People also ask me if there’s any message or theme to Peanuts. I suppose it might be that Charlie Brown, in spite of always losing, never gives up. But really, I never think about that. I just think about how I’m going to get two or three more good ideas. I draw from day to day.

Fascinating that in 1995, after many years of writing those characters, he was still just hoping to turn in good comics. I think there’s something in that for every creative endeavour — don’t worry about the big picture of your art or your craft so much. Just turn in good work as you’re working.

I worked my way through the rest of the store, and as i got to the other end, I said to myself “This is it… there is no longer any need for bookstores. There’s nothing about this experience that I can’t beat online. It’s useless.” I aimed for the door.

My path took me through the children’s section. As I walked through, I heard a little boy, probably 5 or 6 years old, say “Where the Wild Things Are? Can I read that one, mom?” I teared up. It was just a little bit because I don’t cry.

That’s a special book. And maybe that kid was drawn to it because he saw the movie, but maybe — just maybe — he stumbled into it. And that’s not something you can do the same way online. You can’t just be immersed in great books and have the opportunity to stumble into Where the Wild Things Are.

I said a silent apology to Borders. I also decided I wanted to own a bookstore, which my wife mentions might not make sense in our market. I’d want to run it entirely on recommendations… staff recommendations and public recommendations. If it’s a great book and you’ll tell people about it, we’ll stock it. Otherwise, we just won’t bother. Less “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” and more “Here, there be great books.”

I was reminded this evening of the power of books. Even if I don’t ever own a bookstore (and I probably won’t, realistically), I’m committing to going to our local store and spending the occasional dollars. I want my kids to have the chance to pick up a good book by mistake.

Life, of course, has its stages. I’m still learning how to be a good dad; I’m still learning how to be a good businessman / employee. I’m still learning how to juggle all the requirements on my time. I’m still learning how to be disciplined. Those are hard processes.They are time consuming. They are sometimes frustrating.

But, one thing I’m learning is that it doesn’t get easier. It probably gets harder. It definitely takes on different looks as life progresses, but if I don’t learn how to master my time and my output now, I won’t have any easier time later.

I’m thinking of combining a few pieces of advice I’ve heard and read lately. Chip MacGregor offered great advice on taking writing seriously the other day. I think I’m going to combine those thoughts with “Start small” and maybe go back to trying my hand at short stories.

I’ll let you know how it works out!

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

- Jonathan Swift, brilliant writer and satirist of the 17/18th century. Want proof? Read this.

General state of the blog update:

Welcome back, good to see you, all that stuff. Here’s the thing about this blog: It’s only useful as long as it’s serving a purpose. And it’s a little bit of a drain on resources. And, as I approach the place where my time is more and more at a premium, trying to keep this up as a 6 day a week venture is just beyond my capabilities. But, the discipline of routine writing is good for me. So, here’s what you can expect: Monday will continue to be the day where I pawn off something good someone else said as though I put work into a post. Wednesday and Friday, you’ll continue to find original content related to reading, writing, music, creativity and the Believer’s life. The rest of the days of the week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, for those of you not diagramming this out on a piece of paper in front of you), you’ll find nothing new. Hopefully this will allow the content I do post to be higher-quality, as well as allow for some additional sanity / time with my family / etc.

Thanks for reading, truly.

Andrew

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.

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 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?

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.

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.