Book Notes: "The Wind in the Willows," by Kenneth Grahame

"The Wind in the Willows," by Kenneth Grahame is, of course, a classic. But it's a classic I hadn't read before (though I'd encountered bits of the chapter with Pan in various other publications).

It's a story about Mole, and his friends who live on or near the riverbank, particularly Rat and Toad and Badger.

I loved Mole. And I loved Rat, too, and I enjoyed and appreciated the venerable and valiant Badger.


I pretty much hated Toad, though, and I disliked almost every scene he was in.

I have a terrible feeling that the moral of the story is that We Are All Toad, and that we don't deserve the beautiful and joyous life on the riverbank, except that we have Friends who help us win back our Heritage, and so we are all Recipients of Grace, but... I still don't like Toad.

I expect I'll read "The Wind in the Willows" again. Because it is beautiful.


Except for the parts with Toad. Maybe I should be good enough to read those again.

But I don't think that I am.


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


This post contains Amazon affiliate links; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Weekly Links - Holy Week edition

~ LINKS TO SOME INTERESTING READING, too late for the weekend, but perfect for a monday ~



-"Thoughts on the 'Benedict Option' - a Lament": Dr. Peters' point? Don't write a book about the Benedictines and get the monasticism wrong. 


-"10 Things You Should Know About the Trinity": This whole thing is good, but I especially appreciate point #8.


-"The Death of the Levite's Concubine":

Once having choked it down, you’re left wondering, as with the whole rest of Judges, who exactly the good guy is. 

-"Three Myths of Cohabitation": interview with a sociologist who just completed a very interesting study. A snippet:

Generally speaking, the least educated married families in Europe enjoy more stability than the most educated cohabiting families. That’s not what I would have guessed.

-"Stop Hating on Christian Popular Culture": now here's a challenge for our modern age!


-"Celebrating the Feast of the Anunnciation": I'm a few weeks late on this one, but I really appreciate this piece, and I think it's a good meditation for Holy Week:

This year I had several friends who faced the death of a loved one right at Christmas time.  They had no choice but to grieve and celebrate in the same breath. These sorts of emotional juxtapositions always be gut retchingly difficult. Yet living year by year through the liturgical seasons we are offered a foretaste of the multi-dimensional nature of our emotional life.  In following the seasons we are encouraged to explore the depths of our own souls in both joy and sorrow, to bring our hearts before God, and to align ourselves with the life of the church. When triumph is followed by disaster we have a sense of the path to take, we have walked it and we know where to fix our eyes. In the darkness of the tomb we wait for the light of resurrection.

-"Sushi Saturdays": My eldest daughter and I are the only people in the house who love sushi, and we're determined that this experiment is the perfect activity for Bright Week this year.


-"Researchers Have Transformed a Spinach Leaf into Working Heart Tissue": wow!


-"The Impossible Novel that Became IMPOSSIBLE SAINTS": I follow Clarissa Harwood on Twitter, and enjoyed reading this long version of her first novel sale, especially her honesty when she said:

In hindsight I can see that I was far too close to Novel #2 to see it clearly enough to revise it. I invested too much of myself in it, but that’s also why it was such a joy to write. It was everything a first draft should be: too long, repetitive, self-indulgent, and confusing. In other words, what was an utter delight to write was a complete nightmare to read.

I hope you have a good and blessed Holy Week!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekly Links!

~ LINKS TO SOME INTERESTING READING & WATCHING, FOR WHAT'S LEFT OF YOUR WEEKEND ~

Faith

-"What Is Gospel Fluency?"


-"Embracing Valentine's Day Disappointment"


-"A Just Silence": This was helpful to me, especially as I've been thinking recently about how I do (vs. how I should) use social media.


-"Submit to the New Sexual Orthodoxy or Risk Losing Everything"

Family

-"A Simple Way to Speed Delivery": Somehow, this just reminds me of HOW HUNGRY I WAS after I delivered my first child.

Fiction

-"Painting a Story"


-"Why Don't We Talk About 'Stranger Than Fiction' Nearly Enough?": I love this movie.


-"Sunny Day": not fiction, but a good poem, worth reading.


