April Status Report

April was a productive month! I read 9 books this month, putting my grand total at 31 so far. And I read quite a variety, too: Thick and thin books, very childish and very adult books, religious and secular books -- and even a grammar book for good measure.

I enjoyed this month tremendously. I didn't rate a single book lower than 4 stars. I wonder what the month of May has in store...

BOOK 31: Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

Rating: 5 stars

Cover synopsis: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are returning to boarding school when they are summoned from the dreary train station (by Susan's own magic horn) to return to the land of Narnia -- the land where they had ruled as Kings and Queens and where their help is desperately needed.

This is book 4 in the Narnia series. Prince Caspian is the rightful heir to the Narnian throne, but his evil uncle plots to kill him. So Caspian must enlist the help of the magical creatures of Old Narnia (that have been forced to live in hiding for many generations). Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy (from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) are summoned back to Narnia to help.

I waffled back and forth about whether to give 4 or 5 stars. My main beef with this book is that it was too short. The action sequences seem to be abbreviated and we could have had more character development of Prince Caspian. After he runs away, we hardly hear anything of him any more -- but we hear plenty about the Dwarves (yawn).

And we learn that this is the last time Peter and Susan will go to Narnia, but there is no explanation given other than they are too old. But only a year has passed since they were last there, so I don't get it. But in the end, I settled on 5 stars because it was a good story with lots of action and interesting characters.

On to the next adventure!

BOOK 30: The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis

Rating: 5 stars

Cover synopsis: A boy named Shasta discovers he is not the son of a Calormene fisherman and decides to run far away to the North -- to Narnia. When he is mistaken for another runaway, Shasta is led to discover who he really is and even finds his real father.

This is the 3rd book in the Narnia series, but it happens before the 2nd book (The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe) ends. And as much as I liked that better-known classic, I think I liked this book just a tad more!

Nail-biting adventure, mystery, mistaken identities, thrilling chases through exotic locales -- The Horse and His Boy was a treat for the imagination.

BOOK 29: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

Rating: 5 stars

Cover synopsis: Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the Professor's mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund and then Peter and Susan discover the magic and meet Aslan, the Great Lion, for themselves.

I'm at a loss for what to say. Loved the story. Loved the symbolism of Edmund and his temptations and choices. On to the next book in the series!

BOOK 28: The Magician's Nephew, by C.S. Lewis

Rating: 4 stars

Cover Synopsis: Digory and Polly burst into adventure when Digory's Uncle Andrew, who thinks he is a magician, sends them hurtling to ... somewhere else. They find their way to Narnia, newborn from the Lion's song, and encounter the evil sorceress Jadis.

This is the first book of seven in the Chronicles of Narnia. I'm 31 and have never read these childhood classics. I remember picking up The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe when I was in 3rd grade, but I never read the whole thing. So it's about time I finished what I started.

This was a good introduction. I could identify with the characters, and the magic -- though requiring some suspension of disbelief -- didn't seem too outlandish. I particularly enjoyed the evil Uncle Andrew and his attempts to fall into the witch's good graces.

In this book, we are introduced to Narnia, and we learn how the famous wardrobe in the 2nd book comes to be linked to this magical world, as well as how the witch ended up there. In fact, I wonder if I didn't finish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe all those years ago because I didn't understand it. This first book sets it up wonderfully. Wish I would have read it back then!

BOOK 27: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss

Rating: 4 stars

Cover synopsis: Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now "txt msgs," we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. Lynne Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are.

My husband came home last night and I was sitting on the couch, book in hand, laughing. "What are you reading?" he asks. "Oh, a book about punctuation," I reply.

Crickets.

OK. I admit. I'm a bit of a grammar nerd. But non-GN's would enjoy this book too! With hilarious commentary, Truss makes punctuation a bit easier to digest. She emphasizes the important need we have for punctuation in our society, especially in this age when it seems to be going out the window due to email, text messaging, etc. Says Truss: "We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking."

Amen.

