Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Just read in Locus about the death of Algis Budrys. Ruined what was promising to be a perfectly good day.

Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.

Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.

That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.

I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.

I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.

Picked up an old book in my library last night, and a bunch of memories came flooding back. The book was Marked Man by Harry Carmichael, a mystery, and I thought of Bengta Wu.

Bengta Wu was a bookseller. I never met the person, so I can’t tell you anything about him or her, but Bengta Wu was my own personal “84 Charring Cross Road.” We corresponded about books, and I bought most of my early library that way.
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A recent issue of The Writer contains an aricle by Brian Sousa about reading your writing aloud in order to find mistakes (an admirable practice, I might add, especially for checking dialog). I stopped reading when I came to:

Perhaps they were noticieable only to me, but there were sentences, even whole paragraphs, that when verbalized compelled me to rewrite.

The word “verbalized” means “put into words.” It’s impossible for sentences and paragraphs to exist without having first been put into words. And it wasn’t the process of putting them into words that caused the errors to become obvious. It was the process of speaking them aloud, something “verbalize” doesn’t necessitate.

Of course, I knew what he meant. What he meant was “vocalized,” not “verbalized.” But I ask you, what is more depressing than an magazine devoted to writing that cannot be bothered to use the right word?

I don’t like books “exposing” flaws in The DaVinci Code, if for no other reason than they display a lack of sportsmanship. Finding errors in that book is like fishing at a trout farm; the only real question is how many minutes will it take to catch one. That having been said, I’d like to offer a solid recommendation for Ben Witherington’s The Gospel Code.

The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.
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I was told I had to pick up a copy of Mary Higgins Clark’s My Gal Sunday, by people who insisted it was the best husband/wife team since Nick and Nora Charles.

Not even close. (more…)

…, a book by Robert J Sawyer, was the latest to leave its imprint on the wall.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room. (more…)

I suppose I should mention something about the Da Vinci Code, as everyone else seems to be getting drawn in, so here I go.

It’s a well-written thriller, in general, but the historical research is amazingly shoddy. As fiction, I’d give it a B, but if he submitted the “research” behind it as a term paper, it’d get an “F” at most, and we might even have to invent a lower grade for it. He begins with a page stating “facts”, virtually none of which is actually true in the strictest sense, though a few items you could “spin” into being acceptably true, in the sense that claims made in TV commercials are “true.”

You see, I’ve been down this “historical” road a few decades ago, when I read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, but it seems Dan Brown lacks the critical skills required to be a researcher or historian. He seems to believe everything he reads (’it’s in a book, therefore it must be true”) which is a fatal flaw when doing research, though quite essential, if only in a temporary sense, when reading fiction.
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Just finished To The Nines by Janet Evanovich. The first and last book of the series (I did another in the sequence as abridged audio on my recent trip to Phoenix; I did the book to check the real series.)

Evanovich has a way with dialogue. Her plots are more from the thriller genre than the mystery genre, as she doesn’t require anyone to do much thinking. For example, as soon as she introduced the evidence for the existence of the WebMaster in this book, I knew the rest of the story. It wasn’t at all hard to see who the main villain was, and I ended up cursing the supposedly intelligent characters in the book for not recognizing something so obvious right away. The remainder of the plot required the good guys collectively act like idiots for the remainder of the book.

Between that and the annoying characters she’s populated her world with, there’s every reason for me to avoid stopping by here again. Even though Lula did manage to discover the major drawback to the Atkins diet (there’s blessed little to crunch on in it) I really never want to meet up with her again. Life’s too short to spend it with characters who make you wince.

And that’s the bottom line. I cringed often in this book, mainly at the characterizations of ethnic minorities, but at other points as well.

Sara Paretsky has a way.

She has a way of creating characters you enjoy being around, and a way of creating characters you want to avoid being around. She has a way of making them speak as if they were in the room with you. She has a way with plotting, and a way with pacing, that keep you interested, keep you turning pages.

But that’s not what I meant. I’ve been holding off on writing this because it’s going to link to something else; I know it. but here goes.

Sara Paretsky has a way of pulling topical happenings into her books, and making abstract things seem more real for doing it.

