The Lady from Zagreb

Posted on October 6, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Lady from Zagreb
© 2015 Phillip Kerr
432 pages

            Bernie Gunther was an ordinary police detective in wild, wonderful Weimar until Germany’s economy collapsed and fringe parties swept into power. His police department absorbed by the SS, he wears the uniform of a party and of an ideology he loathes – and does a poor job of even pretending to tolerate. His antipathy for the Party makes a man of Bernie’s talents a useful tool, however, at least to Joseph Goebbels. With no career prospects or political ambition, the detective can be hired for a little bit of innocent work that the master of deceit would prefer to keep concealed from his rivals in evil miniondom, like Himmler.  For instance, Goebbels has his eye on a certain starlet who is waffling on cinema as a career prospect, despite being a Siren-like beauty who is sure to become the continent’s most popular actress.  Officially, of course, the chief of propaganda wants to keep her engaged making films to glorify the fatherland,  but he also has more intimate engagements in mind – the kind that married men have no business in making.   The problem is that the poor dear is distracted by her long-missing father, lost in war-torn Yugoslavia. What he’d like for Gunther to do is pop down to the most hellish place in Europe short of Auschwitz for a spell, find dear old dad, and then report back to Berlin.
Nothing is ever so simple, of course. Gunther has already encountered some soul-harrowing scenes since the Nazis took power in 1933;  he has seen massacres on both the Soviet and Nazi sides of the battle-lines, and  been exposed to the Final Solution in action.  Yugoslavia, however, is a bloodbath to be endured only with the native whiskey,:Gunther’s report makes even Goebbels blanch at the horror of it.  There,  the princes of hell on earth decorate their strongholds with skulls on pikes, and photographs of executions, like something out of a nightmare.  The usual psychological defenses – sarcasm, booze, and cigarettes – don’t quite do the trick. To survive, Gunther counterattacks: he falls in love. If the hormone rush from becoming infatuated with Germany’s foremost sex symbol doesn’t do the trick, then perhaps the thrill of chasing a girl who is not only married, but a mistress-potential for one of the most powerful men in the reich will.  Eventually the action moves to Switzerland,  where Americans mistake Gunther for a German general and hilarity ensues. Amid even more death, however, the piece of a puzzle which has lingered on Gunther’s mind for a year finally falls into place.

The Lady from Zagreb is a very well-done detective novel,  putting its wartime Europe setting to good effect and linking several mysteries together. The humor is biting, as ever;  on learning that a fellow officer is writing yet another novel, Gunther comments that there will always be room in Germany for more novels, provided his countrymen keep burning them. In an early scene, a man is literally killed by Hitler; a bust of Adolf is used  as a bludgeon. Against the backdrop of both the Holocaust and the obscene carnage of Yugoslavia, however, even that humor fails to prevent this from being an utterly distressing novel, set in a land of desecration and filled with horror and manipulation. Not even Gunther’s relationship with Dalia is free from the cloud of horror, unsurprising given Goebbels’ close presence.  Certainly there’s no fault in creativity or research; the book is littered with odd little details that must have been strange research finds, like a U-boat parked on the autobahn; one of Gunther’s escapes is especially captivating.  As thrilling as it is, Zagreb is more than touch dispiriting on the whole, however.