A couple of beefs: This was a book originally written in England, and grammar rules are a bit different across the pond. For example, they don't put punctuation inside quotation marks; ["...the cause of clear thinking".] but in America we do. I was also expecting a bit more clarification on the hyphen, but that chapter seemed to have been tacked on as an afterthought. Still, the chapter on the colon and semi-colon were illuminating (and quite entertaining). And I'm still laughing about her teenaged experience with an American pen pal. A jolly-good read.

BOOK 26: Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, by Betty MacDonald

Rating: 5 stars

Cover synopsis: Meet Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. She lives in an upside down house with a kitchn that is always full of freshly baked cookies... Best of all, she knows everything there is to know about children. When Mary turns into an Answer-Backer or Dick becomes Selfish, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle has the perfect cure.

Thought this book was funny when I read it as a kid. But reading it as a mother, I now realize it's a good manual for teaching your children!

What to do about a child who finds chores a drudgery? Turn them into a game! What to do about siblings who constantly fight? Show them how unattractive and annoying their quarreling really is. Child won't take a bath? Plant radish seeds in the dirt on her skin...

O.K., so that one's just downright silly. But still, who doesn't love Mrs. Piggle Wiggle?

(One small gripe: The text is a teensy bit dated. It was originally published in 1947 so this is probably how things were back then, but I can't help but feel a twinge of annoyance about a certain chapter. A mom calls her husband for advice and she spends an entire paragraph apologizing profusely and begging for forgiveness because she had the nerve to bother him with a matter about the children; because, after all, it's supposed to be HER department. *Sigh*)

BOOK 25: The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Rating: 4 stars

Cover Synopsis: Henry DeTamble is a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time. Clare Abshire is an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.

A fascinating premise: Henry time travels, but it's a genetic disorder. He never knows when it will happen or where he will end up. He meets his future-wife Clare on one of his time-travel jaunts when she is 6 years old. They don't meet in the present until she's 20 and he's 28.

A bit confusing at first with all the jumping around, but I soon got the hang of it! Well written love story and a joy to read. (I finished the 537-page book in 3 days.) Only reason it's not 5 stars: There are a few inappropriate scenes and language I could have done without.

BOOK 24: Fireproof, by Eric Wilson

Rating: 4 stars

Cover Synopsis: Captain Caleb Holt lives by the firefighter adage: Never leave your partner behind. However, after seven years of marriage, he and his wife have drifted so far apart that Catherine wishes she had never married. As divorce looms, Caleb's father challenges him to a 40-day experiment he calls "The Love Dare."

For this book, the author novelized the screenplay of a movie. I haven't seen the movie, but after reading the book, I've added it to my Netflix queue. The book reads a lot like a screenplay -- at times I got the feeling certain parts would have made a lot more sense on the big screen than the way it was written. And the writing here isn't a masterpiece.

Still, it told the story well and it got the point across: That in order to truly love someone else, you need to love God and see that person as God sees them. And if you want your love to increase, serve that person.

I haven't seen the movie until now because I thought it would be cheesy. And the dramatization of it may prove to be. But still, I like the moral of the story here. I saw myself in some of the characters and it gave me some things to think about. If everyone followed the advice in this book, more marriages would end in happily ever after.

BOOK 23: Wild Swans, by Jung Chang

Rating: 5 stars

Cover synopsis: Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistantly gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th Century.

What an incredible story. This is a non-fiction book that is so rich in detail you feel as if you are there. Which is not necessarily a good thing, because the details are often disturbing displays of a nation's collective conscious failing -- humanity falling to its basest and cruellest instincts in a struggle to survive.

Chang takes us through her grandmother's life as a warlord's concubine, her parents' struggles as idealistic Communitists and her own eye-witness accounts of Mao's Red Guards and the Culturual Revolution. Incredibly fascinating and heart-breaking. It really made me think about the dark forces at work in our world. How Satan and his destroying angels are real, and how they can truly poison the hearts and minds of people. You wouldn't think that God's creatures would be capable of such atrocities, but so it is.

Through it all though, there are heroes. There is hope. I loved when the author's father was faced with the choice to stand up for what's right, even though it could jeopardize his family's well-being, his wife asks how he could do this to them. He retorts that it's better than jeopardizing his soul. If only more of mankind were concerned with their eternal welfare rather than their temporal affairs, think of what a world we would have. Or how different history would read.