The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

This is a very complicated book. On the one hand it's a wonderful adventure story, very thrilling, very engaging. It also has great epic themes, like the struggle between good and evil, and the fate of the world. But on the other hand, there's a very subtle message or series of messages that I'm really not comfortable with.

Okay, so if you read this book, the first thing you'll encounter is a Daemon. The story's main character, Lyra has one. In fact, every human character in this book has one. It's in the shape of an animal and it can talk. The daemon is actually the person's soul, except it's outside of the body. That's okay. Plus, it works. Pullman does a very good job of this and writes it so well that it doesn't pose a problem at all. The daemon is like a separate person, but it's also the same person; what the daemon feels or thinks or knows is known to its person and vice versa. The daemon often manifests how its person is feeling, so you would read someone's emotions or body language, not by looking at them but by looking at their daemon. And Pullman actually makes this work really well in this story.

One minor thing I didn't like so much about the whole daemon thing is that a person's job or station in life seems to determine the form of that person's daemon. For example, it is mentioned that servants, as a rule, have daemons in the form of dogs but the higher station of servitude you're at, the higher kind of dog you get; for example, the steward at Jordan college is an important servant so his daemon is an Irish Setter. Whereas, in real life, your job doesn't determine what kind of person you're like at all. But that's just a minor thing.

One of the giant themes in this book is separation from one's daemon or soul. The first hint of this I got was at the very beginning when Lyra is exploring her home, Jordan College. She finds the crypt where all the important college people are buried and notices that their daemons are buried with them in the form of a gold coin, engraved with the daemon's shape and name, placed inside the cadaver's mouth. She decides to play a trick on them and switches two of the cadaver's daemon-coins. Lyra's daemon begins to behave as if something terrible has happened and panics, but Lyra is pleased with her trick. That night, however, she is visited by the ghosts of the men whose daemons she switched and she realizes the gravity of the offense that she has committed and corrects it.

A little later on, Lyra meets a character, a polar bear named Iorek Byrnison who is enslaved by the people of a small town. She asks him why he doesn't just break free because he is obviously strong enough. He replies that the people of the town have tricked him and stolen his armour and are keeping it hidden. This doesn't seem like such a big deal...but it turns out that a bear's armour is like his soul and the bear can't stand to be separated from it.

Also, when Lyra first meets Iorek, she is very afraid of him and hides behind a fence but her daemon pulls her out of her hiding place by widening the distance between them. A person cannot be separated from their daemon by more than a few meters, and when one or the other pulls on that distance they both feel a strong physical and emotional pain because they cannot bear to be separated from one another.

Later on, we discover that the antagonists of this story are experimenting on children by physically and permanently separating them from their daemons. The children then become soulless, some of them die right away, others live for a little while longer but while they live they seem to have very little personality left. Of course, in the story, to separate a person from their daemon is a very wicked thing to do, almost like murder or worse.

It turns out that the wicked antagonists who are doing that belong to the Church (ostensibly, the Roman Catholic Church, in this story the Church is the all-powerful governing body of the whole world) and they believe that they can cure a person of original sin by separating them from their daemon before original sin comes on them. It seems as if, in this story, children are completely innocent, untouched by original sin until they reach puberty.

The messages of the story are extremely subtle. The book is so well written that its messages appear as little hints here and there. Almost as though you can't really be sure that what your reading is a message put there by the author or if it's just a part of the story... and that's kind of unsettling. If I were to write an academic essay on this book I would argue that Pullman is trying to write a kind of subtle allegory. But it would take a tremendous amount of work to argue it effectively.

King of the Middle March by Kevin Crossley-Holland

This book concludes the story of young Arthur de Caldicot. Four years have past since Merlin gave him the seeing-stone in the first book. As squire to Sir Stephen de Holt, Arthur accompanies him on a crusade to the Holy Land, however, the crusade is held up in Venice as the crusaders are not able to raise the funds promised to pay the people of Venice for the ships they have constructed. While the crusade is held up in Venice, Arthur is knighted by Sir Milon, leader of the French crusaders.

Along the way, there are plenty of adventures, both joyful and frightening. In this book Arthur experiences both the very best and the very worst of human nature and sees humanity at war with itself. In the end he finds the king within himself and comes into his own as King of the Middle March, a title he gives himself upon taking possession of his manor.

