I've had some time to read (slowly, like I do) lately...which is awesome. These are some of the books I've finished up the school year/started the summer with:

How Should We Then Live, by Francis Schaeffer (crazy stuff. Really thankful to have read it).

1984, by George Orwell (no comment).

Ghosts of War, by Ryan Smithson (really great. really eye opening. So glad I picked it up).

The Selby is in Your Place, by Todd Selby (mostly photos, but that only makes it more awesome).

Our of Africa, by Isak Dinesen (A hard one to pick up, but I'm really enjoying it).

Living on the Devil's Doorstep (Super, super good. Thanks, Brianna).

Looking forward to:

Downtown Owl, by Chuck Klosterman

Into the Mud, by Christine Jeske


Very exciting stuff....

Here's a poem about a journey (not one of the "official" categories), taken from my well worn copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Upon the hearth the fire is red,
Beneath the roof there is a bed;
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
Tree and flower and leaf and grass,
Let them pass! Let them pass!
Hill and water under sky,
Pass them by! Pass them by!

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
Apple, thorn, and nut, and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!

Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Throgh shadows to the egde of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then the world behind and home ahead,
We'll wander back to home and bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!

Apriltry

Brianna and I are starting a 30 day poetry challenge today. It's most exciting. For the next month, we will be posting one poem a day. We have ten "topics" that we will each post one of, and then we'll post five random, perhaps original, poems. Here are the topics in no particular order:

Silly
Paradise
Love
Song
Faith
Nature
Peace
Hope
Tells a story
Joy

Everyone and their mother has been doing some kind of 3o day challenge lately, so we thought we'd invent our own.
I get the honours of posting the first poem of the month! It falls in the "nature" category.

Song to A Tree

Give me the dance of your boughs, O Tree,
Whenever the wild wind blows;
And when the wind is gone, give me
Your beautiful repose.

How easily your greatness swings
To meet the changing hours;
I, too, would mount upon your wings,
And rest upon your powers.

I seek your grace, O mighty Tree,
And shall seek many a day,
Till I more worthily shall be
Your comrade on the way.

By Edwin Markham



What a hippy I must seem...
Brianna will be posting a poem she's discovered tomorrow!

Inkspell by Cornelia Funke, The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, and Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. J'adore all of them. They are lovely works of fiction. What I do not understand, though, is how little fiction I actually read. I avoid it, really, and always find myself in the biography section of the library or B&N. This is even weirder considering how much I love to write fiction. It is to me what eating is to my little sister, what painting was to Picasso, what military stratagem was to Napoleon. It is my #1 form of self expression, yet I avoid reading it. Perhaps this is because of the voice in my head that insists reading fiction is a waste of time. I must get too much joy from imagining what isn't to listen to that voice. Here are some fictional things that I've been really wanting to exist this week....

Naturally blue highlights
Unicorns
Literary Osmosis
Garden gnomes that walk and talk
A white Jeep Wrangler that requires absolutely no gas to run, registered in my name
Blue pandas
Reggae style hymns.

In school right now I am reading literature about the Civil War era and just before then. Of course, with that comes the study and critique of American slavery. It is something that has been talked about in my curriculums to the point of just being annoying. It was terrible, yeah, but it is over. Can we talk about something else, maybe?
Well in further studying that time I am reading more about the other side of it. Everyone seems to look back at it and think "I would never do that", or "that kind of cruelty would make me sick no matter how many of my friends supported it", and that may be true-who can know?-but what about if we had been one of the people enslaved? In Uncle Tom's Cabin, (A work of fiction? Yes. Truth? Mostly, I believe.) the "slaves" blow my mind with their calm, submission, and strength. They sang, and they wept, and they supported one another.
I love to think that the many Africans who were Christians were more free than their "masters", because they were free from eternal bondage, to sin. I am amazed by how backwards things can appear on this earth, and hope that had I been a slave, I would have had that same graceful perseverance.

Sorry, you kind of need a magnifying glass to see this picture, but it's the only one I could find.
It's Teen Angst?Naaah..., author Ned Vizzini's autobiography. I finished reading it yesterday, and ohmyword it's so great. It takes you event-by-event through his Junior High and High School years, and man! the dude is hysterical.
Let's face it-we all had those awful years of development when we obsessed over something, anything. For Ned it was video games, for me it was certain fantasy-fiction works. Those years were there, we can't deny them, though we can try (really hard) to forget. Mr. Vizzini writes us through those awful years, poking fun at himself, and the laughable way he coped with everything. It's so great to hear someone else look at life and know that it's not some tight rope that you have to walk perfectly. He makes fun of himself, and his high school, and his decisions, and really comes out ahead for his honesty. I recommend (obviously).





