The Looking Glass Wars, Frank Beddor

OH MY GOSH! Cannot remember the last time I was that caught up in a book. Could not put it down.

The plot goes along with Alice in Wonderland--the story being that "Alice" is based on the stories told by Alyss Heart, the rightful queen of Wonderland who was exiled at age 7 when her evil Aunt Redd killed her parents and stole the throne. Alyss must return to Wonderland with the help of her friends Hatter Madigan the milliner assassin and her childhood love Dodge Anders, who I am now not so secretly in love with. . . . The book has elements of 1984, and an incredibly imaginative re-interpretation of Wonderland. One of my new favorite books!

Helena, Evelyn Waugh

Once again, I chose a book based on recommendation. I opened it in the library to see if I could figure out the basic plot line (I don't like to jump into a book unless I know this) and sat on the floor reading the first five or ten pages. Needless to say, that recommended it to me.

Helena tells the story of St. Helena from a half-fictional, half-historical perspective. St. Helena is the mother of Constantine, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity. She is famous for being pious, establishing churches, and supposedly discovering the true Cross. Not much is known about her background or her relationship with Constantius, the father of Constantine.

Waugh takes liberty in creating a vivid young Helena on the British Isles who falls in love with the adventures she hopes to find as the wife of Constantius. I felt like I knew Helena through her early marriage, the birth of her son, and even up through her divorce. Then, abruptly, the tone shifts. Waugh steps away from Helena. I spent most of the novel anticipating the story of her conversion because she spends so much of the novel seeking. Waugh simply slipped in her conversion as a side note, rather than a major part of the story. I never quite got over that, even though he brought the narration back into her character for a while.

Waugh also has a habit of slipping occasionally from the concrete into heavily abstract language that, quite frankly, lost my attention. Other than these few passages, however, I enjoyed his writing. Like the first five or ten pages, the novel read smoothly and kept me reading. I just had to see it as a novel about a girl from Britain who marries a great Roman and gives birth to a greater one, not as the story of a saint that I expected.

Dave Barry for Fifth Graders

I just finished two books by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.

The first was Peter and the Sword of Mercy (Book 4 in the Peter and the Starcatchers series). I have mixed feelings about it, because it radically changed the series. Books 1-3 are prequels to Peter Pan (the story of how Neverland came to be, and the adventures of Peter and 11 yr old Molly--the future Mary Darling). At the end of book 3, you can see how everything is set up for the story of Peter Pan to occur a couple decades in the future, when Wendy tells the stories that her mother has told her of Peter Pan and George Darling refuses to remember the adventures of his childhood. But book 4 sort of crosses the boundary from prequel to fan fiction, because it takes place 20 years in the future, and introduces Wendy and Peter in a drastically different way than Barrie's Peter Pan. It was certainly fun to read, and a great adventure, but no longer seems like Peter Pan could come after it :-/

The second book I read was Science Fair: a story of mystery, dancer, international suspense, and a very nervous frog.... This book was just hilarious. Very politically incorrect, but hilarious. The plot is amazing: international terrorists from Krpshtskan infiltrate the school science fair and are defeated by a boy, a frog, and a giant mentos in a 50 gallons of coke. And interwoven is the story of D. Arthur Vaderian, a star wars buff who is attempting to steal paraphernalia from the main character's nerdy parents. Yes, there is a lightsaber battle.

Both of these books are 5th/6th grade reading level. I highly recommend the Peter and the Starcatchers series to everyone, although again--it could have ended with book 3. I wonder if there are plans for a book 5 that will somehow round it out.

The Peacemaker, Ken Sande

Subtitled A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict, this is a non-fiction self-helpish book that delves into interpersonal relationships and outlines some biblical guidelines for resolving conflict.

I should start by saying that this is not the type of book I usually read. In fact, if I had not been required to read this book for a summer fellowship, I can pretty much guarantee I would never have cracked the cover. However, I've never been the type of student who doesn't do the reading (hence the reason I suffered through several Mark Twain books in high school), so I decided to make a go of it. Just under 300 pages long, it's a fairly fast read.

I was pleasantly surprised. Early in the book, there's a diagram entitled The Slippery Slope of Conflict. It's a half circle the lays out the "peace-faking" responses (suicide, flight, denial), "peace-making" ones (overlook, reconciliation, negotiation, mediation, arbitration, accountability), and "attack responses" (assault, litigation, murder). As a disclaimer, I'm the law student -- litigation is pretty much what keeps my profession in business. So I'll admit to being a tad wary. However, Sande does a great job throughout of distinguishing between circumstances in which litigation is appropriate (and, indeed, may be necessary) and cases where people simply jump the gun (it's amazing what idiotic things people will sue over!).