In Blacklist, the topicality is provided by the PATRIOT Act. The subplot is about a boy at a private school who happens to be the wrong ethnic group, and has the wrong place of worship, who attracts blame for all sorts of things for no other reason than that. And it’s about what rights the US Government has taken away from us so it can hunt down anyone it so chooses to hunt, regardless of the facts in the matter.

The story is good, but I have to admit she didn’t “palm the ace” quite as deftly as she usually does. One of the breathtaking revelations in this novel was so painfully obvious to me the moment it first appeared that I began to lose some respect for Ms Warshawski when she didn’t immediately reach the same conclusion. It seemed to me that Paretsky intentionally dumbed down our intrepid heroine in a weak attempt to sneak one by the reader. I don’t mind it when an author tries to sneak one past me, but I feel cheated when she doesn’t put her heart into the effort; almost insulted by the lack of respect she is showing for my attention.

But the major point here is the side effects of the nefarious Act, and how much it requires us to trust that our government will only do good things and only has good intentions. To one who has lived through Watergate, and all the subsequent “gates” (schemes from both parties, I’m an equal-opportunity mistruster) this indeed seems like we’ve slid through the looking glass. I’m supposed to trust people I wouldn’t buy a used car from? Oh, there are individuals in government that I feel I can trust, but just give a blank check to anyone in a uniform? Come on, get real. I’ve spent time in a uniform myself. I know the kind of heroes who wear one, and I know that villains can wear one, too. (Remind me sometime to tell you why I left the military; I met some fine people there, but I also met some real scum. And the scum was winning.)

I’m sure I’l soon launch into some more analysis on the political side of this, but suffice it to say this is a good read, if you’re sane enough to be able to stand the politics.

Tom Clancy answers the question “What’s next?” It’s hard to have an action hero that gets constant Secret Service protection, so it was fairly obvious that former president Jack Ryan was finished as a protagonist for his books. I saw a few tentative starts with some net police stories and some other stuff, but nothing with any legs.

Well, I have my answer, now. Remember the son born during an earlier advanture? He’s all grown up, now, and is stepping in to the family business, so to speak. Father doesn’t exactly know about it at the moment, but he and a couple of his cousins have now become assassins, working for a quasi-non-governmental secret organization which spies on the government and is dedicated to doing that which the government cannot do, because people might find out.

The new direction isn’t one I cotton to, exactly, so it’s possible that my Clancy collection stops here. He appears to have bought into the old saw that to beat your enemy, you must become your enemy. My reaction to that has always been “if that’s the case, what’s the point of fighting in the first place?” It’s the same kind of non-think that spawned the more egregious parts of the PATRIOT act (political aside: parts of the aforementioned act I could possibly support, but not at the cost of the rest of the baggage it brings; it was a perfect example of how hasty action makes for bad laws). He tempers it a bit with the idea that only a few have to do that, leaving the rest of us unaffected, but I don’t buy that. I think any action taken in my name will eventually have its effect on me.

The premise is simple: if you knew the location of people who had been a part of actions taken against your citizens, would you quietly kill them as and where you found them? There’s a certain Old Testament flair to it, I grant. It’s hardly a new idea, even in reality. Israel embarked upon such a quest after the Olympics in Munich. When the hit in Sweden went bad, however, they dialed down the retaliations. And, given the current climate in Israel, I don’t see how anyone can suggest it was more than minimally effective.

But reality notwithstanding, Clancy carries off the premise, and the tale, with his usual aplomb: good pacing, good characters, nice climax. Good read, even if the whole idea is a bit dicey. Whether you’ll like it depends upon your suspension of disbelief. If you can’t get past the politics, even for a few hours, don’t bother.

I have, BTW, two good memories of Clancy, non-book related. First, of course, is his line about computers, back during the Mac vs PC wars: “Never ask a man what kind of computer he drives. If he drives a Mac, he’ll tell you. If he doesn’t, why embarrass him?”

