Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

Wow. This is a book!

I don’t think I’ve been this impressed with a novel since Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which I hate to admit I first read sometime after I turned 45. I think I could find things to quibble over, but I don’t want to. Leading of course to the wannabe author’s key question, why do I like it so?

1. I suppose this is part of how I know I like it, not why I like it, but I couldn’t wait to finish it. If I meet the author, I’ll tell him how he ruined two nights of sleep. Two consecutive nights. That quality has to count in the final judgment of literature: if you write a book in a forest and no one reads it, does it make any noise? Or some such mixed metaphor.
2. I loved the diction. A novel that has a lot of words I don’t know is mostly just odd. That’s not this one. Low-frequency words that I’m prone to use tend to be Latin or Greek in origin—perhaps not surprising for a med school survivor. That’s not him. Here, every few pages, there are robust, healthy, but above all surprising, usually Anglo-Saxon or at least venerable English words that came by their Latin roots honestly, via the Normans. Minnesota words, you might say. North Dakota winter bar-the-door words, maybe. I’m thinking of "jeopardous." "Besmirched." "Bushwhacked." "Fictive." "Allegiant." Even "scapegrace," though that one was flung in by a precocious latency character who was showing off. The words themselves made you pay attention just for the taste of them ... but, strangely, not so much pay attention to the words, but to the message, like makeup so artfully applied that you notice the woman not the paint.
3. The perfectly knitted, quotable sentence was rare, but there were a few happy exceptions, most especially the last half page of the book. I also marked this one: "We supposed over that obituary for most of the day, Swede and I—mostly Swede, whose vaulting imagination revealed mine as miserly and torpid."
4. It has wonderful but not impossible characters; it has what I am surprised to keep noticing in books I like: a believable, not cloying, love story; it has at least a small story-within-a-story—sure, this one’s obvious, but I liked it anyway.
5. Not least, the author had some things to say, and (I checked on his bio page) his perhaps most obvious message was nevertheless a heartfelt one, a truth told with an understated passion that almost made it feel immanent.

Plus, it has a passage I want to quote Sunday for ward conference.

Definitely recommended.

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.
  

Snijeg pada! It's snowing!

Hey everyone! we've had some crazy snow here this week. europe's got lots of records for temperatures and snowfall this week. on friday we had about 2.5 feet of snow, and it's been pretty much snowing ever since with a few small breaks since that. everywhere looks like an ant farm--lots of little pathways everywhere where people walk, but besides that, you can't see anything. that much snow is probably nothing to mom, but i don't think i've seen so much snow ever in my life. So, i'm writing today instead of yesterday because yesterday, when we got here for internet, a girl texted us asking where we were. to make a long story short, there was a miscommunication, so we ran off to the church so she didn't have to wait in the snow forever for nothing, so there went the rest of our internet time. so, we got permission to come back today. i'm very glad of that because lots of cool things happened this week. We taught Jelena a couple of lessons, and she's really searching for truth, but doesn't feel like she ever gets any answers when she prays, goes to different churches, etc. She's willing to do whatever it takes to get her answer, and she's been doing just that. In our first lesson, she prayed with us, and that was her first time praying aloud, and the first time using her own words. She was very hesitant to, but afterwards, she said it felt good, different than she's ever felt before when praying. She came to church this week, so that was the first investigator we've had at church that wasn't just there to say goodbye to missionaries in a long time. We only had 2 members there though because of the snow, which isn't the most fun on a fast sunday. so lots of just sitting and meditating, which i guess isn't a bad thing, it just tends to get uncomfortable for people. We started teaching a family with a 3 yr old (3.5, but she admits to 4 at social gatherings). We found them through english [classes], and at sign-ups, the mom, Mihaela, said she was interested in learning about the gospel outside of english class, so that's been good. She was listening very attentively while we taught... at least as attentively as you can with a 3 yr old begging for your attention. Her husband knew a lot about the bible, and asked interesting questions, but he wasn't just the type of person who tries to make themselves look smart by bringing up facts in the bible he knows. I like that family very much. last sunday, we met a couple while tracting. Their names are Milica and Drago. We taught a bit and then set up another lesson with them. we weren't sure how that would be the next time because they were a little tipsy when we came, but when we returned, Milica had read from the book of mormon and they were ready to learn from us. We had a lesson with Gordana on thursday. she was really closed at first, because the chapter was about baptism, and last time we came, we had asked her to be baptized, but we started talking about faith and repentance, and she relaxed a lot, and when we talked about baptism with authority and about receiving the gift of the holy ghost, her attitude changed, and she was actually trying to learn from us, instead of just being curious and passively collecting interesting information. She prayed with us for the first time, which was really cool. Right after that lesson, we went with Danaja to Evica and Jelica's house for visiting teaching. It was one of the coolest things ever, and it strengthened my testimony of visiting teaching a lot. They haven't seen each other since Evica and Jelica stopped coming to church, and Danaja visiting them did more for their desire to come back to church than years of them being visited by missionaries. It's been a good week, but it's just getting better.
Oh, and guess what! Osijek has its first baptismal date scheduled for about a half a year. It's exciting. it's someone the elders started teaching last week. Exciting things are really starting to happen in Osijek. It's on the brink of a lot of cool things. just you wait.

Lots of love,
Sestra Black