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A Man for All Seasons

Posted on October 3, 2015 by smellincoffee

“A Man For All Seasons”
© 1966 Robert Holt
163 pages

“…the king wants either Sir Thomas More to bless his marriage or Sir Thomas More destroyed.”
“They seem odd alternatives, Secretary.”
            The king wants a son, Sir Thomas – what are you going to do about it?   King Henry, eight of that name and possibly last of the Tudors,  has decided to change wives. His lawful queen, Catherine of Aragon, has so far only given him one long-lived child: a girl, utterly useless for succession purposes.   Convinced that his marriage is cursed, Henry seeks to have it declared null and void by the Pope, but said pontiff is unwilling. He already made special dispensation for Henry to marry his brother’s widow in the first place; now they want to him to un-dispensate?   Anxious to replace Catherine with a younger model, and in fear of dying without a proper heir, Henry decides to resolve the succession  problem via secession.   Assume leadership of the Church  in England, appoint someone pliable as archbishop, and hey presto, instant divorce.    Henry can do nearly what he wants; the Pope may object, but he is across the Channel, and even the Queen’s Hapsburg family doesn’t have the energy to invade England just for marriage counseling.  Henry intimidates both Parliament and the church into giving in, but still—there is an itch of sanction. The compliance of dogs is easy to find; they can be appeased with food or cowed with beatings, and dog-men abound here, epitomized in the person of Richard Rich   What Henry needs to sooth any lingering qualms that he is following the straight and narrow path is approval from a man of virtue and conscience – a man like his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More. But More cannot approve; he is a faithful husband and doting father to several daughters, and a good Catholic who finds Henry’s easy disposal of his wife and the Church’s authority to be utterly alarming.   Choosing discretion as the better part of valor,  More retires from the court in the wake of Henry’s break with the church, but Henry is not content. He and his minions want either More’s sanction, or his destruction.  “A Man for All Seasons” follows the king’s pursuit of More,  a path that ends only with the subject’s martyrdom.   More never explicitly opposes the king’s behavior;  never writes a tract, never denounces him from the chair of office,  never even says a word to his wife.   His silence, however, is forbidding, and the king will not have it.  There can be no law in   England save the King’s – not even More’s private reign over his conscience.   The import of “A Man” is not lost centuries ever the times they portray, nor decades after the play was written. Its championing of conscience against coercion, of moral conviction against swaggering license, remain relevant so long as those in authority continue to pursue their every impulse,  dressing their wrath and lust for power in the clothes of law and demanding obedience. Sophie Scholl lost her head for the same reason More lost his;  they had a better one than the king’s.  More’s stand for conscience was such that the Church of England – which More opposed – hails him as a saint.  Truly he was as Holt describes him, a man for all seasons,  including ours.

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Anne of Green Gables

Posted on October 2, 2015 by smellincoffee
Anne of Green Gables
© 1908 Lucy Maude Montgomery          
299 pages

 “Anne, are you killed?” shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. “Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you’re killed.”“No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious.”“Where?” sobbed Carrie Sloane. “Oh, where, Anne?

  Anne of Green Gables is chicken noodle soup bound in paper, the heartwarming story of a imaginative girl growing up on the Canadian frontier. Anne is every reader’s ideal companion; she is one of us.  Anne is not content to read good stories; hers is a boundless imagination  that makes the ordinary spectacular;  she names trees,  sees roads to Camelot in humble dirt lanes, and can convert anything into a sweeping story.  She is the embodiment of childish wonder and delight, who is rendered rapturous at the thought of learning about something new, or embarking on an adventure with a friend.  Though orphaned at an early age – she has no memory of her parents, and is adopted by a childless pair of siblings at the novel’s start – Anne’s imagination gives her access to a boundless well of enthusiasm. Although she crashes from misfortune to disaster, she never loses and hope and always gains a bit of character from the experience. Anne’s imagination is not limited to creating stories for she and her friends to act out (Tom Sawyer would be an interesting neighbor for her; what would happen if the rafts they set out on chanced to meet, and Anne’s Arthurian romance collided with Tim’s pirate ship?). Her head is filled with the language of books, and when she reacts she reveals a vocabulary filled gloriously with pomp.  It’s almost a disappointment when she becomes more level-headed assuming the responsibilities of adulthood, but all stories have their proper ending. For Anne, that usually involves hugs, tears, and speeches.   Green Gables is glorious fun;  I wish I’d paid more attention when watching the play in third grade, but I was fairly smitten by the  actress. 