Lydia

Gulliver's Travels is an awful book in my humble opinion.
Controlled Media is starting to freak me out.
Sociology is a crazy subject.
I really want to pierce my eyebrow.
It's so beautiful outside.
Ted Lennon and Ingrid Michaelson both make wonderful music.
A year and a half of High School left.
I want to go on a really long camping trip in Arizona.

That's my week for you.



Lydia

The book on the left is phenomenal. The book on the right is up next.

I am also reading Working in the Shadows by Gabriel Thompson. I highly recommend (so far).

Lydia

I've always thought that it's important to know who your favorite character in a story is. I even got anal about it back in the day, and made myself choose a favorite character from every movie I watched and story I heard. haha. Now, though, I only have a favorite when someone particularly stands out to me. This time it's Mercy from Pilgrim's Progress.
When Christiana, her boys, and Mercy get to the Gate (the beginning of Part 2 in the book), Christiana and the boys go in while Mercy remains outside. She was not invited the way Christiana had been by her husband, Christian. Mercy was timid, and fearful. She believed in God, but was hesitant to knock on the gate for herself because she felt a little bit less welcome than Christiana. Eventually, though, she gathered her courage and knocked. In boldness she summoned the Interpreter and he answered, in spite of how different her way of coming was from Christiana's.
She was different, yet she felt in her heart that her boldness was good, and therefore she refused to be turned away from the path to the Celestial City. Kinda awesome, I'd say....

Lydia

"In the same way that the Pharisees thought they have killed Christ, and put His body in a dark grave, thinking He was gone forever, the [Council of Constance] who opposed John Wycliffe thought their symbolic act of disintering the "heretic" and throwing away his ashes would kill his memory among his followers. But as the Pharisees learned to their dismay, nothing could stop Jesus Christ, and nothing can stop the truth."

-John Foxe

"Why buy a moments ease at the expense of a miserable eternity?"

-Denisa (16 year old martyr)

I think I'm going to put up my Christmas list. Not because I'm dying to get any of this stuff (who ever feels that way once you're over 12 years old?), but because it makes me happy to talk about fun stuff. And this way, if I lose the paper list I have, I won't have forgotten it all and become totally clueless when birthday/Christmas time comes around!

A punching bag.
Les Miserables (DVD).
Angus and Julia Stone (CD).
Nneka (CD).
Video camera.
After, by Francine Prose (book).
Reformation Study Bible (ESV).
Operation World (book).

Fun stuff, I know.

Lydia

P.S. I am reading Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Oh. My. Word.
More on such later.

"

Here's some of the books I've been reading...

Most of them have been good. Two have been REALLY good, and one has been quite slow. Honestly, that's about all that I've read over the whole summer. It takes me a while to read books. Quite a while.

Lydia

Below is a picture taken from above a bazaar in Mexico City.

I recommend this book. Especially if you like pictures. I didn't really read the written parts (it seemed rather propaganda-ish), but there were some pictures of huge landfills full of rubbage. Garbage. From us. We are filling land fill after land fill up. I don't say that there is anything wrong with using styrofoam and plastic containers but the least we can do is be mindful of what we waste. When you see a plastic bottle, almost empty, take the lid off. Throw the lid away separetely so that any liquid left in the bottle will be able to return to the earth and the bottle won't take up so much room in a landfill. There's lots of other obvious things we can do. Not to save the world, but to preserve what has been given to us. Honestly, though, the pictures were just fun to look at.

Lydia

North of Beautiful is a work of art. There is no other way to describe this book. It is a painting. A tapestry. A collage.
Headley did an amazing job using similes and metaphors to impart the ideas of her characters and what they were going through. Not to mention that her characters were slightly exaggerated and romantic in an unusually comforting way.
The main character is an artist and Headley reflects this amazingly well in this seventeen-year-old's story. Just as the girl makes collages of different pictures linked together in various ways, so Headley crafts a geniously coordinated sequence of events linked by the desires all the characters have to understand and relate to those around them. The variety of the author's characters are equivalent to an artist's use of exotic colours that are completely different yet fit together like pieces in a puzzle.
This novel is a delightful picture of regret, independence, the desire to belong, all kinds of love, and true beauty.
I highly recommend. As does Brianna.

Lydia