Results of Ruminations

Unless you're new to my posts, you've probably already figured out that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a life-long Mormon, I've spent a lot  of time thinking and learning about the teachings of my church. I've learned that some stuff isn't real stuff but cultural stuff (e.g. having to wear a white shirt to Sunday meetings; caffeine isn't the thing that's forbidden in the Word of Wisdom). I've also learned some cool stuff that is real stuff (e.g. God's love for all His children; the grace of Christ is monumental and beyond capacious). But one thing that I never really learned about in official Church settings (General Conferences, Sunday Schools, Institute/Seminary classes) was the broadness of religious thought that the world has yielded. Despite being awash in my religion, I've never gone deeply into religion s . There's an explanation for this, of course--plenty of them. One is the fact that Mormon...

When younger, I read a lot of different genres of fiction. I stayed up late reading Goosebumps , like most kids of the nineties, but I also read Young Adult "classics" like Island of the Blue Dolphin, The Cay, and It's Like This, Cat.  I would try some of the bigger stories, but even Alice in Wonderland  was too strangely written for me to really engage with it. I read a lot of Redwall  books as I edged out of elementary school, and Anne McCaffery's world was large in my imagination by the end of sixth grade. Mr. Soto, my sixth grade teacher, read to us the first book of the Prydain Chronicles, which I instantly snatched up and read on my own. (That reminds me: I want to reread those books.) I read novelizations of video games ( Castlevania ftw) and movies ( Hook ). By the time I hit middle school, I was sometimes buying books of movies I couldn't see because they were rated-R, gaming the system as only a ninth-grader could. I picked up some Robotech  to go alon...

A new meme has been circulating through Twitter in which a guy with his girlfriend is caught "appreciating" another girl's look. The mutability of the meme is that the labels of each part can vary. The one I saw that I liked the most, and what inspired this essay, is this one: Yeah, basically. I got it from this tweep .  There's an allure to a book. Bookstores are quasi-sanctified ground for me, with the library-esque reverential feeling of speaking in Sacrament Meeting whispers, the particular smell of books and (often) coffee invoking a specific attitude both putting me in a specific mindset. Bookstores are less places to buy and something and more experiences to be enjoyed. Because of where I live, I don't get to go to bookstores as often as I'd like (read: Daily), but I'm not so far away that I can't go whenever I really need to. My favorite was Borders, but that died the death a decade or so ago, so while I still pine for their weekly coup...

I finished reading In Defense of a Liberal Education  by Fareed Zakaria. Having read two books now by different authors (coming from very  different backgrounds) about "the classics", I have to say that I much preferred this second one. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison by any stretch--one book was a quasi-manual for teaching in a prescribed way, the other was an argument for why liberal arts and the humanities ought to be invested--and, in a sense--believed in. The fifth and final chapter of Zakaria's book really made me happy. Perhaps it was an echo-chamber effect--I'm not above confirmation bias--but I felt optimistic about the students I teach and my role in the world. The other book left me disgruntled, abused, and pessimistic; this one made me hopeful. And the last part of the book is where it made the most sense to me. In it, Zakaria goes to great lengths to describe the accusations against the "millennial generation", of which I am bare...

I'm clawing through my memories, trying to remember the books that I loved as a kid. See, my two older boys love listening to audiobooks (whilst reading along) when we're in the car. It's a great pacifier, too--they don't argue or fight or wiggle too much, because the books keep them occupied and focused. Plus they help them improve their reading, and it gives me something to do whilst driving. Since the daily commute equates to about an hour a day, that's pretty good. Though there are more Pern books, I kind of don't want to revisit McCaffery's special planet again for a while. The emotional ending of All the Weyrs of Pern is so perfect I'd rather let it rest for a while, as I mentioned before . Being "done" with the series for the nonce, we scoured the library for the better part of an hour, trying to find the next set of books to read/listen to. I managed to score a digital audio copy of Redwall , by Brian Jacques. Frustratingly, there wer...