The other one was his appearance on The O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly was on one of his favorite hobby horses, using the military to patrol our borders and catch illegal immigrants. And, given the politics in Clancy’s books, he assumed he get an easy agreement from his guest. (Making the assumption proves that O’Reilly doesn’t read closely, or at least critically.) Clancy shut him down in no uncertain terms, and repeatedly told him, much to our host’s dismay, that he didn’t know what he was talking about and that it was a Bad Idea. Maybe it’s a distinction that only us ex-mil types can see, but it was good to see someone handle that pompous windbag as well as Clancy did.

The rise of the mega-book.

Susanna Clarke’s first novel has a good sales run at the moment, and it’s up for Hugo. With some difficulty, I read it. Well, perhaps “read it” is too strong a term. At several points along the way, my eyes frankly glazed over, and I skipped pages. An actual page count of what I read vs what I skipped would reveal I probably read about 85% of it. And that was too much.

She seems to have a full-blown case of the disease that has been afflicting George RR Martin, JK Rowling, and many other writers today. I’m not sure what the exact cause of it is, but the result is The Big Book, the book that’s too long for the story it’s telling. I don’t know if they think readers want more pages to justify the higher price, or if the cutbacks in staff at the publishers are resulting in editors that are incapable doing their job because of time constraints, or what. But many books today are just too long.

This is an excellent case in point. This 782-page monstrosity shouldn’t have been over 500, and probably could have been less than that. The plot is rather good, as are the sub-plots, but they get so bogged down in detail that on more than one occasion I had to resist the urge to throw the book across the room. Come on, get to the point already!

The Big Book has always been with us, but not in such large numbers as today. Yes, Lord of the Rings was long. But, to tie the two together, JS&MN reads as if Tolkien had included all of the Silmarillion as footnotes in the Rings trilogy.

The basic idea here is that a mean-spirited magician (Henry Norrell) is wanting to be the only magician in England, when a young pup with some talent comes up; Norrell can’t resist keeping him around (you know the story, it’s as old as the hills) and Things Develop. Mix in the idea of a long-disappeared English King that his subjects expect to return and let simmer.

This is generally a good dish to preprare, but Clarke has decided it needs to be garnished with a dry-as-dust academic tone, including footnotes that go on for pages(!) and all sorts of irrelevancies that serve mainly just to brag about the back story she’s created for the book. Yes ma’am, it’s a well-crafted deep back story, and you’ve certainly done your homework. But every good fantasy tale has one of those, trotting it out and putting it on display is tacky at best, and boring at worst. In the case at hand, it oscillates between the two poles.

I can’t explain why the book has sold the copies it’s sold; I haven’t yet got around to the other Hugo nominees, but this makes me dread going through the rest of them. If the art of writing is knowing what to leave out, then this book is truly artless.

Maybe I’m just being silly, but I expect the book to tell me a story, and hopefully through the story’s development learn something more about myself or the people around me. This book has a good story buried in it, struggling to get out, but the excavation process is painful, and frankly, not worth the effort. I can only recommend this book for those who think doctoral dissertations make good reading.

by Lev Grossman

I really don’t remember when I’ve read a book that irritated me this much. I’m generally a sucker for old manuscript-based thrillers. Possibly it’s because I collect old books myself, but for whatever the reason, a search for old documents will generally find me coming along for the ride.

So it’s no surprise I bit on the premise here: a man is contracted to catalog the book collection of a wealthy family, looking in particular for a specific book. The book is one of those mythical beasts, the only evidence for its existence is what is generally accepted as a forged printing of it. The book doesn’t exist. Or does it?

The plot and the pacing go well enough, though we are expected to swallow several rather large presuppositions to get the story started, such as that the man contracted to catalog the collection knows next to nothing about books, and even less about cataloging them. We’re never given an acceptable reason why he was offered the job in the first place (the closest it gets is the old “I knew I could trust you when I saw you” kind of thing) and worse, we don’t have a good reason for him to accept the job. He seems to have no real interest in books, old or new, he’s due at a top-paying job across the Atlantic in two weeks and he’s spending the time with eleven crates of musty old books and playing what sounds like a prettty boring computer game, rather than preparing for the trip. Yeah, right. That really makes sense.

