Liar, Liar

Do you lie about books? Do you falsely claim to read Tolstoy when you’ve actually been reading Stephenie Meyer? See what the Telegraph’s Melanie McDonagh has to say about lies readers tell in her article “Why Bluffing About Books is a Civilized Art.”

Booking It--The Best Book You Never Read

We’ve all seen the lists, we’ve all thought, “I should really read that someday,” but for all of us, there are still books on “The List” that we haven’t actually gotten around to reading. Even though we know they’re fabulous. Even though we know that we’ll like them. Or that we’ll learn from them. Or just that they’re supposed to be worthy. We just … haven’t gotten around to them yet.

What’s the best book that YOU haven’t read yet?

I think I'd have to say Anna Karenina. It's hard to classify a book as "best" when you haven't even read it, but this novel just keeps cropping up. I have friends who praise it. I've been to readings by authors I admire, and they'll mention that it's the best novel they've ever read. I'll read someone's blog and it will be at the top of their list. The evidence just keeps mounting.

What about you?

Sunday Funnies

First Lines, Part I

Okay, I have to be honest. This past week I’ve done a lot of writing, but not as much reading as I’d like. And I didn’t find anything particularly quotable in the reading that I did get to do. So I thought I’d do something a little different for the next few Saturdays. I found a list of the 100 Best First Lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University. I’ll share them with you, 25 at a time.

1. Call me Ishmael. -- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. � Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. � Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. � Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. � Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. � Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. � James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. � George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. � Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. � Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble? Do-you-need-advice? Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. � Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. �Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. �Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. �Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. �Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. � J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. � James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. � Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. � Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. � Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. � James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. � Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. � Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. � Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. � William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

To be continued . . .

Can You Hear Me Now?

After stressing the need for our own humility, I talked about the absolute necessity of treating all people with dignity and respect, whether or not we agree with their religious/philosophical positions or their lifestyle choices. I also explained how important it is to get past categories and see people as individuals.

One example I used was Abilene Christian’s Christ-like reception of Soulforce, a group whose purpose is to discourage discrimination and violence against gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered individuals and to promote greater acceptance. In 2006, this group notified Abilene Christian University that their campus would be included as part of a cross-country bus tour. Some Christian universities around the country attempted to ban the organization from their campuses. Some threatened arrest. How did ACU respond?

“After careful consideration and discussions about who we are as a university, we decided the best way to affirm our core Christian values would be to treat Soulforce as Christ would – to have peaceful, patient dialogue about these issues while respectfully and clearly articulating why we believe as we do," said Dr. Royce Money, ACU President.

Soulforce members said they knew ACU continued to affirm the belief throughout the day that God intended sexual relations as an expression of love between a married man and woman. They also agreed that ACU offered the love of Christ, despite theological and academic disagreements.

"I think that in some ways, we can disagree but still acknowledge each other's humanity," said one Equality Rider in a discussion session. "I don't want to be here to push an agenda. I want to be here so that we can learn more about each other.”

Dr. Dwayne VanRheenen, Provost of ACU, said, "Part of our calling as Christian educators is to prepare our students to think through a wide variety of issues they will face while in college and after graduation. This visit showed students that there are real people dealing with the issues we hear about in the national press – and that these issues are complex and require deep, critical thinking to understand and to respond to as Christians."

"I believe Soulforce was unprepared for the depth of the love they would be shown by people on this campus," said Dr. Wayne Barnard, Associate Provost and Dean of Campus Life. "The Equality Riders expressed several times how unfamiliar that experience is for them, and we pray that somehow we touched their lives in a positive way.”

I don’t know about you, but it makes me sad that people are surprised when Christians treat them kindly and with respect.

After the lesson was over, I got lots of positive feedback. But one older woman came up to me and said, “Do you know what one lady at our church says about those homos?”

“Those homos?” I thought. Didn’t I just spend 45 minutes talking about Tolerance?

How To Begin

Last week, after my Girl Who Cain’t Say No post, Jonathan asked what I was going to say about Tolerance when I spoke at the WINGS conference. Well, I can’t condense a 45 minute speech into a blog post, but I can definitely tell you how I began: with humility.

I like what James W. Sire says in his book The Universe Next Door: A Catalog of Worldviews:

“Unless each of us begins by assuming that we are in our present state the sole maker and meaning-giver of the universe, it would be well to accept an attitude of humility as a working frame of reference. [Human beings are finite, and this truth] will keep us both from total accuracy in the way we grasp and express our worldview and from completeness or exhaustiveness. Some truths of reality will slip through our finest intellectual nets, and our nets will have some holes we have not even noticed. So the place to start is with humility.”

Amen?

National Grammar Day

“Do you adore clean, correct sentences? Do ungrammatical advertisements make you cringe? We understand completely, and this is why the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar and MSN Encarta have designated March 4 as National Grammar Day.”

If you love grammar, you should definitely check out National Grammar Day’s website. You’ll find out who had the worst grammar in 2008 (politicians, celebrities, cities, etc.). You can link to great grammar and writing websites and blogs. You can order your own National Grammar Day t-shirt. They’ve even put together a Bad Grammar Hall of Fame playlist.

Grammar lovers may be weird and neurotic, but at least we know how to celebrate it.

Say It Isn't So!

Every Sunday afternoon, I read the newspaper. I quickly go through it, arranging the sections in the order that I want to read them. I never bother with the Classifieds. Over to the side they go. Next, I set aside Sports and Business unless something on the front page of the section catches my eye. I read the main section first, then international news, then the Arkansas section, then on to Style, next to Perspectives, then Travel, etc. . . . But there’s one section that I always carefully save for last: Books. It’s like dessert, or a good cup of coffee after a meal.

Every Sunday, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette devotes two whole pages to books. On the left-hand side, the Best-Seller List runs the whole length of the page, Fiction and Non-Fiction broken down by Hardback and Paperback sales. The rest of the two pages are taken up with book reviews.

Imagine my dismay when I opened up to the Books section last Sunday and found this:

“Publication of the Books section ends with today’s Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Economic conditions preclude its continuation. The resources used for many years to publish two pages about books will be redirected toward the newspaper’s core mission of covering the news.”

President Obama seems to be a president who loves literature. You think that if I contact him personally, he might direct a little of that bailout money towards rescuing Book sections nationwide?

Yeah. That’s what I thought, too. But one can always dream . . .

Booking It--Collectibles

Hardcover? Or paperback? Hardcover, if I have a choice.

Illustrations? Or just text? The text is what I’m interested in. But I do love the illustrations in children’s books.

First editions? Or you don’t care? Don’t care. But if you gave me one, I’d take it.

Signed by the author? Or not? I love signed editions!

Sunday Funnies