Paulo Coelho, O Alquimista

I finished this short novel recently. It was a very thoughtful birthday gift from my wife: a book she had enjoyed that I could read in the author’s original words. The English title is The Alchemist.

This book seems particularly apt for a 50th birthday, since so much of the book is about accomplishing something truly important with your life—achieving your destiny—and big round numbers like 50 force reflection on whether one has done so.

I really liked this book. It is fascinating to think back to my reaction to Anne Perry’s Tathea, which had a somewhat similar goal, yet in comparison suffers from what I initially saw as virtues, namely depth of theology and variety of application. I guess the conclusion is something like “sometimes the sonnet really beats the essay.”

I liked the book even though I am not sure yet to what extent I agree with the details and implications of its message. That observation fascinates me too. I look forward to discussing the book with Winona.

Parenthetically, I’m not sure lenda pessoal really is best rendered “personal legend,” as Winona says it was in the translation she read. I’m not sure there’s a better brief English phrase, but I wonder whether “personal quest” or “personal destiny” or even “biography” might add something. I’m curious what Rosalynde Welch would say.

Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

A Newberry Medal winner. Both delightful and thought-provoking. I liked it!

Marc Elliot, What Makes You Tic? My Journey from Tourette's to Tolerance

This is a delightful, extremely honest book. It has a great message. I am proud to own an inscribed copy.

Another author for KJB to read

Recommended by an Argentine co-worker when he heard I'd read some Borges: Julio Cortázar

Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

Avery, From Mission to Madness: Last Son of the Mormon Prophet

I read this biography of David Hyrum Smith maybe a few months ago. It is missing important details one would want for definite diagnosis, but it probably has all the biographical information that is available. A must read for LDS psychiatrists.

Orson Scott Card, A War of Gifts

This long short story must be one of the most unlikely, not to say bizarre, Christmas books ever written. Yet it shows remarkable skill in its craft, and extraordinary insight into human motivation.

James Rollins, The Last Oracle

Re-read this a few weeks ago. Was worth one read, probably not two.

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

It was one of my 50-cent library discard airplane reading books. Picked it up mostly because a smart friend with good taste loves Dickens. I still avoided it for a long time. Finally took it on the plane and finished it a day or two later. I can't believe the dude's skill. He wrote this for serial publication, i.e. keeping to a strict deadline for each chapter. Good characterization, plausible motives, a morsel of mystery, and of course lots of plot. A somewhat too-obvious theme (though the introductory essay by Robert Donald Spector argues for a more nuanced message). I can't believe Dickens published this book that is so down on monogamy with a poorly suited partner, knowing his wife would read it ... but then again, he reportedly took no pains to hide his mistress either.

It was fascinating that the day after I finished the most persuasive pro-divorce chapter of this book, I had a most inspiring conversation with a faithful Protestant colleague who was remaining faithful to (as he phrased it) "the woman I covenanted with before God," even though she had recently divorced him. He was living the advice of Ephesians 5:25.

Otto Reimherr, ed., Quest for Faith, Quest for Freedom: Aspects of Pennsylvania's Religious Experience

Includes an essay by Reimherr, "The Susquehanna: Mormonism's Jordan," but I also read essays on two early African-American clerics, Isaac Leeser and his remarkable contributions to American Jewish culture, a comparison of 3 early Roman Catholic intellectuals in Philadelphia, and a history of Katherine Mary Drexel.

Rick Riordan, The Son of Neptune

So despite not thinking much of the first one, I like reading these books. The quality is improving.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

The book was on my dresser for a year or so after I started it, waiting to be finished. I finally did.

I'm sure it's been said before, but . . .

Still waiting for a plot, waiting for interest, waiting for relevance, waiting for enlightenment. . . .

Marilyn Sachs, A Pocket Full of Seeds

In this book supposedly written for children, a young Jewish girl and her family, living in France during World War II, discover that their being Jewish matters to others, to them, and to their safety. The book was OK. I don't know why I don't think it was great.

Rodman Philbrick, The Mighty

Originally titled Freak the Mighty, this short book turned into a movie. Apparently. Anyway, I liked it.

Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents

This book won the 2001 Carnegie Medal. I liked it.

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.
  

Robert Jordan (pseudonym) and Brandon Sanderson, Towers of Midnight

From around Christmastime:
OK, I liked this book, and I am proud that a BYU alumnus wrote it. But I suppose it could be seen as just a wee flaw to take over 11,000 pages (and counting) to come to the climax.

David Weber, In Fury Born

From a week ago, or so:
800 pages or so, really 5 or so books, and I'd read it before. But pretty much fills the bill for escape reading.

David Stern, Star Trek®: The Children of Kings

I was not surprised that I enjoyed reading this book. I was surprised at how the plot included a mystery or two, some clever humor, decent character development, and a good touch of "show not tell."