This book is warm and satisfying. I cannot recommend it enough.

what i am like

so, after we finished the peasant princess series of sermons on the song of solomon by mark driscoll, janelle and i started going through his series on the book of proverbs.

so last night we watched the one about planning, where pastor mark talks about the value and methods of organization. it was so inspiring that janelle and i decided to do an online calendar so we could sync our schedules ... or even have a schedule.

which led me to reflect on what kind of person i am. i love organizing. i love putting things into their categories. i love making plans and carrying them out. i love overseeing projects. i love making decisions. but, that being the case, why is my life such a disorganized mess? why am i so indecisive?

janelle has accused me of being a closet perfectionist. and i think she's right. i have a tendency to give up on things if they're not going my way. for example, when she first accused me, we were playing a game with some friends, and after losing a few times i gave up and quit and janelle said, "you're just a closet perfectionist." well, losing isn't fun! but it turns out, if i can't win i won't play.

i found myself doing this a little while ago by myself too. i was playing privateer on my computer and got to a dead end where it was too difficult and i couldn't beat it after a few tries. instead of trying again and again or changing my strategy, i opened the program files and changed the game to give myself an advantage. well, i gave myself such an advantage that the game got so easy i quickly lost interest and stopped playing.

when janelle and i were first married, we tried putting together a budget. i really like doing that. we planned our spending and saving. but as we were planning it, i was already tempted to give up on it because janelle and i weren't agreeing on how much money to spend on what. but we worked through it, put the plan in place and tried to execute it. it was a cash-only system. we would use our debit cards to make cash withdrawls and that's it. our credit cards came out of our wallets and we used them only to make online purchases or in case of emergencies. but one of us couldn't remember to bring the cash and kept using the debit card, because shopping trips are so whimsical. we just happen to be driving past the grocery store and deciding what we're going to eat at the same time and, of course, we left the grocery cash at home, so instead of going home and getting the cash and coming all the way back, we just use our debit cards.

so i gave up on the budget before we could even use it.

i like using agendas. i like to write in everything i need to do and scheduling my day months ahead of time and planning my life like that. but, i can't plan every aspect of my life like that. plans change and unexpected things happen and mess up my beautifully scheduled life. so, i give up on my agenda. i'm really inflexible that way.

i know i appear to be easy going and laid back, but really, i'm kind of uptight. it's just that being uptight isn't working for me, so i just let everything go and stop caring. i need to qualify that, though...

i like to be spontaneous and unpredictable, but even my spontanaity is planned. for example, when i asked janelle to marry me, it seemed like a spontaneous decision: i mean, janelle and i had only known each other for a few months and we'd only been together for ten days. i just bought a ring and asked her to marry me. but that had been planned, right down to the exact words i used when i asked her to marry me, months ahead of time. i just needed a time, when the time came, i was emotionally prepared for it.

some people seem to think i'm reckless and a little crazy. but i put a lot of thought into my recklessness. i'm no daredevil. i don't like taking risks. unless i'm completely in control. and i can feel like i'm completely in control when i'm climbing things crazily, or driving recklessly in certain conditions, or any of those things i do that people would consider "crazy" because the only variable i need to take into consideration is myself (and my vehicle... but i don't tend to take risks with a vehicle i'm not comfortable with) and whether or not i am able to do whatever it is that i'm doing. i can take risks, but they're managed risks, where i'm very confident that i will succeed without hurting myself or anyone else. otherwise, i don't enjoy myself. i hate amusement parks because it's always someone else doing all the decisions and i don't know what's going to happen. if i could decide what the ride would be like, i would probably love it. i really don't like the idea of a cruise ship vacation because all the stops and the times are planned by someone else.

i hate being in a state of constantly reacting to things. when we get an invitation, or a catastrophe occurs that i haven't foreseen, i get irritated. i want to have everything planned and be the one in charge and i wish people could issue invitation months or even years ahead of time so that i have time to emotionally prepare for them.

i need to have a plan, but i don't have one.

new job

so, my first real shift at my new job was saturday night. i now work as a night shift stock clerk at the atlantic superstore. what a nice surprise. it's a small store--well, not very small, but much, much smaller than the one i worked at in toronto--and much less busy. my new coworkers seem to be much more relaxed than my stressed out and edgy coworkers in toronto. of course they were stressed out--they were constantly understaffed and overworked, with management constantly threatening to keep cutting their staff and increase their workload.

working at the superstore saturday night, i felt like i had never left. it was a very comfortable and satisfying feeling and i'm happy to be working here. they do many things differently here, but i'm looking forward to learning it.

also, there's no union, so i won't always have to work weekends. and all the other union-related problems attached to working at the previous store... like part time employees who get paid half as much as their full time coworkers having to work harder than their full time coworkers because they can be dismissed easier.

but i'm sure this place has its own problems. anyways, i'm quite happy right now and looking forward to working here for the next little while.

Lunch With Lenin by Deborah Ellis

Lunch With Lenin And Other Stories is the perfect book. It is a collection of beautiful and heartbreaking short stories. Definitely a must-read for everybody.

Nothing more needs to be said.

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is a memoir in graphic novel format. it is completely biographical. and it does many things for me. on the surface, it tells a very compelling story about a very compelling character and i like that a lot. it also makes a terrific picture of life in Iran after the Islamic Revolution because the story is all about growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution.