Additionally, Sande lays out an orderly and consistent approach to examining your own behavior. For my fellow Catholics out there, think of it as an examination of conscience with a twist of pop-psychology. Though at times he gets a little preachy, overall the balance of religious verse with a general analysis of conflict resolution is well-maintained.

My one big criticism is that Sande doesn't venture very far outside of Scripture. His examples work very well if the conflict is between two Christians (especially if they go to the same church), but I don't believe that he adequately addressed how Christians can take advantage of secular institutions, especially if the party with whom they are in disagreement is not a Christian.

So overall, I can't really say that I'd recommend this book. However, if you're looking for some guidance in resolving conflict in your life, this is definitely a good resource. Sande makes a good point when he notes that our society is quick to place people in adversarial relations. The problem with that posture is that it makes us very inward-oriented, when really we should be working in communion with those around us.

This will probably be the only book of this type that I'll review here. But since I had to read it, I figured I'd pass along the title -- maybe it'll come in handy for you someday.

Snow White and Rose Red, Patricia C. Wrede

As I was searching the children's section for Briar Rose, I stumbled upon a few books I had not read by Patricia C. Wrede. Wrede writes fun young adult books, full of magic, confusion, and spunky heroines. Being in the mood for fun and not too much thought, I picked up another book in the Fairy Tale series of Briar Rose, Snow White and Red Rose.

Snow White and Red Rose is not the same fairy tale as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. So I didn't actually know the fairy tale of the book. Wrede interspersed bits of the fairy tale with her story, so that I read it slowly throughout the novel, but I think part of the joy of the story was lost on me.

The novel is set in Elizabethan England, in a world that combines traditional idea of Faerie with a historical fear of witchcraft. Two girls and their mother get inadvertently involved in a vortex of human wizardry and Faerie drama. Wrede uses rather Shakespearean language (this is the only place I've read "an" to mean "if" outside of the Bard), which jarred with her accessible prose at first. Once I got past it, I enjoyed the novel, from an "I want something simple and engrossing to take my mind off the housing hunt" perspective.

The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet, Thomas Dubay, S. M.

My parents gave me this book as a present because I'm fascinated by the overlap between science and God/religion/theology. I had to wait until the summer to have time to enjoy it, and overall I found it an interesting book.

The book had a lot more philosophy and theology and less science than I had expected. The first third of the book discusses the concept of beauty. The second third finally got into the science and discussed the beauty of creation and scientific marvels, ranging from the very huge to the very small. The author also discussed the idea of design in the universe and the anthropic principle. The final third of the book focused on the beauty of God.

I found the first part of the book a bit slow, which probably stems mostly from my limited patience for philosophy, although it did raise some interesting thoughts. I greatly enjoyed the second and third sections, which made me more appreciative of the world and caused me to pause and think about the beauty surrounding us.

My only remaining criticism of the book is that it was a bit repetitive. Some of the quotes and ideas were repeated often enough that I thought I was rereading sections. However, I enjoyed this book overall and would recommend it.

Briar Rose, Jane Yolen

On recommendation from a roommate and fellow Vincentian volunteer.

This book brings together the stories of the Holocaust and Sleeping Beauty, one of my favorite fairy tales. I mostly liked the fairy tale as a child because I had a Sleeping Beauty book with the most beautiful illustrations. I sped through Jane Yolen's Briar Rose in one evening, from 4pm to 10pm, despite the fact that I had assumed it would keep me reading for a few days.

Despite the fact that it is in the Fairy Tale series, a series of books by different authors meant to bring fairy tales to life in the modern world. It is the story of a girl on a quest for her own history and her grandmother's identity, an identity which Yolen reveals through the story of Sleeping Beauty. Any Holocaust story is bound to be tragic, and this novel is no exception. Yet it keeps from being oppressive. I'm fairly certain that I've read excerpts from it somewhere, because portions of it were so familiar that I already knew the names of places and events, but I know I hadn't seen some of the plotlines before.

The library housed it with Juvenile Fiction, where it probably fits best, but it doesn't need to be a children's book. Which, after all, is part of the goal of the Fairy Tale series.

An Explanation

This isn't where I regularly blog. However, it occurred to me as I was placing the lasted additions on the "Books I've Read" list at the bottom of my bog, that such a list is fairly useless. Its original purpose was to keep tabs on the books I could check off my "Book List" on Facebook -- a helpful compilation created by my friends for my literary benefit.

However, I never intended that list to be a show-off list of what I've read. I wanted to keep tabs on what I've read and share good books with others. Problem : I wouldn't recommend everything I've read. Solution : This blog.

I will post a few brief thoughts on books when I finish them. Each entry will be a title and author; I'll try to make labels based on genre. I've asked other people to contribute to make the thoughts and opinions more diverse and to get some book recommendations of my own. You can follow me in my reading career, or visit if you are looking for a good book. Unless you don't trust my taste in books...