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Saint Joan

Posted on September 28, 2015 by smellincoffee

Saint Joan
© 1924 George Bernard Shaw
160 pages

            
In the darkest hour of the Hundred Years War, a teenage girl re-inspired both a defeated nation and a despondent king to fight again for what was theirs. She — Joan of Arc — would be captured by her enemies and condemned a heretic by the English, but later vindicated by the Church. In 1920, in fact, Joan was pronounced a saint. Shaw’s play no doubt follows on the heels of the news of her canonization.  Scoffing at saintly romanticization of the Maid, Shaw chose to pay tribute to her in his own way, making her an apostle of Whiggism.  “Saint Joan” pays tribute to the Maid’s time in the historical sun, relegating unpleasant battle-and-execution bits  to the background and focusing instead on her conflicts with the silly men she is forced to enlighten. Considering that the title character is burned alive, the play is far funnier than it has a right to be, from the opening scene with a duke arguing with his page almost to the end, where the man Joan made king is visited by the shades of his past after her vindication.   Shaw fills the play with modern conceits; his characters seem to wish they were living in the 1920s instead of the rotten ol’ middle ages. They even invent words like Protestant and Nationalism to describe how Joan makes them feel. 
Shaw’s Joan is more ambiguous than this, however; he endeavors to save her from beatification and her enemies from damnation in the same stroke.  Joan as written is not ‘saintly’ she is cheeky. Assuming familiarity with lords of the realm and lords of the church alike, she gives as good as she gets when they argue her down with reason, or scold her for acting so presumptuously. The irreverent, tomboyish Joan may be the star of the play, but her opponents are no villains. They may be guilty of pious fraud at times, but their arguments seem perfectly sensible, and prompt a reader to wonder just where Shaw’s sympathies lie.  When the churchmen accuse Joan’s patriotic  zeal of threatening to divide Christendom into nations and in so doing, dethrone Christ and allow the world to perish in a welter of war,  the graveyards of the Great War do not seem far removed from Shaw’s mind.  They are less villains than men moved to horror through fear, and happily ere the conclusion is reached they experience the genuine crisis of remorse, repenting in turn.  Although Shaw is just as guilty as having the Maid carry his own standard as any of the old romanticists,  “Saint Joan” succeeds in granting both her and her enemies humanity and redemption.

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Forward March

Posted on September 28, 2015 by smellincoffee

This past week I’ve made further progress on the 2015 reading challenge:

Book on Bottom of To-Read Shelf:  The Search for Ice Age Americans


As many times as I walk past this book in the library, I’ve never broken down to give it a try — until now. The Search  is a history of American archaeology, focusing specifically on the origins of the Clovis people.   Much of the work has been done by amateurs, literal cowboys stumbling upon finds in the wild. The book is principally about the people searching for Clovis, with little information on the culture other than their diet and some social speculation.

Book with Magic: The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien

I read The Two Towers back in high school, for reasons now lost to me. Why, I wonder, would someone disinterested in fantasy try the trilogy, and the middle part no less?   Last September I read The Fellowship of the Ring, however, and this time around the story made much more sense.   The Two Towers collects books “three and four” of the series,  where where the drama to come tremors the surface.  The fellowship of the first book is, like Gaul, divided into three parts: Frodo and Samwise are missing,  Merry and Pippin carted off by Orcs, and the non-hobbits desperately looking for their furry-footed friends.  The epic final battle between the forces of  good and evil is yet to come, but things are already in motion;  both parts of the fellowship move through war zones as orcs and men collide.  As the story unfolds, Tolkien’s rich experience and creativity in philology are on display, treating readers with song and poetry from various cultures. One truly gets the sense when reading The Two Towers that another world is being stepped in to; one with a long, storied history that no character knows in full, but which everyone shares in part. This history makes itself known, a mountain of work casting a shadow across the landscape through which everyone moves, and to which their individual stories contribute.  I’m looking forward to the conclusion, which won’t wait until next September.

What’s next?  With October finally rolling around I can tackle Stephen King’s Carrie, which will be a ‘famous author’s first book’; it seems like Halloween reading.  Before that I may try ‘a book my mother loves’.   I’m going to be taking it easy with a ‘trilogy’ — the two options I have in mind are both Star Trek series.  The big challenges ahead are the book with antonyms in the title, and a Pulitzer; so far, all the interesting winners I’ve found have been enormous.

