March 2011
March was an invigorating month full of books, music, and especially poetry. I hope the following reviews help you to navigate the many choices we have in libraries and shops, and remind you to examine everything through the light of the Scripture. What new books, music, and poetry have you enjoyed this past month? Please comment below; I would love to hear from your thoughts on them!
Books Read This Month
This thin volume minces no words. Hospitality is a non-negotiable command from God to his people. Everywhere in the New Testament where hospitality is commanded, it is in the context of the sincere brotherly love that stems from obedient love of God. This book will encourage you to fervently pursue the holy calling of hospitality, no matter your personal situation!
I also listened to Vision Forum’s recording of Strauch’s message “Hospitality: The Biblical Commands.” Although it shared many of the points of Strauch’s booklet, it also contains many new stories and thoughts that further flesh out the command of hospitality.
03/09 Homemade Hospitality. Barbara Sims. ✩✩✩✩
If you are new to the practice of hospitality, Mrs. Sims’ book will be a great encouragement to you. Her book is full of interesting stories, practical suggestions, and fun ideas that will make hospitality simple and attainable. The goal is not to impress guests with our houses and cooking, but to bless them with the love, joy, and peace that comes from serving God in this ministry to friends and strangers.
03/11 Celebrating the Sabbath: Find Rest in a Restless World. Bruce A. Ray. ✩✩✩✩✩
This is a wonderfully informative and thought-provoking book that I highly recommend to all Christians. Many view the Sabbath an inconvenience, a gloomy day of restrictions. Some churches have responded by instituting what Mr. Ray calls “McSabbath”—”worship services that are quick, easy, convenient, and user-friendly.” Neither of these attitudes reflects what God desired for us when he consecrated the seventh day. So what does it mean to observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy? This book will answer your questions about the Sabbath. Why was the Sabbath established? Why is it celebrated every seven days? Why do most Christians celebrate the Sabbath on Sunday instead of Saturday? What is required of Christians on the Sabbath? Each chapter is followed by questions for comprehension and personal application.
I was ready to enjoy this book, but I found the rhyming story distractingly unrhythmic (even the author’s own recorded reading seemed awkward), and the story less than satisfying. A squirrel makes daily visits to the art museum. One day, he watches a student make a copy of a masterpiece, and decides he can do the same. He stows away in the student’s art supplies, and, while she sleeps, uses her paints and canvases (and his furry tail-tip) to create a series of his own paintings—copies of masterpieces, with a unique twist.
03/18 The Garden in the City. Gerda Muller. ✩✩✩✩
A family buys an old, charming house with a huge, overgrown yard—in the middle of the city. The family works together to clear the yard and, with help from Aunt Lisa and a friend next door, restore it to its former glory. The two children, Ben and Caroline, each have their own garden patches, and watch as each season touches the garden with its beauty and brings different gardening chores. The illustrations are beautiful and detailed. (I’d love to walk barefoot in their grass!) Some pages have a little sidebar with suggestions for your own gardening projects, but there are not so many that they become distracting. This book passed the “Littlest Brother Test.” He especially loved the pictures, which he examined with absorbed interest. It was easy to overlook little faults in an otherwise charming book: some choppiness in the story, and a picture of Caroline spreading fertilizer with her bare hands. At one point the little boy falls asleep under the old apple tree and dreams that the tree tells him its story.
03/27 A House to Let. Charles Dickens. ✩✩
This little book was the collaborative effort of several popular Victorian authors: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Adelaide Anne Proctor. The challenges of this arrangement are painfully apparent in the text, which seemed to me disjointed and hastily concluded. Sophonisba, an old maid, moves to London for her health, and is intrigued by the house opposite, a dilapidated “House to Let” that, mysteriously, never is let. When she notices signs of life in what is supposed to be an empty house, she enlists the aid of an old admirer and a faithful servant who seek to outdo each other in finding curious facts about the previous occupants. What secret does the house hold? This is not a book for young readers; one story involves polygamy and suicide.
Music
I am making an effort this year to go beyond my iPod, the music I already know and love, and to discover new favorites by listening more attentively to the local classical radio station, borrowing recordings from the library, looking for “new” music by the composers I know, and looking for pieces by composers with whom I am not yet acquainted.