If you manage to swallow plot setup points like those, the pacing moves along fairly well, and the story develops as the Duke wantshim to drop the search while the Duchess wants him to continue). Then, abruptly, it ends. No climax, no ultimate struggle. Nothing. It just ends. Our hero shows up, breathless, with the codex in his hand, the crypto solved, and nothing whatever comes of it. Nothing changes, nothing is rescued or destroyed. We don’t even know whether our hero gets to start his new job (he was threatened with its loss during the quest for the codex) or what happens to the software company of his friend/acquaintance (which was also threatened with destruction by the Duke’s men).

This non-ending reduces the book to triviality. Why did the author even bother telling the story? What was the point? Basically we have a passably well-written book with nothing to say to us. If all you want to say is that everything is futile, and nothing can be achieved, then be consistent and shut up; if everything’s futile, then your story is as well, so don’t bother anyone else with it.

The structure of a thriller calls not only for a real ending, which Grossman fails to propvide, but for a brief “cooling-down” period after the climax, in which we are given the opportunity to recover our breath while the author fills us in on what finally happens with many/most of the sub-plots that were introduced along the way to keep the suspense building. Here, the author shirks his duty to his readers completely. We get nothing in return for our investment in the characters. No satisfaction at all.

Avoid this book. I can’t think of any circumstances under which I’d support buying it. Counting the speckles in the plaster on the ceiling will pass time more enjoyably. There’s no joy in this read, and if you’re a masochist, there are several other more efficient ways of inflicting pain on yourself, most of which will cost less.

Egad, a consecutive string of turkeys. I need to read something good to get this bad taste out of my mouth.

A first novel from Christine Kling.

Les Standiford, you should be ashamed of yourself. Mentioning Seychelle Sullivan in the same breath as John D [MacDonald] is a crime. I’ll admit I’m probably not a good judge of potential, and since it’s her first book maybe I should cut her some slack, but if John D had written this it would lining a bird cage or a cat box somewhere.

The link to Travis McGee is obvious; Sullivan is in salvage. But it stops there. There is the stupid but thorough cop who adds 2+2 and gets the square of the hypoteneuse, the old friend cop (only this one’s recently retired; seems like you can’t have a good guy on the force in this particular world). There’s the home for wayward girls (and you know what it really does to the girls, don’t you?) the ex-lover too nasty to be with but of course too noble to be part of the plot against her. Sullivan herself is too smart for the bad guys to put up with having her around, yet everyone believes nasty things said about her by a drunken racetrack loser. Yep, I can believe that, I can.

I got the feeling for about the middle third of the book the author was stuck for how to stretch it out. So we have a bunch of hand-waving (some hands containing weapons) and water-churning until enough pages have gone back to draw the tale to a close.

Maybe it’s just the linkage with MacDonald that’s triggering this in me; if so, that’s not Kling’s fault. But this tale was tiresome, I frankly almost didn’t finish the book. Life’s too short to waste it reading really bad books. This book seemed to hover gently right on the line between mediocre and bad. It’s quite possible the author has grown past this level now. If you think so and are willing to check it out, try one of her latest books. The only defensible reason for picking this one up is to complete a collection.

Double Sin, published in 1961, is a collection of stories written by Dame Agatha Christie. The publication date puts it toward the end of her “dry period” where her books were more automatic writing than inventiveness, but don’t let the timing put you off. Many of the stories come from the very fertile earlier periods of her career, and there are some real classics in here.

Of the eight stories presented, half are Poirot, and few of them of the automatic variety. Two more are Miss Marple’s, but those are among the more pedestrian of her adventures, and could be missed without regret. And finally, there are two examples of Christie’s gothic touch (non-series). Dame Agatha wrote a number of gothic stries as well, and they are interesting outings as well.

The longest story in the batch, The Theft Of The Royal Ruby, gets reprinted in nearly every Christmas Mystery collection; there are elements of the heart-warming in it as much as mystery. “Wasps’ Nest” plays the least fair with the reader, but that’s OK, in its way, because it’s not really a mystery story. It’s more of a brief step by the Belgian over the line from dectective story to gothic. The question to be solved isn’t so much “who did the crime?” as it is “What’s going on here?” As such, the lack of fairplay is forgivable.

This is one of the better books in this stretch of Christie, probably due in no small part to being comprised of earlier stories. Recommended.