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The Egyptians

Posted on September 26, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Egyptians
© 1997 Barbara Watterson
368 pages



“We stand where Caesar and Napoleon stood, and remember that fifty centuries look down upon us; where the Father of History came four hundred years before Caesar, and heard the tales that were to startle Pericles. A new perspective of time comes to us; two millenniums seem to fall out of the picture, and Caesar, Herodotus, and ourselves appear for a moment contemporary and modern before these tombs that were more ancient to them than the Greeks are to us. ” (Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage) 
The Egyptians surveys the entire course of Egyptian history, from ancient settlements to the 1990s, in a mere 300 pages. Were this not ambitious enough, Watterson does not limit herself to mere politics, but includes separate sections on religion, architecture, law, and economy.  The approach is reminiscent of Will Durant’s symphonic history. Pyramid-like, The Egyptians is bottom-heavy:   two-thirds of the book is devoted to the ancients, with the Roman, Christian, Islamic, and modern periods sharing the last third together. The scale is immense, as it has been Egypt’s fortune or misfortune to be an combatant or an object of interest to nearly every great power around the Mediterranean. Egypt’s longevity is such that she has been conquered by two wholly different Persias, an epoch apart.  In the beginning Egypt was star of her own story, an insular union of two kingdoms fixed on the Nile; after outside invasion by the Hyksos, Egypt overcame her conquerors and became an empire in her own right. The land of the Nile would go the way of all empires, however, falling to Persia, then the Macedonians and their successors — Rome, Constantinople, the caliphate, and Turkey. Through history Egypt has also been the plaything of other empires, like the French and British. Even Hitler attempted conquest, while trying to rescue Italian pretensions of a resurrected Rome.  Aside from a brief interlude during the Islamic civil wars, Egypt had to wait until the 20th century to be ruled by her own people again. Despite the generations of new reigning powers and the trauma they inflicted —  Ptolemies are utterly horrifying in their abuse, what with one king marrying his sister, then his niece, then murdering his own child and sending the body to his sister–wife to taunt her —  Egypt endures. Given the chaos of Egypt in recent years, such resilience is a hopeful sign.  


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One by one

Posted on September 23, 2015 by smellincoffee
In the past few days I’ve knocked out several categories for the 2015 Reading Challenge, including:

A Book Older than 100 Years:  Beowulf,   the story of a hero from another land who conquers a monster,  his mother , and his own fear of death against a horde-guarding dragon.  I used Seamus Heaney’s translation, which seemed to be the best judging by reviews, and found it far shorter than I expected.

A Book You Were Supposed to Read in High School:  Grendel is a mid-20th century retelling of Beowulf through the eyes of the fearsome beast our doughty Geat  rendered ‘armless.  This was assigned to me in 12thgrade English, though we never read it because the teacher was a Guardsman and we were taught by a series of substitutes.  I never gave away the book, though, because I paid $12 for it, and when a book is assigned to me reading it becomes a point of honor. Anyhoo, Grendel was a curious choice for my teacher. As it turns out the fearsome beast is a teenager:   clumsy, chronically mired in an existential crisis, and fairly miserable on the whole.  Aside from a few philosophical conversations with the dragon, Grendel spends the book crashing through the woods, spying on the Danes, feeling sorry for himself, and occasionally screaming at the heavens. Though I endured this in the hope that Beowulf would show up and put him out of his misery, I must say the ending line did make me feel…almostsorry for him. Almost.

A Book Based on a Television Show: Star Trek: Foul Deeds Will Rise,  based heavily on “The Conscience of the King” and touching on another though to name it would give away  the whodunit.

A Book By an Author Who You Love, But Which You Haven’t Read:   Zebra Derby, Max Shulman. Yes, despite saying “anything by Asimov or Wendell Berry” for months now,  last night I spotted my copy of Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size and realized – hey, I’m awfully fond of Shulman, and I haven’t read the third novel in that collection, so why not?  It’s a short bit of postwar satire in which a returning soldier struggles to find his place in the new world. Through his misadventures Shulman pokes fun at door-to-door salesmen, Communists,   psychologists, bureaucrats, and entrepreneurs . It’s not nearly as funny as the soldier’s previous misadventures (Barefoot Boy With Cheek), erring as it does on the side of randomness, but I still like Shulman. 

