As hard as it is to believe, Christmas isn’t that far off. For those of you who might be the type to plan ahead and buy presents now, let me offer a suggestion. For those kids - or adults young at heart - who love fantasy adventure books, I can heartily recommend the Spiderwick Chronicles series by Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing. The reading level is ages 9-12 but they can be enjoyed by readers of all ages.

For the uninitiated, the series revolves around the Grace family and their new temporary home, the Spiderwick Estate. The Grace children find themselves in a new home out in the boonies and so naturally they begin to explore their surroundings. The story takes off when they come upon what appears to be a book prepared by their uncle entitled Arthur Spiderwick’s Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. This field guide turns out to be a manual on how to spot and deal with faeries; fairies inhabit the Spiderwick house and the surrounding area. With the help of this guide, the Grace children are soon spotting and interacting with these fantastical creatures and adventures ensue.

This is not just an innocent fantasy story of children playing with “the Little People,” however, as the faeries have a dark side (or at least the bad ones, or Bogarts, do). It seems the faeries are not happy that this book exists and the children are told to discard it post haste. The children’s adventures are largely made up of trying to figure out what to do with the book and the Pandora’s box they seemed to have opened up.

While the story is inventive and the characters realistic and interesting, an important part of the attraction of these books are the illustrations by co-author Tony DiTerlizzi. And now Simon and Schuster has expanded this aspect with a beautiful companion volume: a real life Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You. This book should provide hours of exploration and entertainment to go along with the series. The Amazon description says it all:

Spiderwick fans will adore this gorgeous guidebook to the fantastical creatures featured in Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi’s spectacular series. The superdeluxe, lavishly illustrated “field guide” features 142 information-packed pages, 41 full-color plates, 6 spectacular gatefolds, 6 watercolor landscapes, scores of black-and-white and color sketches, and enough information to satisfy even the most demanding faerie enthusiast. Not only will readers learn all about the 14 fantastical creatures featured in the series, but they’ll be delighted and astonished by an additional 15 creatures featured in this elaborate volume–including mermaids, gargoyles, and more. And if that weren’t enough, we’ve included dozens of snippets from Arthur Spiderwick’s personal journal–information that links the Guide specifically to the Spiderwick Chronicles–as well as cameos from a few of the series’ favorite characters.

IMHO, the series box set and the Field Guide would make a great gift. Of course, you can always buy it for yourself too!

Click below for a few snapshots of some of the illustrations it contains or click over to Amazon to see more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alan of Thinklings points out some humorous statements by theologian Herbert McCabe:

McCabe was a Dominican priest, theologian, and editor of New Blackfriars and author of God Matters. He lived from 1926-2001, and was shaped by the 1960’s, with its clashes over situation ethics and the rise of liberation theology. Unfortunately, he was much taken with the latter, although he fought unwaveringly against the former. He would not tone down any expression of his convictions. His radical politics got him into trouble, but he was unrepentant:

He was sacked as editor of New Blackfriars in 1967 for remarking in one of his widely anticipated monthly editorials that the church “is quite plainly corrupt.” After his reinstatement three years later he began his first editorial, “As I was saying before I was so oddly interrupted.”

I remember that John Calvin did something similar after he returned to Geneva, having been kicked out due to a firm hold on Biblical doctrine. He had been in the middle of a long exposition of one of the books of the Bible, and when he returned after several years, picked up the exposition as if he’d never left. I wonder if he said, “You may remember in my last sermon . . .”

- In what order should you read the Chronicles of Narnia series? John Miller argues at NRO that readers should tackle The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first rather than The Magicians Nephew which is the first book based on internal chronology. Miller believes that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe best sets up the series and introduces the reader to Narnia. Reading The Magician’s Nephew first dilutes the power of Lucy’s, and thus the reader’s, experience with finding this alternate world.

- Olen Steinhaurer is continuing his discussion of the role and meaning of Art in novels. In this second part he discusses what differentiates good and bad art. If you are interested, I offered some thoughts on art and novels in this space last month.

- Scott over at Conversational Reading raises an interesting point while discussing self-publishing:

On one hand, greater freedom to publish opens things up to valid viewpoints that haven’t been able to gain acceptance–witness the blogs (well, some of them). But the ability for virtually anyone to be in print contributes to a general decline of respect for the written word (witness the blogs, again).

- This isn’t really book/literary related, but Ross Douthat is probably my favorite blogger. If you aren’t already reading The American Scene, you should be.

