Real quick, on the value of Fantasy as a genre: There are, I’m sure, vast tracts of the fantasy genre that are somewhat-to-very short on merit. It’s not my intention to get into specifics of “Well, I think that so-and-so’s work is useless.” Two reasons: One: I haven’t read them all. Or even most. Two: Of course you’re going to find things that aren’t worth reading. You’ll find them everywhere. In bookstores, on Amazon.com, on blogs and news outlet webpages and on and on and on.

There is some intrinsic value to the fantasy genre. It tends to feature archtypes with characteristics that are desirable and worthy of emulation, as well as archtypes that underscore evil and make us run from it. Insofar as the fantastic helps the reader to grasp ahold of deep truths, I cannot imagine a more useful genre.

There’s a more-than-healthy dose of cynicism in North America today. Think of how many times today something you’ve said honestly has been responded to by sarcasm? If you’re having a good day, you might only be able to count them on one hand. Fantasy is a wonderful antidote to this cynicism. In the place of sarcasm, we find wit. In the place of doubt, we find faith. In the place of anger over useless things, we find righteous anger over injustice. In the right context, fantasy can help its readers to see the things in life that are truly valuable.

To close, I’ll leave you with a thought from Samwise Gamgee, the faithful friend of Frodo, there with him to the end.

It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it’s only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it’ll shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand, I know now folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

So there… and it was even super relevant. Wish I’d thought of that this morning.

I want to talk about story and art and what they communicate.

Obviously, my approach to story and art are very heavily impacted by my world-view. No sense apologizing, right? I believe that man is engaged in a struggle. Either it’s a struggle with God, “I’ll have it my way,” or it’s a struggle with self, “I’ll have it His way.” (That’s gross oversimplification. I’m sure 12 of you just had 3 thoughts each that don’t fit into this construct. My apologies. Oversimplification is never fair to anyone, and I just did it to myself.)

Struggle does seem to be a fairly universal theme for humanity. I mean, we live in North America, in a time where income and wealth are at unbelievable heights, and yet we all seem to struggle. In my time as a bank manager, I got to interact with people who could personally write checks that blew my mind. One of them was what we all commonly refer to as a cat lady. None of them was content. All struggled for something different, something better, something more.

I think good art reflects (and helps instruct us in) the struggle. This seems to me to be as true in art that doesn’t reflect my world view precisely (like In Good Company, a movie about the corporate struggle that seems to understand corporate life incredibly well) as it is in art that does reflect my world view (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s treatment of Edmund, for example, which makes my rebellious self sick to my stomach when I think about it and compare it to how I receive grace).

It’s not an attempt to instruct. Life instructs us every day — I watch my tomato plants grow and naturally think about the complex nature of how what I put in to the little cup they’re growing in impacts their growth. That’s a lesson. The tomato plant didn’t wake up thinking, I’ll show him today. But it did because of its nature. Art’s kind of like that.

It’s good for us. It’s fun too. If it’s not, you may want to start picking different stories, different art. It draws our attention in ways that we don’t always expect. It engages our hearts in creative ways. It keeps us thinking.  That’s why I value art and story. That’s why I want to teach my child to cherish good art.

I’m a re-reader. If a book strikes me as a great read or incredibly helpful, I have a tendency to re-read it. Some books I’ll re-read as often as yearly. I think I’ve probably read Ender’s Game at least once a year since I first read it. Others I come back to as I pass them on the shelf, going “Oh yeah, that was good. I don’t remember it all. I should read it again.” Desiring God by John Piper is one of those. So is The Knowledge of the Holy by Tozer.

I’m seldom disappointed by re-reading. I guess that probably just means that my memory is reasonably good. It seems like I usually end up finding a new angle that didn’t click the last time I read the book. Are there books that you read repeatedly? Or are you the type of reader that would rather never re-read?

There’s enormous benefit to being a reader. You can learn cost effectively. You can experience new and different things without having to spend an arm and a leg. You can explore ideas that are different than the ones you carry in your head. You can improve your understanding of truth. Books are good for you.