-2016 Novelist Income Survey Results, Part One, and Part Two




I hope you have a lovely Sunday, full of worship and rest!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Book Notes: "Dear Committee Members", by Julie Schumacher

So this was the book I had to refrain from reviewing till now, even though I finished reading it in the fall. Why?  Because I wanted to give it for Christmas presents! And some of the people I love have the bad habit* of purchasing books I recommend.

This book . . . oh my friends, this book. This book made me laugh so hard.

It's also rather melancholy at the end, so: fair warning. This book might not make you feel, in meme-speech, all the things, but it might come close.

"Dear Committee Members", by Julie Schumacher, is an epistolatory novel, wherein all the letters are written by an English professor. More specifically, by a writing professor.  And yes, both the fact that it's epistolatory and the fact that it's about writing made it almost inevitable that I would pick it up once I heard about it.

But it lived up to my hopes.

If you know anyone in academia, you'll be familiar with the exquisite pain of the procurement of letters of recommendation. Painful from the point-of-view of both professor and student, I am given to understand.

In this book, our protagonist, Prof. Fitger, has written letters of recommendation. Oh, has he written letters of recommendation. So many letters of recommendation.

So many, in fact, that he has begun to go a bit mad.

Not really mad, not crazy, but mad enough to write them now in the driest of sarcastic voices, with the withering, biting humor than only a very, very, very annoyed professor can muster.

And not just sarcastic letters of recommendation, but plaintive letters of complaint to the dean, self-deprecating letters to his ex-wife, and (most heartbreakingly) pleading letters on behalf of his students, who he knows very well might find themselves without home or means once they're out of the half-hearted embrace of their home university.


I loved this book. It's been a long time since a book has made me laugh like this, and I shook my head in recognition of the erudite, dysfunctional rhythms of academia. For the purposes of this blog, I can't recommend it as Christian or hopeful or anything like that, but all the same, I can't imagine an avid fiction reader who wouldn't enjoy this one. It's just really good.


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell


*errr, that is, lovely! I mean, they have this lovely habit.


This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you purchase something through these links, I'll receive a small percentage of the purchase price - for my own shopping! :) (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Weekly Links: the "My Writer Friends are Awesome" edition

My first link this week is really exciting! (to me, anyway, but to you, too, if you like good fiction!)
My friend, Ann Dominguez, has just released her first novel!

You might know Ann from the Ordinary Time chapter of "Let Us Keep the Feast". And if you do, you know she writes clear, beautiful prose that makes you happy to be alive in the world.

Well, the same is true of her fiction. I had the honor of reading one of the first drafts of this novel, and it kept my attention throughout the whole story. I love how she marries the tense, commercial form of a thriller with acute observation of the rhythm and flow of ordinary, everyday work and relationships.

Also? She's a practicing physician herself, so you can count on the medical details of the thriller being accurate. :)

Anyway, here is a link for "The Match", a medical thriller by Ann Dominguez.  Enjoy!



Okay, now on to shorter reads . . .

-And now that I've mentioned Ordinary Time and the church year, here's an interesting little post on Advent: "The War on Advent". An excerpt:

For many centuries, Advent was a season of spiritual preparation before the Feast of Christmas. It began four Sundays before Christmas. Contrary to the practice of so-called Advent in many churches, it wasn’t focused on the story of the birth of Christ and the singing of carols. That’s for the Christmas season. Instead, Advent is a time of reflection, penitence, and preparation, not of celebration.

-A piece on freelance writers and ethics: "Wil Wheaton and Why I Won't Write for the Huffington Post Anymore".


-"How to Stage Your Home for Living" - this article has such a very, very good point:

So then, in the weeks prior to our house hitting the market, we spent numerous hours "stageing our home for the sale . . . I can't help but be struck by the irony of the situation. We spend countless hours getting our home into its best possible condition, only to leave it? Most of the time while staging our home for sale, I wondered why we had never put in the effort to stage our home for living. You know, so we could have actually enjoyed it more while we called it home.

"50 Things a Man Should Be Able to Do" - I thought this was much better than most lists of its sort.