What’s next? Probably either Book on the Bottom of Your To-Read List,  for which I have a nonfiction contender I’ve been meaning to read for several years now, but have never actually picked up, or A Book with Magic, as I’m  plodding through The Two Towers.   Sure, I could use a Narnia book for the magic, but scavenger hunts are no fun when there’s no challenge.

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Foul Deeds will Rise

Posted on September 22, 2015 by smellincoffee

Foul Deeds Will Rise
© 2014 Greg Cox
384 pages


            A galaxy can be a small world. When James T. Kirk attended a performance of The Tempest put on by volunteers nursing refugees in the middle of a war zone, he didn’t expect to encounter a woman  who tried to kill him. Admittedly, he has that effect on women, but  the last time he laid eyes on Lenore Karidian, she was being hauled off to an insane asylum after the killing blast she meant for Kirk dispatched her father instead.  It’s been over twenty years since, but there she is on the stage, immersed in Shakespeare once more.    But is it her only repeat performance?  Kirk has come to help mediate peace between two planets locked in a bitter war, and whatever fragile hope for bloodshed’s end is lost when the leading counselors for both sides find themselves murdered on Kirk’s own ship.  The murders are utter copies of Lenore’s past crimes, when in her youth she sought to kill anyone who could identify her disguised father as a war criminal.  Although Ambassador Kevin Riley – Kirk’s colleague and former crewman, previously poisoned by Lenore and saved only by Dr. McCoy’s swift action – is quick to believe the femme fatale is up to her old tricks, Kirk suspects there is more to the  story.  The stakes grow after both sides in the war somehow learn that Karidian had a criminal past, and explode into fury against the Federation they blame for harboring a known criminal. Even as two of his officers are arrested by an alien military,  a raging mob takes innocent aid workers hostage. Even worse,  Spock and Scotty – said arrestees – were on the brink of discovering a conspiracy that threatened not only the peace, but the lives of millions.  Foul Deeds will Rise is a classic Trek tale,  an action-mystery reminiscent of the shows themselves, complete with abundant references to Shakespeare.  Plotwise, Cox’s writing is perfectly entertaining, with action unfolding in three different locations at one point, all building together to the same finale, with the occasional fun bit of dialogue thrown in.  It does seem odd that a murder investigation on a starship would involve virtually no reference to security tapes being checked, but how nice it is to see a mystery solved by sleuthing instead of computers!
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The Classics Club

Posted on September 21, 2015 by smellincoffee

For the past year or so I’ve been aware of a book/blogging community known as the Classics Club, whose members have pledge to read a list of fifty or so “classics” within five years, and share their thoughts about them with other members of the group. Although that sort of thing seems right up my alley, I’ve not joined in yet because I didn’t too much like having to choose the books in advance.  On reflection, however,  I realized that I’m going to be reading classics, anyway: I might as well have company in doing it.  So, here’s my official throwing-in announcement: below is the list of titles I expect to read before September 22nd, 2020.

These move generally from western civ classics to American literature, including southern literature.

  1. The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Danny Jackson
  2. The Aenid, Virgil
  3. The Histories, Herodotus
  4. The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar
  5. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I, Edward Gibbon
  6. One Thousand and One Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy
  7. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
  8. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
  9. The Prince, Machiavelli 
  10. Inferno, Dante
  11. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoeyesky
  12. The Seven-Storey Mountain,  Thomas Merton
  13. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  14. The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  15. The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
  16. Dracula, Bram Stoker
  17. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  18. The Swiss Family Robinson, Robert Louis Stevenson
  19. Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
  20. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
  21. Emma, Jane Austen
  22. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
  23. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  24. The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith
  25. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
  26. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
  27. The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
  28. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  29. Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
  30. The Federalist Papers, various
  31. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
  32. .Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain 
  33. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
  34. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
  35. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  36. O Pioneers!  Willa Cather
  37. White Fang, Jack London
  38. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  39. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
  40. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  41. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  42. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  43. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  44. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  45. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
  46. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  47. The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  48. Love Among the Ruins, Walker Percy
  49. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
  50. 2001: A Space Odyessey, Arthur C. Clarke
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A Week in Narnia