The latest book in my return trip through Agatha Christie’s world is Cat Among the Pigeons. Someone is killing the schoolmistresses of one of the most exclusive girl’s schools in Britain.

This one comes from the period where Dame Agatha was truly sick and tired of Hercule Poirot; it’s one of the books where she keeps him offstage for as long as possible, bringing him in 2/3-rds the way through when one of the school girls finds something in a tennis racket, and remembers being told about him by an aunt, so she leaves school to find him.

Plot devices here include the kidnapping of the daughter of a foreign potentate. I find myself asking why I don’t find the plotting here as tiresome as in the Hilda Johansson tale I chatted about earlier, because I’m moved to give this book a higher ranking. Two reasons come to mind: first, the devices weren’t nearly as tired when Dame Agatha was writing, and that Dame Agatha wields them in a more believable story.

As for clues, no she doesn’t play fair this time. She gives Hercule Poirot access to information we don’t get until he announces the solution of the case, and she allows Hercule to guess correctly the interpretation of some clues that admit multiple interpretations without suffiecient evidence.

As a puzzle, it’s not one of her best. As a Poirot story, it’s almost non-existent, unless you’re partial to Deus Ex Machina endings. But it’s a passable story. All told, I wouldn’t recommend it unles you’re trying to be a completist. (If you’re looking for good mysteries, in fact, I’d suggest skipping this entire period; until she resigns herself to Poirot’s continued existence, the Poirot books are simply a master going through the motions, “phoning it in,’ as it were.)

Maybe I’ve just overdosed on the period lately, but this particular mystery, by Jeanne Dams, left me completely cold. Try as I might, I just could not get interested in any of the characters presented in it. That’s a bit unusual, as I have generally liked her work (enough to locate signed firsts of her first three books, featuring Dorothy Martin).

The basic plot is is that the uncle of Hilda’s (for lack of a better term) boyfriend has disappeared, and the last reported sighting of him before he disappeared has him murdering his rival for election to the town council. Plot devices include liberal dosages of laudanum, prejudice against both sewedes and irish, con men, and the power of a family to make a murder investigation stop in its tracks.

Also the story steps upon one of my political peeves: democrat=Good, republican=Evil. For the record, I am not now, nor have I ever been a republican. I simply believe that democrats are just as likely to abuse power as republicans (maybe that comes from growing up in the era of Richard Daly, but then again Boss Tweed was also a democrat, wasn’t he?) and I’m getting tired of novels portraying the one but not the other. One of my favorite lines from Rod McKuen (now if that doesn’t date me, I don’t know what does) went: “Black isn’t always beautiful, but any man who thinks it always ugly should be shown the ugly side of white.”

The period touches in the book simply serve to make the idea of a maidservant/detective all the more unbelievable. The plot itself might be good, I don’t know. It was hard for me to pay attention to it because the characters were so uninteresting. In fact I finished the book solely because I kept hoping for it to suddenly get better, I’d enjoyed her Dorothy Martin books enough to make me expect it would. It didn’t. It will be the last Hilda Johansson I read; life’s too short to waste it on unenjoyable books. Not recommended. If you want to read about the period, grab a US History text.

I have to admit, the cover painting played a part in my purchase of this book. One of the rare times that has occurred, because it’s been my experience that most cover paintings seem to be done by an artist who has read (or at least paid attention to) little more than the title of the book. Most of the time, they’re useless as a tool for making decisions about the book. But Christian McGrath’s depiction of a monk with a keyboard tucked under his arm against a double-exposure backdrop of a circuit board and the wals of a gothic cathedral was nothing short of delightful. Match it with Christopher Stasheff, he of The Warlock In Spite Of Himself, and I figured I was in for an enjoyable ride.

And I was. The premise is that the blessed Father Vidicon is walking down the throat of Hell (having, of course, passed successfully through the Hellmouth) and hears the pleas of those who are struggling against Murphy. A young man, Tony, a computer troubleshooter, stumbles across a message from the blessed father, and becomes pressed into service, falls in love, and tries to maintain a relationship with both a beautifule woman and the blessed father.