- James Bowman on academic literary criticism:

In the arts and humanities, at any rate, the curriculum itself is built around left-wing assumptions — such as, for example, that literature is only worthy of study as the fossil-record of power relationships between oppressors and oppressed in pre-revolutionary societies, including our own. Hence the importance of the great -isms in their critical vocabulary: racism, sexism, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, post-colonialism and that honorary ism, homophobia. All these words are used to describe putatively oppressive relationships which it then becomes the job of the literary critic to tease out of, say, Jane Austen for no better purpose than exposing the fact — which the critic obviously knew before he ever read Jane Austen — that they are there. Who but a true believer would choose to make a career out of such a sterile exercise? By the same token, if you happen to cling to the reactionary belief that Jane Austen has something of interest to say beyond the implied critique of the imperialist-capitalist-racialist-fascist-sexist-post-colonialist-homophobic structures of the power elite of her time, a university is the last place you would go to test it.

Last month I reported back on my trip to the National Gallery with some of my favorite works of art and even tied it to an interesting book.

I thought I would dip in this national treasure again and note some interesting paintings from my most recent visit.

This 18th century French painting seems appropriate subject matter for a literary blog:

A Young Girl Reading, c. 1776
Jean-Honore Fragonard

I also found a beautiful painting with an interesting backstory. This time it is the artist rather than the subject. First the painting:

The Marquise de Peze and the Marquise de Rouget with Her Two Children, 1787
Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun

It turns out Yale University press has just come out with a book on this fascinating artist: Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun - The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution. Here is the book description from Amazon:

The foremost woman artist of her age, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1755—1842) exerted her considerable charm to become the friend, and then official portraitist, of Marie Antoinette. Though profitable, this role made Vigee Le Brun a public and controversial figure, and in 1789 it precipitated her exile. In a Europe torn by strife and revolution, she nevertheless managed to thrive as an independent, self-supporting artist, doggedly setting up studios in Rome, Naples, Venice, Milan, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and London. Long overlooked or dismissed, Vigee Le Brun’s portraits now hang in the Louvre, in a room of their own, as well as in all leading art museums of the world.

This gripping biography tells the story of a singularly gifted and high-spirited woman during the revolutionary era and explores the development and significance of her art. The book also recounts the public and private lives of Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, connecting her with such personalities of her age as Catherine the Great, Napoleon, and Benjamin Franklin, and setting her experiences in the context of contemporary European politics and culture. A generous selection of illustrations, including sixteen of Vigee Le Brun’s portraits presented in full color, completes this exceptional volume.

Doesn’t that sound fascinating? If I didn’t have a TBR pile a mile long I might have picked this up at the NGA shop. Maybe I will get my wife to read it. She read and enjoyed my last art as history inspired book find.

TO: The loyal half-a-dozen folks still reading this blog
FROM: Your loyal, if too often distracted, host
RE: Lack of content
———————————————————————-

Sorry about my being incommunicado the last few days. I was “out of pocket” and unable to post. I did get some reading done, however, so expect reviews and general content to return to normal mediocre (Phil’s excellent posts excepted of course) levels soon.

In a desperate move to stave off the complete collapse of this site’s traffic, I hope to post some actual thoughtful commentary in the next few days.

Thank you.

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. . . . It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.” — Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French novelist and critic.

Bartleby.com says, “Bataille was the founding editor of the journal Critique (1946). Strongly influenced by Nietzsche, he focuses on extreme states of consciousness (violence and eroticism) as forms of mediation between nature and culture.”

What do you think of his statement? I’m inclined to agree. Maybe not for all men, but for some of us when faced with utter despair, all calm days would precede days of war.

Shocked, shocked I tell you! What blogs cost American business:

Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.

About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force — visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks — blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

If you are not reading Olen Steinhauer’s work then you are missing a real treat (see here for example). Olen has had a blog for awhile but it has been neglected of late. He has returned, however, with some interesting thoughts on ambition, literature, and the potential of “genre”.

It kinda jumps off a post by Sarah this summer on cliches and gimmicks that had an interesting debate in the comment section.

So read ‘em both. Plenty to chew on for writers, readers, and critics alike.

In the latest Eclectica Magazine, Andie Miller writes on several elements surrounding Paul Auster’s life, chiefly his father and son, as a possible explaination for dark elements in Auster’s most recent prose. Miller writes:

In 1979, Auster concluded his Portrait of an Invisible Man, of his father, with these words:

“Past two in the morning. An overflowing ashtray, an empty coffee cup, and the cold of early spring. An image of Daniel now, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this.

“To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old enough to read them.

“And the image of his sweet and ferocious little body, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this.”

It was these words that touched me, and made me curious to investigate what had become of this little boy. Now I am filled with a profound sense of sadness.