Tim Challies (a much famous-er blogger than I) has written a few times recently about why reading is beneficial and how to effectively read books. I particularly commend his How I Read a Book. I think that personality plays into how we read, but Tim’s points, especially on not completing books that aren’t worth it and finding a way to interact with the material to ensure comprehension are spot on.

What kind of reading year will this be for you? 1-10 books? 10 – 20 books? 20-50 books? 50 – 100 books?

I received A Century Turns from Thomas Nelson’s BookSneeze book review service — basically, free books in exchange for reviews. Here comes the review!

Being a Canadian living in the USA, I am perhaps more acutely aware of the different ways that history can be presented than most. Take the War of 1812 as an example: In Canada, to the best of my recollection of 4th grade history classes, in the War of 1812 the Americans tried to invade Canada in a land grab. The Canadians beat the Americans senseless, marched all the way to Washington, set fire to the White House and left when they finally begged us to stop. We’re nice, so we said “Let’s just go back to the way things were,” and the war was over. In America, they teach that it was a war of resistance to British imperialism. Any attempts at land grabbing were expressly to gain leverage to get the British to cooperate. Since the British eventually were forced to cooperate, the victor was obviously the USA. (Note: that’s a gross oversimplification of the views from both sides… and I’m more and more inclined to fall somewhere in the middle of the debate. Also, we had Maine and they had Windsor/London Ontario and we traded back!? Seriously? Shoulda kept Maine! I digress…)

To the victor go the spoils, and also the right to record history. A Century Turns is a view of American history in the last 30 years or so from the perspective of Bill Bennett, a conservative talk show host. (I will state as a disclaimer that I am sometimes, perhaps even often, on the same side of issues as Bill Bennett.) This is an unabashedly American book. It tracks minutiae of the way politics developed through the late 80s, 90s and 2000s. It was a genuinely interesting read for me for several reasons: I’ll give you three, plus the two reasons the book aggravated me:

1. My understanding of American politics between 1950-1996 is woefully thin. Getting some of the details of the latter part of that period filled in was fascinating.
2. I don’t think I’ve ever engaged in reading an attempt at a historical accounting of events that I’ve lived through. I think that’s probably a reflection of my age. But, it was interesting to read how someone else saw events that I lived through. I didn’t always agree, but getting a different perspective was helpful.
3. Bill Bennett is obviously a smart person and understands the details of how Washington operates at a very high level. Getting a window into that world was beneficial, even if just to confirm for me that politics is not something I aspire to.

Now for the aggravations:

1. Bill constantly has footnotes that tell anecdotal stories from his experience that attempt to fill in details about the people involved in the events. In spite of his disclaimer that it’s not intended to be self-aggrandizing, that’s exactly how it feels — kind of like MadTV’s Stewart saying, “Look what I can do!”
2. This is a distinctly conservative book. For the most part, Republicans get either an even-handed or light treatment while the Democrats mentioned are given the gears. Clinton’s problems are flogged while George W Bush’s are excused. If the Republican party “wins” in the long term, this will probably be how histories of this time read in a hundred years. If the Democratic party prevails long term, these sorts of accounts will be discounted as obviously partisan.

You should read Bill Bennett’s book, if you have the time, if for no other reason than to better understand what you’re getting when you read historical accounts of any kind. In this book, with events that are easy for me to remember, it was easy to see where the writer’s personal biases came into play. The reality of writing is that biases are likely in play in the ancient histories I read as well — I simply don’t know the events or players well enough to see them. All in all, an interesting experience.

I’ve always been the type of person to keep up with the news. It’s not necessarily the best habit. C.S. Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy,

Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be seen before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

He’s probably right. I’m not sure where to find the balance between paying attention to what goes on in the world around me and, as he put it, an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism.

This has come to the fore for me in the recent redesign of CNN.com. They now display a little graph of the most-read stories in the top right. As I write this, Heidi Klum’s Halloween is the most read story. It’s followed by three straight stories about extreme violence.