All the while Tony strives against a delightful bestiary representing the problems we all encounter, Father Vidicon continues his walk, struggling with the more powerful sendings.

Stasheff has put together an allegory for our time, sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress, albeit with both a technological and philosophical twist. While the former would, no doubt, delight Bunyan, the latter I’m equally sure, would not.

Definitely a Good Read, though perhaps we techno-dweebs are most likely to identify with Tony. There is a low probability of this becoming a series, which is a Good Thing (I’d call it impossible, but I know better; still I hope it doesn’t as the story is complete as it stands) because I think the tale would lose something were it to continue.

James Patterson’s recent outing for profiler Alex Cross was, to be blunt, a disappointment. The premise is that Alex Cross has left the DC police and joined the FBI in order to have more time with his family. We’ll leave the obvious point that this is unrealistic and scarcely credible alone, chalking it up to the required “suspension of disbelief” that reading every novel involves.
But after passing over that point, there are just too many stale plot cliches. The mother of his (Alex Cross’s) child reappears with a nasty lawyer and you can deduce every detail of the progression of that subplot just from that statement. Another subplot revolves around how the supervisor of Cross’s mandatory FBI orientation and training classes feels towards this new guy the the bigwigs recruited and brought in by promises. Yep, you guessed it. Most of the other devices in this novel have beards fully as long or even longer.
Still, I’ve always said that I don’t mind a trip down a familiar road so long as the tour guide makes it enjoyable. The major plot involves a white slavery ring operated by a Russian mafia, ex-secret police, gangster. It involves the kidnapping and delivery into slavery of white suburban soccer moms to order (with the token gay request thrown in for diversity) from a catalog assembled by the organization. Fortunately, Patterson manages to avoid descending into the obvious titillation offered by this premise, and the pacing of developments and plot twists in it occasionally show flashes of his mastery of the genre. But generally speaking, instead of a tight plot and good characterization we get a lot of running around with accompanying shouting and waving of hands, with no real satisfying conclusion at the end of it all.
It’s a rather pedestrian effort from a writer I’ve come to expect more of. Diehard fans of Alex Cross will want to pick it up, if for no other reason than it marks a sea change in his life. If you’re new to Alex Cross, pass on it; you’ll find material at least as good in almost any book selected at random from this genre.

My latest batch of mystery books, by Anne Perry, leave me a little puzzled. I’ve written before about her books (liked the Pitt — Cater Street Hangman — but not the Monk) but I may be changing my mind. To the extent that I may not be able to finish the latter one.

The Pitts (Charlotte and Thomas) are a husband and wife team in the Victorian era. He is a police inspector, she “merely” his wife. Perry does a fairly good job of evoking the sense of the period, I suppose. But I’m starting to wonder about a couple of things.

For one thing, her books don’t “feel” like the books and stories I’ve read that actually were written during the Victorian era. There’s a lot more societal detail, and she lays on the atmosphere with a trowel, something the real Victorian authors never did. I suppose a partial explanation for this is that she’s “overcompensating,” she’s trying to emphasize the time period when the story takes place, and cannot (or does not) expect her readership to be aware of what the Victorian detective story actually reads like. So she overemphasizes the feel of the epoch, to be sure we “get it.”

This in itself isn’t disturbing, but there’s an undercurrent I’ve started to notice that is. I’m not at all sure of this, but I’m beginning to feel Ms Perry herself doesn’t really like this period. It started gnawing at the back of my mind during the Monk novel, and now that I’ve done three of her novels (and am working on a fourth) the idea is growing more steady on its legs.
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This book by Frankie (son of Francis) Schaffer isn’t a new one, and it isn’t new to me. But I went back and reread it a little while ago.

It makes some very good and very interesting points. Frankie isn’t the thinker his father is, but who is? His main point is that Christians are ghetto-izing (that neologism is mine, so don’t blame him) themselves in the arts. Christians are creating subgenres of almost every art form by prepending the word “Christian” to it. And the entries in these subgenres aren’t very good. “Christian movies” (a subgenre close to his heart, as he is a movie maker himself) for example, have lower production values and the acting is worse than in their mainstream counterparts. And worse, the writing and plotting are stale.

Can his premises be argued with?
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