carol, however, was delicious fun to read at every page (or, actually, phone screen).
  
• G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Enjoyed this.
  
• Alexandre Dumas pere, The Count of Monte Cristo. Loved it!
  
• Stephenie Meyer, the Twilight books. OK, I don’t care if she used to look like Jen Purvines. This chick is weird! Meaning Mrs. Meyer. Of course this is not a professional diagnosis, just a total guess based on the weirdness in her books. Not the obvious weirdness that’s supposed to be weird (vampires, whatnot), I mean the relationship weirdness and the suffering-in-silence weirdness and ... oh well, if you read these books, you know what I mean.
  
• Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist. Well, it was a free page-turner.