Marjane, or Marji as she is called in the book, is born to a family of modernists. her parents participate in the demonstrations and protests against the Shah that brought about his abdication. however, it seems that what replaced the Shah was much worse, or at the very least, no better and they found themselves opposed to the new government as well.

so, they raised their only daughter to be a free-thinking person, but her outspokenness eventually got her in trouble in Iran, so her parents sent her to Austria at fourteen. she spent four years in Vienna before returning to Iran, but in Iran after four years' absence, she finds that much has changed, most startlingly, in herself. she finds that she cannot fit in anywhere: in the west, she is Iranian, in Iran she has become westernized. this feeling of homelessness leads to depression and she tries to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose while her parents are on vacation. miraculously, she survives and decides to 'take her life in hand.'

and just that is three quarters of the novel, so i won't give away the ending. what i liked about the book is that it showed a lot of what Iran is like. i've always wanted to visit Iran because it is always a very interesting and conflicted part of the world, even in my own lifetime, but especially throughout history. so, in this book, i felt like i was being given a guided tour of Iran, its culture and ideology. that was fascinating.

also, i found the author's own political and ideological insights to be quite astute. and i really appreciated that. i appreciated her freethinkingness and how she embraced being marginalized, no matter where she was--she was marginalized in vienna as she was in iran. but she didn't resist mainstream culture just for the sake of resisting mainstream culture; what i appreciated most was her insight into the thoughtlessness of society, how so many people--both the religious fanatics and the liberals who resist the Islamic Revolution--can dispense with thinking simply because it's a more convenient way to live, they just do what they do without thinking about why they do it. she's also very honest about finding herself living thoughtlessly on several occasions and about how easy it is to dispense with thinking. to me, she showed her life as a constant struggle to be a thinking person, and she often gets encouragement from her parents and grandmother, who teach her think for herself and who sometimes lovingly show her when she is not.

that's why it stung so much when, at the end of the book, she makes some decisions, like the ones that lead to her marriage and ultimate divorce, and defends them with the same unthinking kind of logic that everyone else does. but i'll save that for another post.

in conclusion, i loved this book. it was an education without seeming like one.

Experiencing The Resurrection by Henry and Melvin Blackaby

I can't really recommend this book to everyone. For one thing, it's boring. For the first part, it reads like an academic manual. Towards the middle it becomes a bit preachy. In the end it vacillates between trying to be instructional and trying to be inspirational. When it tries to be inspirational it winds up sounding preachy, but it does a decent job of being instructional.

It begins by giving some theological facts to build the framework, that's why the first part is instructional and reads like a textbook. It talks about what sin is, that sin leads to death, and what God intends to do about that. Next it talks about how Jesus died as a consequence of our sin and in our place and how his death and resurrection made a way for us to God. The major thing to understand here is that when the book talks about experiencing the resurrection, it's not talking about some kind of mystical experience that's reserved for only the most spiritual Christians. It's talking about the newness of life that comes from being saved. Jesus died, by becoming Christians, we die with Him and are born again into a new life--the Christian life. This is the resurrection that the book talks about, the new Christian life. So, really this book is about the theology and experience of Christian living. The last section of the book talks about the fundamentals of Christian living.

The books sounds preachy when it tries to goad its reader into living the Christian life. It sounds like an old preacher, trying to preach the concept into its audience. That probably works for some people, but for me, it's a turn-off. The book is also riddled with quaint little examples from the authors' personal lives. The examples just make the book sound more preachy, because they're not clever and they're often very basic--I would have understood it without the example.

The book could have been a lot shorter and still just as effective. I learned some from reading it, but a lot of the time I felt like I was reading a poorly written textbook.

janelle's birthday!

so, we celebrated janelle's birthday this week.

we had planned to go rock climbing on friday but no one could make it, so we were a little disappointed, but janelle's classmate, angela, threw a surprise party for janelle on thursday evening and that was so wonderfully fantastic.

on friday, janelle's sister took her out to lunch and afterwards, janelle and i went shopping and we got janelle some perfume that smells like toffee or coffee crisp or something and then we went to see cloudy with a chance of meatballs and we were the only ones in the whole theatre! i like it when that happens.

the movie was super good, but all the food in it must have made us nauseous because we both felt really sick later that night.

one time, we were in toronto and we went to a really, really late movie and when we got there we were the only ones there so we picked the best seats. a few minutes later another couple showed up and janelle offered to move over so they could share the best seats with us and the gentleman replied, "i've never had such a generous offer in such an empty theatre." that was funny.

on saturday we went to eva's birthday party. i hung around the kitchen munching on cheesy crackers and cupcakes while janelle painted kid's faces. it was really neat. she turned max into a regular clown (once he put the multicoloured wig on), and she painted black and purple stars on eva's cheeks, and cupcakes on laurie's cheeks... i wanted her to paint a rainbow on my right cheek and a unicorn on my left cheek but we ran out of time.

we had dinner with jon and andrea in bedford and vince and ciela came too. vince and ciela just got engaged in cape breton and were on their way back to ottawa. so after dinner, janelle and i drove them to the airport. it was a neat little visit, a little too short, though.