Posted on September 20, 2015 by smellincoffee

On last Friday I enjoyed The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, reading it for the first time since the O.J. Simpson trial. I never liked fantasy as a child; it took Redwall and Harry Potter to coax me into not holding my nose any time I came near a work with dragons and magic in it (not that Redwall has any of the latter, just a bunch of mice with crossbows and monks’ habits). I enjoyed it then tolerably well enough, just not enough to pursue the series. I’ve remained familiar with Narnia, however, because so many other people love it and through them I receive constant reminders about the book’s plot and meaning. (It helps that most of the basics are right there in the title.)    The Christian allegory was a lot more obvious this time around, but what I didn’t remember is Lewis’ general charm. My favorite part of the book, in fact, was its dedication:

My Dear Lucy,  I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall always be
 your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis 

I don’t think I’ve ever read a dedication I liked more. I technically read this as part of the 2015 reading challenge (a book from my childhood), something that does not require reading through the entire series.  Like the Pevensie children, however, that first visit through the wardrobe was not to be my last, and I’ve spent the entire last week reading through the series. I’ve found it delightful for many reasons, not because I’m a sucker for stories  about redemption. I mentioned in my comments on the books themselves the graceful way Lewis connected Christian and European themes together, using symbols from Greek mythology and creatures plucked from various bestiaries to tell an essentially Christian story. It’s most salient in the first and last books, of course, what with the sacrifice of Aslan to redeem a traitor and destroy the Witch’s hold on Narnia, and then the Apocalypse — but present in more subtle ways throughout the series.  Lewis’ writing is commendable; terribly funny at times, and sweet in others. I roared when he referred to an inept headmaster being put into Parliament so she would stop getting in the way of things, and thought some of his characters utterly delightful, especially the mouse Reepicheep — his bravado was matched only by Aslan’s, and Aslan had REASON to be fearless. Speaking of which, I thought Lewis handled him better as a character than could be imagined. Other fiction featuring Jesus tends to be respectful to the point of static (Jesus just quotes himself from the New Testament), or irreverent to the point of being unrecognizable (done hilariously in Lamb).  Lewis’ Aslan, despite being Jesus in another world,  is neither a copycat nor a fraud; he acts in his own way in a fictional world, but he acts in ways that accord with a revered character; Aslan is revered in his own right, for his own reasons. His appearances are vanishingly brief, but regular enough that Narnians and the reader live in expectation of him; when he arrives he acts decisively. His appearance at a pivotal moment is a warning, or routs evil when his followers have done all they can do;  even when he does not make a personal appearance he is revealed to have been working in the background.  He is stern to the good, merciful to those who stumble, and swift to  strike the obstinately malevolent.  Aslan never lingers around enough to become mundane, nor absents himself so long that he becomes a mere memory. He is Aslan, always watching and waiting for the right moment to bound into the story and change lives.

For me, this week spent in Narnia was a wholly unexpected pleasure. I never intended to be hooked, and I’m glad I was!  This next week I’ll continue working on the reading challenge, with two or three possible entries lined up, while in the distance looms a series I want to do on the ancient near east, with books on Sumer, Babylon, Persia, and Egypt lined up.

========================================================
Some quotations…

“For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”

“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are -are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

“We’ve got to start by finding a ruined city of giants,” said Jill. “Aslan said so.”
“Got to start by finding it, have we?” answered Puddleglum. “Not allowed to start by looking for it, I suppose?”

“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

“This is my password,” said the King as he drew his sword. “The light is dawning, the lie broken. Now guard thee, miscreant, for I am Tirian of Narnia.”

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