When I was 8 or 9, I remember finding an old movie playing on television one afternoon, about an old man and what looked to me like a swordfish. I came in only near the end and my goodness it left an impression, though I retained no clear memory of how the story ended. I … Continue reading The Old Man and the Sea
In my last post I reviewed a book by William P. Brown, The Seven Pillars of Creation, that read God's speeches in the Book of Job as a creation story. This was a very new perspective for me. It made me take a look back at my little journey through Job in recent months. I've … Continue reading William P. Brown podcast about Job
"The Fellowship of the Ring" came out in theaters twenty years ago, almost to the day. Below is an essay that I wrote in the days after I saw it -- an essay that, besides being a bit of a time portal, covers a ton of subjects about books, movies, history, religion, dead white males, … Continue reading The Fellowship of the Ring
"Makoons" is the last book written, thus far, in "The Birchbark House" series. (Spoilers ahead.) It's a deceptively simple story, which you think is just about the details of ordinary life, but then you realize how many deaths have taken place in the course of the story. Nokomis. Angeline and Fishtail. Two Strike's pet lamb … Continue reading Makoons
Finishing "Huckleberry Finn," it struck me that there's no romance in the story, not even a steady female character. So in this respect the novel is somewhat similar to “Moby-Dick”, its main historical contender for the “title” of Great American Novel. But Huck doesn't quite go as far as Moby in casting off the ladies. … Continue reading Huck and the ladies
September 23, 2021 I’ve taken years to read "The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn", because of its darn reputation. The back cover of my 1985 Penguin edition quotes Hemingway’s famous line, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. Further down we read that “Of all the contenders for the title … Continue reading Starting Huckleberry Finn
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
Larry McMurtry published “Streets of Laredo”, his sequel to “Lonesome Dove”, in summer 1993. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution then ran a piece by Michael Skube, who compared “Lonesome Dove” to “Don Quixote”: Living briefly off the luster of its predecessor, a sequel establishes its own grounds as art or it diminishes the work from which … Continue reading McMurtry and Cervantes
I recently read a book that was a delight for me, a lifelong fan of a certain bit of punctuation. It covers a lot of territory, efficiently: the origins of the semicolon; historical debates about the "rules" of grammar and whether such rules even make sense; snobbery in punctuation, and snobbery in general; the critical … Continue reading Semicolon
December 15, 2020 I'm reading this now for the first time. What stands out most for me may be the swiftly changing Spirit of Christmas Past. It's like an anomaly-entity from modern sci-fi, but soft-voiced and ominous like the representation of Satan in The Last Temptation of Christ movie. (Overly Sarcastic Productions was reminded of … Continue reading A Christmas Carol