Oh, this is wonderful! It's a reprint of an old interview with J. R. R. Tolkien, and reams could be written in response to every paragraph. Lovely.  "JRR Tolkien: I never expected a money success".  The bit I keep particularly chewing over and over again in my mind is this:

Some people have criticised the Ring as lacking religion. Tolkien denies this: “Of course God is in The Lord of the Rings. The period was pre-Christian, but it was a monotheistic world.” 

Monotheistic? Then who was the One God of Middle-earth? 

Tolkien was taken aback: “The one, of course! The book is about the world that God created – the actual world of this planet.”

"Evangelicals Need to Read Richard Hooker": this article hooked me as soon as I read the phrase: Think of him as Anglicanism's John Calvin. Of course I had to read it all! And so should you. :)



Finally, this isn't a proper link, really, but this last week's collect (from the Book of Common Prayer) was amazing. I was so glad to have it as part of my daily prayers and thought you all might appreciate it, too. Here it is:

O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might
destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God
and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may
purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again
with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his
eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with
you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Amen.

Have a great weekend, folks!

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell


This post contains an Amazon affiliate link; if you purchase a book from this link, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.  (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

Long thoughts on short stories

The fun of writing short stories is that you can write the “what if?”, but you don't have to write the whole arc. You can write a disaster, but you don’t have to solve it.  If in a novel (at least, in my novels), you have to have the triumph of the hero who struggles against a tragedy, in a short story you can just depict the tragedy itself.

The short story form is freer. You don’t – ha! – you don’t have to tell the whole story. Yes, it has to have movement. You have to have a change, or a decision, or a revelation. It’s not a static scene. That’s not interesting. It has to have movement.

But for someone like me, who believes that the story of, well, everything has, at its heart, a redemptive arc, and that that arc is at the heart of every good story – or that it at least has to be possible (there are tragedies where redemption is refused) – the short story allows for more experimentation. Because it's not the whole thing. It’s a small sliver. It’s a piece. It’s five minutes of the two-hour movie. It’s a scene.

And it better be a compelling scene. It better matter, it better mean something . . . but it doesn’t carry the weight that a longer piece of art – like a novel – has to carry. It can’t.

It can let you feel something – let you feel something exquisitely – without explaining all the rest of it. You get a little piece. It’s a sketch, a snippet, a sample.

And it’s fun to get to do that, especially when you’re used to writing things that take you months and months to complete. It’s fun to do something quick – something whose composition takes you a day, an hour – maybe only a few minutes.

I imagine the feeling is similar to what artists who work on 6’ canvases in oils feel when they get to do a 5-min. watercolor sketch.

Sometimes, short stories come out of “this feels like a little idea. I want a little canvas for it.”

Sometimes, short stories come out of the “this feels like a big idea, but I just want to highlight this tiny piece of it.”

They’re their own art form. And I’m not arguing that the short story is either inferior or superior to the novel.

It’s just that, as a novelist who’s now experimenting with shorter forms, I’m enjoying figuring out what works here, and why it works.

It’s fun!


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Book Notes: "Lizzy & Jane", by Katherine Reay

"Lizzy and Jane", by Katherine Reay, is the author's second novel. (You can read my review of her first book, "Dear Mr. Knightley", here.)

Her first novel was a delightful take on Jean Webster's Daddy Long Legs. (And not so much Austen, as you might suppose. But that was fine with me - there are so many Austen tributes, and rather fewer Webster tributes - and I love Webster.)

"Lizzy and Jane" was harder for me to get into than "Dear Mr. Knightley", but not because the writing was worse. Far from it: the writing was just as wonderful.

It's just that the subject was so very sad.

Cancer is a hard subject. On Saturday, I participated in a cancer fundraising walk, and watching all the survivors list their diagnoses was so moving. One of those survivors is my father. Another is my husband.

Who hasn't been touched by this horrible disease?

And Reay's writing is so good that it felt way too much like real life.

It was hard to make myself want to read about cancer.

And on top of that, I had trouble connecting with the main character.

But I'm glad I kept going, because each of those problems I had with the manuscript ended up being part of the point. Cancer is horrible, and a novel about it would be a bad novel if it didn't get some of that horror across.

And it turned out that the reason the main character was hard to connect with precisely because she was a person who'd cut herself off emotionally, due to her mother's death (from breast cancer) when she was so young.

