I have just finished this book which is an unusual venture for me. I don’t often read sci-fi or fantasy unless it is authored or recommended by Lewis or Tolkien. But my good friend Brent proffered it and his recommendations are nearly as reliable so I read it. And…I’m not sure what to think. The book was fascinating. Several times I didn’t want to put it down. The language was archaic although the atmosphere was futuristic. The moral universe was different but recognizable. The book was like Kafka filtered through the imagination of a lesser Tolkien. I am intrigued to read the sequel.

I also just finished another PG Wodehouse. I love that man’s work. Picadilly Jim was amusing and heartwarming, so basically all you need in a comic novel. I mus also say that I am ever more in love with the Overlook Press editions. They are just fantastic. Lovely jackets, lovely pale-blue bindings, and the perfect size and shape: a little short and a little squat.

I found the book difficult to read simply because of the tragedy of the story. Knowing what hundreds of years of epidemiology has taught us about the spread of the plague makes me want to reach through the pages and scream at 17th century Londoners “IT WAS THE RATS!!”

Since falling in love for the first time, five years ago, I have developed an incredible sensitivity to sadness, heartbreak and true tragedy in art. I find it impossible to sit through movies depicting war, infidelity or terminal illnesses. Books can make me cry now. Becoming a parent has only heightened this delicacy of feeling. Life is much more perilous than I used to feel or think. I once recklessly risked my life and sometimes even the lives of others. I drove aggressively, speeding, cornering too tightly, pushing the limits. I hiked, scrambled and climbed cliffs, dove into swift, deep rivers enjoying those moments on the edge, unsure of my grip, tasting the metallic after-flavor of adrenaline. Now, I could still do those things but can barely stand to see my husband taking much milder risks and have to discipline myself not to scream whenever my sons test their physical limits. I cannot imagine how I will manage when they are grown and pushing more serious boundaries.

All of this to say that A Journal of the Plague Year is sad and difficult but it should remind you to be grateful for 21st century Western medicine. Grateful for vaccines. Grateful for penicillin, IVs, X-rays, and all the other things that contribute to the dramatic lowering of infant mortality and increased life expectancy that we enjoy almost unconsciously.

A few weeks ago, I decided to pick up Typee which I own in a nice slipcase edition. It is a fictionalized account of Melville’s own experiences among the Typee people and I find it fascinating that his own life contained such interesting, risky, and exciting adventures. The book was thoroughly enjoyable, easy to read and full of interesting anthropological sidelights. Highly recommended!

The following picture illustrates what happens when the mom is a bookish sort who likes to get away of an evening for a little quiet reading and writing and dad makes and serves dinner…

Yep. Naked babies. Eating spaghetti. From the pot. On the patio. Sigh…

Every time I read them though, I’m struck anew by how richly Lewis’s learning and his religion informed his fiction. On every page the Christian is challenged to set aside pettiness, to reject convienent and minor immorality and to stand for the slightest shred of honor and justice. Lewis’s characters sometimes seem to be tilting at windmills, but it always turns out that those windmills were the clever disguises of genuinely dark and evil giants, and that however ineffectual the actual tilting may have been, the obedience it embodied brings about righteousness.

My understanding is that Out of the Silent Planet was groundbreaking work for Science Fiction when it was written because Lewis was one of the (if not the) first to imagine an alien people being juster, kinder and wiser than humanity. I highly recommend reading the whole series again and again. These books never wear thin.

I was enthralled. The writing is definitely top-notch for a modern author though not up to the standards of classic literature and the Idea Clarke created was unexpected in the best possible sense. The novel is very evocative of “Englishness” and the alternate history it presents is thoroughgoing and convincing.

Clarke’s writing is very much a pastiche of different styles. I occasionally thought the story had dropped into a quote from a reall or imagined book because of the dramatic change in voice but since the style stays good though it alters, this is not such a defect.

The story (for those few of you who haven’t heard all about and/or read the thing) is of the “revival of English magic”. English magic has its own history, its own literature and its own scholarship which has fallen on hard times. One magician sets out to revive it and another comes along and assists him. In true mythical fashion the characters fulfill a prophecy without knowing it and without desiring to know it. I am not sure I appreciated the way the story ended but I was carried away through all 850 pages.

Clarke has been compared to Austen and while there is social satire alive in the book, she is not nearly so acerbic and her touch is not nearly so light. Still, for a 21st century novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is extraordinary.

I laughed so hard I cried. Several times.

I don’t have the book with me to quote but please, do yourself a favor and nab a copy to laugh over. It will cheer you up. I promise.

*If you are highly sensitive then the occasional F-bomb contained within its pages may offend. Also some descriptions of adolescent lust might outrage. Having worked in a fine-dining restaurant (worse than the Navy for language) and having known an adolescent or two, I was neither shocked nor offended. Your mileage may vary.

He writes of angels not of aliens. He writes of life as a perilous battle but without any silly grandstanding. He draws deeply from mythology without being self-consciously mythological. I find the book profoundly moving and it is very much a part of mental framework.

“I don’t believe we were meant to see ourselves,” said Jane. “He said something about being mirrors enough to see another.”

Travels With a Donkey seemed a very modern work. Stevenson wrote about religious schism with a self-conciously tolerant air, about poverty and ignorance as local curiosities and about his own agnoscticism as a self-evident necessity. He was indulgent, tolerant and quite superior to everyone and everything he met. In other word: insufferable. The book is slim and the prose is smooth so it wasn’t difficult, just disagreeable.

We are off on our road trip tomorrow at 3:30am. Insane but better than leaving later and having the boys be awake for the entire 12 hour journey. I anticipate that they will be restless and I will be impatient but have plans to mitigate both those problems. I am taking books to read to them (and hauling 7 along for myself), stuffed animals for them to cuddle with and plenty of snacks to distract them. Fingers are officially crossed. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The books I am taking along are, That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis,  Travels With a Donkey by RL Stevenson, The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers, The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy, Deep Comedy by Peter Leithart, The Western Canon by Harold Bloom and Poems of Sleep and Dreams. I hope I don’t run out of reading material…