Note: Since the new film version of the book is coming out soon, I'll put a spoiler warning on this post, if only because someone may be planning on watching the film without having read the book. So here it is: As I mentioned before , I'm reading Stephen King's It. The book is massive--clocking in at over 1,400 pages--and tells the story of a haunted town called Derry, set in King's home state of Maine. A handful of kids end up being compelled to defeat the evil entity known as It (or Pennywise the Clown), and then, when they get older, they have to return to Derry in order to defeat It once and for all. So the set up is pretty straightforward, but part of what I found so interesting was how  the story was told. Despite its sprawling size, the book is tightly connected. Small details ripple through the narrative, which spans a summer in 1958 and a spring in 1985. Even the paper boat that kicks off the tragedy and terror and leaves by the end of the first chapter...

Time: 11:04am. Timer: 25 minutes. Go. Case #1 Here's a thing I've been thinking about: Fame. Part of it comes from the book I started listening to this morning, But What if We're Wrong? . I'm still early in the book (about an hour and a half so far), but there are ideas that are challenging and interesting. It's part futurism, part history, part critical analysis--definitely up my alley, even if it does make me uncomfortable with some of the implications of the cheerily described tendencies of humanity. Klosterman begins by talking about Moby-Dick , one of my favorite novels. I've read it once in college (where it ought to be read, if only so that the worthwhile conversations that the book inspires can have regular space; in lieu of college, a good, dedicated book club could tackle the Whale over the course of, say, three or four meetings), then half again whilst playing a Batman video game. It's not easy to read by any stretch, and its purpose is far...

I happened upon Verso Books '* summer sale and picked up five books for a buck each. I bought five ( General Intellects, Beneath the Streets, and The Spectacle of Disintegration, all   by Mckenzie Wark, Beyond the Pale  by Vron Ware, and In Defense of Lost Causes  by Slavoj Zizek), but I wanted to go a little meta, a little rhizomatic, and talk about one piece, taken out of context, from the beginning of Zizek's book. I've mentioned Zizek before , and he's a fascinating thinker, albeit hard to understand (as much his speech patterns, his lisp, his accent, his thoughts, his writing as anything else about him). Nevertheless, there's a lot about him that I can't help but be attracted to, and when I started off, he hit me with this particular phrase: "the rhizomatic texture of reality" (loc. 93). The broader context is that he's going off on the idea that, because there are no more "big ideas", some think that "we need 'weak though...

Why do we tell stories? Yeah, yeah, I know: To make sense of the world, to preserve our culture and heritage, to explain what we could be. There are lots of reasons, and a lot of them also make sense (which is nice), but I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. Maybe it's because it's late but I'm worried the insomnia that's been plaguing me the last three nights is lurking behind me; maybe it's because my own sense of self-worth and legacy resides in twenty-six fragile letters, pushed back and forth on my keyboard millions of times and my stories remain almost entirely unread; maybe it's because the late July night outside of my now-open window is cooler than July usually is, and that feels like a detail that ought to be remembered somehow, if even in a nebulous, digital way. Maybe there are more reasons for telling stories than there are stories to be told, or maybe because there are really only a handful of each, but the veneer is different enou...

I finished my tenth novel today. As I've been struggling to finish this latest book (struggling because I wrote all 88,000 words of it in the last four weeks, and that kind of focus is draining), I decided to do a rough approximation of how much writing I've done since I started college/came back from my mission. (During my time in Florida, I didn't really write anything, though I talked about ideas with roommates or companions. Writing--genuinely putting effort into my stories--started in July of 2004, after I had been home from my mission for about a month. I've been writing ever since.) Since I'm bad at math, I decided to make a spreadsheet that would do the calculations for me. This is what I have so far: All of these are finished novels, and some of them I even like. The numbers have decimal points, for some random reason. Ignore those extra zeroes. I'm only talking about finished  products, but assuming those numbers are right (I'm a little ...