It was realistic, and in the best of ways.

Properly, the book really came alive in the second half, as the main character herself came alive again: reconnecting with the family, rediscovering her love of making food, and (of course!) falling in love.

Speaking of the romance, one of the things I liked about it was that it wasn't the point of the book. It wasn't even in the book.

And then it was.

And then it was everything.

And I loved that! It's so real life: at one moment, you are just yourself. And the next? You are you-and-him, and then it is just so forevermore.

I liked that a lot.


And now I find I've written almost an entire book review without telling you much about plot or genre. But I hope I've said enough to let you know if you want to read this or not - and I'd lean towards read this.

Because I love reading Christian fiction that doesn't feel fake - even if it feels a little more beautiful than real life. Beauty is something we can all do with having a bit more of.

"Lizzy and Jane", by Katherine Reay? Recommended.



Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

This post contains Amazon affiliate links. (See full disclosure on sidebar of my blog.)

How I lost NaNoWriMo . . . and still won

You’re really not supposed to decide you’re going to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) at the last possible minute.

You’re really not supposed to sign up past the last possible minute.

But that’s exactly what I did. Last year, on the first of November, caught up in the excitement of all my friends’ posts on Facebook, I decided, “What the heck! I’m doing it!” and I signed up to write a novel in a month.

Not so crazy

Like I said: this isn’t the recommended procedure. Most people going into NaNo knowing months ahead of time that they’re going to do it. They have time to plot and research and scheme.

But I wasn’t totally crazy: I had an idea, I had a story structure I thought might work – I was even borrowing from the master who borrowed from the masters: if Shakespeare could steal his plots from Italian writers, surely I could steal mine from Shakespeare!

I was taking my favorite play – Twelfth Night – and adding a little magic to grease the rough edges (i.e., to make Orsino not quite such a goober). No need to plot, right? I could just jump into it.

It all seemed like a great idea.

No, actually, still totally crazy

And I actually got some stuff I liked. The fantasy parts were gorgeous. I loved them. It was better than I’d expected, and I felt like I’d finally found a way to do justice to a story I’ve loved for a long time.

But I stalled. Not because I can’t write a novel – at this point, I’ve written at least six of them. And not because I can’t write fiction that fast – I’ve actually written it faster than the NaNoWriMo timeline calls for.

It was because I was ignoring who I actually was: I’m a planner. I don’t do things on a whim.

Oh, occasionally, I’ll just give something a whirl, and that can be fun . . . but my normal mode of operation is to spend some time thinking things through before I make any kind of commitment.

And now I know that there’s a reason for that: it’s because that’s how I work best. Planning ahead plays to my strengths, and it makes up for my weaknesses. Planning lets me dream. Planning lets me tweak. Planning lets the whole project gain depth and nuance and weight. It’s like brewing beer or aging whiskey: time equals taste.

And planning takes away my fear, leaving me ready for the work. Planning lets my anxieties rise, get dealt with, and melt away . . . all before the initial work begins. Then, when I start, I start confidently . . . and that confidence carries me all the way through the thousands of words that stand between me and the end.

Not a waste of time

But I’m still glad I gave NaNo a go on the spur of the moment.

Why? Because I didn’t know all of this about myself until I tried.* All that stuff I wrote above about my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to novel-writing? It’s something I didn’t understand that well until I tried to do things differently. Doing things differently let me learn something about myself, and that makes it a win for me.

(In fact, it even makes me think that I ought to stay open to doing things differently in the future - who knows what else I might learn?)

Plus . . . following that instinct to join NaNo got thousands of good words out of me – words that are the perfect start to brainstorming, planning, and plotting the novel that I WILL write . . . that fantastical take on Twelfth Night, the one where Orsino has a reason to fall in love with Viola, and Olivia has a reason to marry Sebastian – even after she knows who he is.

I’m looking forward to it.**

Peace of Christ to you,

Jessica Snell

*Okay, that's not quite true. I totally knew I was a planner. I just didn't realize how deeply that part of my personality affected my novel-writing style!

**Of course, that novel will have to take its place in line - I'm already at the editing stage with one novel, the writing stage with another, and the plotting stage with a third! < --See, that list? More proof of my planning personality. :D