Christmas Reading!

The term is over and the holidays have begun... literally as it were, though. That always signals a turn in my reading from required to chosen reading. This year (as in semesters past) my reading began a little earlier than my finals ended and I picked up Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. I think that most conceptions of Scrooge in film are fairly accurate of Dickens mildly cartoonish (that is to say exagerated) character, but the prose is places is sorely missed from the film versions; an example: it is common for Scrooge to exclaim, when Bob Cratchit's point that since Christmas only happens once a year it is perhaps not such a bad thing that Scrooge pays salary for a days work that is not done: "A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every December the twenty-fifth!" This, however, is not the text (Let us be faithful to the text!) but an American inflection; Dickens wrote, "A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket eery twenty-fifth of December!" The difference is in the inflection. The original forces your voice up (which is far more British/UK) while the movie version goes down, which is more American. It's a digression, but I love the way Marley's "atmosphere" is described as hot and "infernal" so that you get the idea of where he has come from. And the descriptions of food are amazing! Reading about the store fronts in London or the Second Ghosts throne (made up of fowl and hams!) is such a delightful experience! This was my third year in a row to read the book at Christmastime, both in protest to the commercialization (Charlie Brown wasn't the firt to complain) of Christmas, but also as a reminder of why we celebrate Christmas. I would give all I had, but for some reason the spirit of Christmas (and I think I use that world literally) isn't particularly inviting to worship or generosity; it makes me angry and tired. So I've been trying to force myself out of my basement world into a generous and loving state of mind... I'm trying to not become Scrooge as he was but to be Scrooge as he became, by God's grace.

After Dickens I moved on to an interesting book a friend introduced to me, The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. This is an amazing treatment of learning how to read a novel, autobiography, history, play or poem and understand it. There are three stages of reading, Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric. The subtitle of the book is "A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had" and the structure of the reading Bauer propses follows the classical format, to first read and to ask basic questions, working your way up to a rhetorical interaction with the material in which you critique the work. I was especially impressed with the introduction to history becuase of the clarity with which she presented a tangled web of ideas and works. I was particularly interested to read on her website that she teaches American Literature and homeschools her children, and has a theological degree from Westminster Seminary. These are three questions I have been wrestling with (academia, family and God, though not in that order) and was pleased to find a woman who has moved in that direction and encouraged me that it might be more than possible; another diversion. The annotated book lists are done well, providing suggestions for the best copies available (one of her criteria is the amount of white space in the margin for writing!) and she provides a general lay out of the book. Don't be disappointed by this! I have become convinced that knowing the end before you get to there is a better method of telling a story than keeping in hidden away... wrapped in smoke and guaze so that you can't see definately what will come (as is the book of Revelation, if you think about it) but C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism is certainly moving me to believe that knowing the end (whether through an outside source, previous reading or the author's intent) only enhances the reading of a good story.

This brings me to my most recent reading, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (to the Brits it is known as His Dark Materials: The Northern Lights - why do American's always get the crappy titles? See Harry Potter #1 to see what I mean). This book is the first in a trilogy regarding the young girl Lyra, brought up in a college in Oxford by old but loving professors, but this is an Oxford that is not in our world. All human's in this world have their souls on the outside in the form of a daemon and someone is performing experimental theology (it is a much more tangible field in this world) on children by cutting away their souls, who take the form of animals. When a child is young, their daemon is able to change into any animal it wants (Whatever suits the purpose of the child at the time or the emotional state) but when they hit puberty the daemon is forced to settle into one shape, which seems to reflect the nature and purpose of the human. When children all over England start to disappear and rumours of the Gobbler's who take children and kill them, Lyra thinks little of it until her best friend, Roger, disappears as well. This is coincided with the appearance of a mysterious lady, Mrs. Coulter, who takes Lyra to "train" her as an explorer to the North... well it gets complicated from there regarding the many people (this included witches and armoured bears and gyptians - a kind of Gypsy world that moves on boats) but the gyptians and bears (panserbjornes) are the best part of the whole book. Lyra finds out that Mrs. Coulter is in charge of this gruesom experiment and runs away and finds herself in the care of a gyptian family she knows; they protect her while a manhunt rages all over England for her (though the thousands of other children are left unlooked for) and eventually she ends up in the North to help rescue Roger from the Gobbler's and her uncle from the bears. I kept trying to figure out why I should care. Yes, cutting the soul of a child away is gruesome, though apparently not deadly, but I was never really invited into feeling what Lyra felt about her daemon until halfway through the book so that I just didn't really get it. It seems that you should want to create such an attachment to your main character that the reader would want to read the second book as soon as they put the first down (as many people attest to with Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings... any number of stories, really). But I had to struggle through and when I got to the end I was disappointed. I will probably read the next two, but not right now when there is so much to read and so little time.