I wouldn't say this is a companion piece to an older essay , but it is a spiritual successor. Despite the fact that lots of different thoughts have been percolating, I feel as though I would be remiss if I didn't self-indulge about how I feel about my writing, especially now that I've finished, essentially, six days of uninterrupted writing. And the way I feel about my writing is pretty much this: "Are you enjoying the creation of your book?" "Yeah!......*sobs*." ( Source ) I tried something different this year, which isn't unusual--I am doing my best to grow as a writer, which means that I put arbitrary challenges on myself to see what happens and how I can improve (as well as what mistakes to avoid in the future)--but I may have gone a little too far. Firstly, I didn't have a single word written* before I went down. The past couple of years, I was in the middle (or near the beginning) of a book when I headed for the cabin . This time, h...

I try to keep a light touch on the publishing world, and I like to follow success stories about authors, even if I don't read their stuff. As a frequenter of bookstores (my closest is a Barnes and Noble, which hurts my help-independent-booksellers inclination, but spares my bank account, as I can get a teacher discount at B&N, plus not have to commute for an hour to get there), I see a lot of names on the shelves. My diet is dichotomously spread between classics and science fiction/fantasy , with some dabbling in the historical section, too. The large, mainstream fiction is relatively unexplored by me, though I occasionally venture outwards. And, since I always perk up when I hear about authors--and few current authors court as much controversy as Jonathan Franzen--I finally decided to buy a copy of Freedom . (In the interest of full disclosure, I bought it used for a dollar, plus tax, at a now-out-of-business used bookstore.) It's still sitting on my shelf. But an audiob...

I looked up the most lucrative authors of 2016 on Forbes , curious to see what kind of emphasis mainstream fiction has over the commercial fiction (which covers the speculative market). Here's the list (the gallery is obnoxious, so I'm putting the information here). Also, I've put the genre in which they write into parentheses so that it's easier for me to analyse. James Patterson (A) Jeff Kinney (MG) J.K. Rowling (YA/F/A/M) John Grisham (A) Stephen King (F/H) Danielle Steel (A/R) Nora Roberts (A) E.L James (A) Veronica Roth (YA/SF) John Green (YA/NA) Paula Hawkins (A) George R.R. Martin (F) Rick Riordan (YA/F) Dan Brown (A) If you've walked through a bookstore for any amount of time, you'll see these names. What's interesting here is the sprinkling of Young Adult books (though it's debatable if Rowling's presence on this list comes from her Adult/Mystery books or continual sales of Harry Potter ), but only one Middle Grade. The fa...

When going to Seminary* back in high school, I remember seeing on a classmate's desk the quote, "You don't have to read the scriptures everyday, just on the days that you breathe." I'd seen a similar sentiment elsewhere. "You don't have to practice piano every day..." or "You don't have to practice basketball..." or "You don't have to do art..." or whatever else. And in a lot of ways, that's what's wonderful about that sentiment: It doesn't matter what you plug into the blank, if you truly care about something, if you love it and want to excel at it, you have to inhabit it. The last nine months have been interesting for me. I'm now at the close of an experiment that I decided to begin in August of 2016. I toyed with writing daily for a half week or so, but really began the experiment in earnest on 23 August 2016 in which I talked about  beginning my ninth year as a teacher. I wrote it in the morning, befo...

A friend sent me a copy of this essay by C.S. Lewis, in which the world-renowned novelist and essayist opines about the power of Story and puts his significantly-smarter-than-mine brain to the task of analyzing story qua Story. It's left me a little underwhelmed. I know that part of it is that I don't understand what he's getting at. Not being familiar with Lewis' work (I've read Screwtape Letters  and a Narnia book or two, but that's about as far as I got), I'm also not familiar with his allusive tendency or repetitious manner. I found his particular style somewhat disdainful of that which he didn't like, and some of his conclusions were, at best, underdeveloped.* That being said, he brings up a couple of really good points that reminded me to be a little less judgmental of people's tastes. For example, he mentions the tendency to underestimate another's intellectual ability because of what one chooses to read about. But if I am right i...