I have far more questions than I have conclusions, but perhaps the whole of western civilization could stand to take a look at what we’re interested in / fascinated by. Perhaps we should, as Lewis suggests, spend our time on things that will not be untrue or irrelevant ten years from now. I think our wonderous technology lends “news” to being irrelevant/untrue in ten minutes rather than ten years.

We Canadians don’t just have prettier money than you Americans. Sometimes we have good ideas, too. Evidence of this fact can be found in butter tarts, the CANADARM, Tim Hortons, the AVRO Arrow, and ice hockey.

Tim Challies, one of the most widely read Christian bloggers on the internet is also a Canadian. He’s just hit on a great idea, and is in the midst of executing. He’s started a project called 10 Million Words over at the Gospel Coalition. He’s going to read all the non fiction books that hit the New York Times Bestseller list over the next year.

It seems like an interesting project. I’ve recounted my attempts to read various “top novels of the x decade” lists in the past. I haven’t done so great. Part of the challenge there is, in my experience, a lot of “popular books” are just garbage.

But, there’s something to be learned from the garbage — it says something about pop culture when they celebrate garbage. Tim speaks well to this over at his blog. You should read it. Go now. Say G’day, eh, while you’re there.

I’ve been reading Lewis lately — finally making time for some of his works that I should’ve made time for a long time ago. Thus far in my life, I’ve conquered his fictional works and Mere Christianity, and snippets of others. I’m now in the midst of his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Its made me realize that some people just have a way with words. Whether Lewis is writing fiction, faith, or semi-auto-biography, his sentences are just brilliant. I find myself chuckling about the various things he records — schoolmasters and dances, his father’s mood swings (his father had a common Scottish/Irish tendency toward extremes… extreme happiness sometimes, extreme anger others). He also writes beautifully about sad things and insightfully about terrible things. In general, you get a pretty good idea of who the man is.

It leaves me to wonder how much of writing is raw talent and how much is refinement. We can work on the refinement part, but the talent part simply is what it is. Reading about Lewis’s imagination, it’s clear that there was a prodigious talent there.

(The picture to the left has absolutely nothing to do with the post. It was in the morguefile results for art, and I had to chuckle.)

Why do we bother with art? What makes art admirable? What is it we seek to accomplish through the acclamation and enjoyment of art?

Good art is praise of the God of the universe. He created everything. By seeking to create (as much as it is possible for us to create) something that reflects His truth, we honor Him. This is easier for me to see when it pertains to a story than when it pertains to a painting, but that is only because my comprehension of paintings is limited by my pea-sized intellect.

Nevertheless, when I read a true story, I feel it… It resonates. I think, it is good. This is the feeling I get when I read great tales by fellow believers like Lewis and by people I’m diametrically opposed to, like Ayn Rand. In Lewis I feel it in the redemptive themes. In Rand, I feel it as the characters experience an intense longing for something more than what they have. These things are true. They are worth experiencing and commenting on, because they reflect the truth of the world God created. And He is good.

Lately, I’ve pretty consistently found myself reading genre fiction. Apparently this is the natural result when you go to the library, find the sci-fi section, and pick the book with the most sci-fi looking spine as your selection.

You can actually learn a fair deal about genre that way. I’m not sure how much crossover there is (can anyone describe an amish romance spine for me? I’m not sure I’d know one to see one), but I think at least in sci-fi and mystery, there’s something to the method. There are certain features visually and stylistically that indicate that you’re reading the genre you’re reading. I doubt if it’s even intentional on the author’s part, but it’s almost like they do certain things with their opening chapters that make you go, “Oh yeah, sci-fi.”

I think I first started to notice some of this when I was endeavouring to read through a list of “must read” sci-fi that Orson Scott Card had put forward. I’m cross that I can’t find that list now — it was an interesting six months. Then I gave up I think. I made it through Asimov, Herbert, and zig-zagged through a few others. I circled around to Robert Heinlein (I think) and gave up. But, it was informative. There’s a reason those books are classics… I learned a lot.

So, if you want to write in a certain genre, go out and read it. A lot. It’ll be good for you. You’ll learn what you should be doing and aren’t. You’ll also — if you read widely enough — learn what you shouldn’t be doing.