Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m not sure how to say enough good about this book. It doesn’t just criticize public education; it challenges our temptation to conform to the corporate fascism of the modern world. And it is a personal encouragement. The book will give you confidence both that your children can learn and that you can do so too.
Jump the Cracks by Stacy DeKeyser
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Pretty cool story. Could have been a thriller but was more of a relatively realistic drama about a daughter of divorced parents. Interesting use of some low-key Christian content. The issue seems to be finding faithfulness. Not sure if I like the ending. One could say that she sells out. Still thinking about it.
(PS. one might also complain that the book is too positive about the State grabbing kids from “unfit” parents. It stayed ambiguous enough not to repel me.)
All the Rage by F. Paul Wilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Despite my problems with the hero’s morality, I had to give this another chance. This story found him in a monogamous situation, and I’m surprised I didn’t like the novel more. It reads like a anarchic version of Xfiles. What’s not to love? But I didn’t love it. A lot of authors I like really love “Repairman Jack,” but something about him creeps me out. This got better toward the end but once I reached the ending I was disappointed.
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Was this the ideal of total accuracy? No. And much of the book didn’t seem to have much bearing on any single thesis. That is why it wasn’t just good, but awesome. It was like pulling up a stool at a bar (an Irish pub) and buying a beer for the talkative fellow next to you because he is highly entertaining and highly knowledgeable. Aside from feeling sick at how familiar the description of the decline of Rome sounded, this was a wonderfully cheerful book that opened up a great deal of history. While I think his title was overstated, as were several other observations (i.e. sex and Christianity in Ireland), it was still an awesome book. Even its overstatements were valuable. (Didn’t Nietschze say the mistakes of great men are better than the successes of the small?)
My only regret is that I listened to this on audio while driving. It would have been more appropriate to read it with book in one hand and beer in the other.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This seemed way too evil and disturbing for younger readers. But it was an amazing read once you got past the fact that the protagonist was making horrific decisions at such a young age. It was hard to imagine a modern teen being so calculating in the face of such trials. But Collins was, nevertheless, convincing. Reading Stephen King’s “The Running Man,” tempts one to believe that this kind of plot can never be written with too much realism. But Collins has done it, and done it well and even as a YA book. I am quite impressed.
Collins portrays a future in which the rulers of North America (from a capital in the Rockies) control all the other sections of the country, exploiting most of them so that they are left with severe poverty. They run an annual arena which the populace is required to watch on TV. A male and female teen from each sector are drafted and required to participate if no one volunteers to take the victims place. They are forced to fight until only one survivor is left. However, because this is a TV show, the “gamemasters” have ways of making sure the conflict does not slow down. Furthermore, the audience can help out their favorites so that one is constantly working them as well as fighting. Violence and lies are the only hope for life.
I won’t give this away except to say that Collins manages to give the reader a glimmer of triumph over tyranny while, at the same time, entangling the protagonist in enough moral compromise to make the victory questionable.
The Running Man by Stephen King
This book was quite violent and gross and the protagonist was a stubborn rebel… who insisted on getting married for life rather than following the societal norm of a few year contract. It is his loyalty to his wife (who made extra income as a prostitute) and his sick baby girl who needed medicine–a need which motivates Ben Richards to volunteer to be a player for the Games Federation which more or less runs the former US.
I have to admit I loved this book. It is every bit as important as Bradbury’s Farenheit 451. At one point I started wondering if King had studied the works of Rene Girard. The America of King’s 2025 is a stratified society where peace is kept through sacrificial scapegoats seen on reality TV. The top show, The Running Man, involves hunting a man to his death. He gets money for every day he stays alive (assuming he sends in his videos) and even more for killing policemen who are trying to kill him.
There are a lot of times when I felt King was really not able to suspend my disbelief… except that I never wanted to stop reading. It is easy to see King’s book as prophetic (the rise of reality television for example) and also an expose (through hyperbole of US society now). I especially liked the subtle invocation of H. G. Wells’ Morelocks.
By the way, just forget about the movie when you read this novel.
It by Stephen King
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I wanted to say how good this is. It started off amazing even if one scene was way more explicit than I wanted it to be. (Stephen King does not know the meaning of TMI). The narration of childhood and the attempt to grapple with suppressed memories of horror makes for an amazing novel.
And I wanted to mention that I think King bit off more than he could chew in this one. He created an unearthly, magical, super-powerful monster. So he had to come up with a way to explain how eleven-year-olds could fight It. The contrivances of magic and symbolism got to the edge of how much I could suspend my sense of disbelief.
But none of that really matters now. In King’s attempt to create a sense of primal magic, he inserted a scene in which the one female of the seven child friends does something totally wrong with all of them in a row (trying to avoid showing up in the wrong kind of searches here). It isn’t just evil and senseless, it actually makes the paranoid and perverse accusations of one of the villains in the story come true.
And I’ve just lost interest. I’m not reading about these characters anymore because they aren’t understandable persons anymore.
I’m not bothered as much by the fact that King wrote the story this way as that he did so after he had kicked his drug abuse and didn’t re-think the concept in the review process. And neither did anyone who saw the manuscript. And the reviewers all gave high marks to it.
Ugh. I’m done. Over and out.
Good Omens CD by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
OK, I got nervous starting this because it seemed it could lead to Heinleinesque (SIASL) levels of blasphemy. But despite the heterodoxies, this was hysterical as a parody of all the end times horror stories told by Hollywood and the likes of Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, and Blue Oyster Cult (!). It skewers gnosticism and “last days” literalism.
It also makes a profound statement that the ultimate war will not be between heaven and hell but between humanity/earth and both the other places. This will seem to be one of the heterodoxies, but it should be given more credit. We will judge angels. We won’t conquer heaven exactly, but we will inherit it. And heaven will enjoy all our special drinks, novels, and all the rest of the stuff we make. (The angel character needn’t have feared he would lose those.)
The main thing the authors can’t seem to settle on is human nature. On the one hand they make it clear that humans are more depraved than demons. On the other they make out that being human is an alternative to being either angelically good or demonically evil.
The message about fate and prophecy was wonderful. Reminded me of the end of Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates or Terminator Two.
Outstanding humorist novel.
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m giving this two stars because it did have an interesting alternative world. I got about 2/3 or 3/4 through it and gave up when the girl kissed the bad boy. This is teen-girl-lit except I wouldn’t encourage any teen girl to read it. The descriptions of skin, jaws, eye-lashes, bred like maggots throughout the text.
And the similes! Who will save us from drowning in them? I can’t remember any thing or event in the book which wasn’t described as “like” “like” “like” x 50 billion something else. When I heard a sentence on how he or she “deflated like a balloon pricked with a pin,” I began striking my forehead with my fists, repeatedly, like a pinata with a layer of bone around the thick oozing candy.
And every single character who describes anything to anyone else also abounds in using the similes as well!
The combat scenes seemed bizarre because things that should have happened fast somehow allow for shouted warnings and elaborate evasions.
Hearing the story read put me in mind of Saturday morning cartoons like Super Friends. That struck me as an apt embodiment of the writing. Only with more boy crushes.
As a Christian, I didn’t approve of the pluralistic, agnostic stuff that coated the otherwise medieval urban fantasy. This did not offend me however since I didn’t expect anything else. I did not with satisfaction that for all the talk about how a mosque or synagogue would work just as well, readers got to tour a Roman Catholic Church to get weapons to fight against vampires.
By the way, vampires and werewolves as enemies is getting really old. And vampires are getting even older. I was glad that much of the story centered on demons rather than these other two.
To end this back on an positive note, I did think the actual story, as far as I got through it, was an interesting plotline.