This month is Mark O’Connor Month for the Soirée Society of the Arts, and we’ve been saturating ourselves in his Strings and Threads Suite. The discussion on the private website has been lively, and features the vivid mental pictures evoked by each of the thirteen movements. Another discussion weighs the relative merits of the original guitar and fiddle version and the later string orchestration. I find the guitar and fiddle version more compelling; the artistry of the tune is more apparent, whereas the string version is apt to clog it with emotion. That said, both of them are great fun!
There’s not much I like in modern orchestral work, but Connie Ellisor has written a piece that is both very modern and very beautiful. Blackberry Winter is a freshly American piece that features the mountain dulcimer and a string orchestra. I’ve heard it several times now on the public radio, and I finally bought the three movements for my iPod. The theme of the first movement is taken from a traditional Appalachian tune called “Blackberry Blossom”; the second takes its from an old hymn tune. The third movement is entirely original, almost cinematic in quality, exhilarating and unique.
Poetry
This month the library shelf was kept full of poetry. I checked out all the books our library had for the Poetry for Young People series published by Sterling. In many cases the illustrations were beautiful, but I was usually disappointed by the poem selections. A quick breakdown of each book I reviewed follows.
Alfred Lord Tennyson. ✩✩
Some of my favorite poems by Tennyson were included in this collection: “The Eagle,” “Sweet and Low,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and “Crossing the Bar.” Unfortunately, there were also a great number of his mystical poems. Also, a mermaid, using only her arms to shield her, is stretched across one two-page spread.
This book was my favorite of the series and would have received four stars if not for sloppy editing—a huge typographical confusion in the biographical introduction and a formatting discrepancy in one of the poems. This book features excerpts from Longfellow’s many longer poems—Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere”—as well as “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Hymn to the Night,” “A Psalm of Life,” and “The Arrow and the Song.” One excerpt from Haunted Houses is illustrated in a way that might be frightening to very young children.
John Butler Yeats. ✩
The paintings in this book were the best in the series, but most of the poems reflect Yeats’ interest in the occult. The biographical introduction also dwelt long on his morbid interests.
The illustrations were very childish and garishly colored, and the selections were mostly from Stevenson’s own collection of his verse for children, A Child’s Garden of Verses. You would do better to get the original; and a volume illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith, Barbara Mcclintock, or Tasha Tudor would be beautiful instead of silly-looking.
I was disappointed by the generous inclusion in this collection of so-called modern “poetry.” Very little of e. e. cummings pleases me. This book, however, did contain several beautiful poems for each of the four seasons: an excerpt from “Rain in Summer” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “November” by Thomas Hood, “The morns are meeker than they were” by Emily Dickinson. I even discovered a new favorite poem, “The loveliest of trees, the cherry now” from the collection A Shropshire Lad II by A. E. Housman
...And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry full of snow...
This collection did not contain any of my favorite poems by Wordsworth, though, naturally, this is not a criticism that will apply to everyone’s tastes! The biographical introduction includes an account of Wordsworth’s liaison with a French woman and the illegitimate daughter he had by her. Though I dislike “cleaned up” biographies that portray sinful men as godly paragons, I did not appreciate this sympathetic portrayal—directed to young children—of a sinful situation.
I spent an early Monday afternoon in March transcribing poems of Walter de la Mare. (Biggest Brother loves that name!) I read two of his own collections: Bells and Grass and Peacock Pie. Though I found that many of them were mystical in nature (de la Mare was a writer of ghost stories), I found others to be not only appropriate, but also very beautiful. (None of them seem to be his popular poems, because I cannot find links for you on the internet.) Most of you will know his famously alliterative poem “Silver”—”Slowly, silently, now the moon/ Walks the night in her silver shoon.”
I also glanced through much of de la Mare’s anthology for children—Come Hither. I found the frame story decidedly strange, saw that many of the poems were mystical or fantastical, and that the rest were not thematically or literarily satisfying. I did transcribe one poem by William H. Davies—“Sweet Stay at Home.”
...Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place,
Sweet simple maid, bless thy dear face;
Thou hast made more homely stuff
Nurture thy gentle self enough...
Photograph: Certainly no earnest attempts to clean a room are complete without some crowning arrangement of fresh things. The bamboo (which in the years we’ve had it never once produced a cane fishing pole) makes for beautiful but short-lived greenery. Their triform lances of bright green are sophisticated in their simplicity. The addition of pink orchids gave the entire room an Oriental atmosphere, further accentuated by The Lark Ascending playing on my iPod.
Photograph and text © 2011.
Friday, April 8, 2011