Steelheart

One of the best parts about being on vacation is the opportunity to just take a day to read.  I’ve always been a fast reader, but after I took nearly a month to get through Atlas Shrugged, I was worried that I was losing my touch.  Turns out that, no, Atlas Shrugged was just exceptionally awful.

Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart is the first book I’ve read within 24 hours for a long time.  If Sanderson has written a bad book, I haven’t read it yet.

The premise is simple: a significant percentage of humanity has been given superpowers, and these supposed superheroes (they’re called Epics) instead become they’re oppressors.  Steelheart is the worst of them.  He now rules the city of Newcago and is seemingly invincible.  But one young man, David, has seen Steelheart bleed and wants to see him bleed again.

Steelheart is a bit of a departure from the Sanderson works I’m familiar with.  Sanderson began his career writing epic fantasy: Elantris, the Mistborn series, Warbreaker, the last three books in The Wheel of Time series, and his planned magnum opus of The Stormlight Archives.  These are books that are grand in scope, are shown from the perspective of several characters, and really take their time to develop.

Steelheart feels like a thriller more than a fantasy.  Scratch that—Steelheart feels like it wants to be a comic book.  Between superpowers and the almost non-stop action and short chapters, I get the feeling that if Sanderson had ever been interested, he could have had a reputation like Michael Crichton.

If anything, though, this shows that he’s versatile.  It’ll be exciting to see where he takes his career from here.

                        ***

I spent the first week of my two-week hiatus planning out the next six weeks of blog posts.  I was really excited about this.  I had topics planned for each Sunday through Thursday, and I’d even started writing these blogs ahead of time.

Last week became the roughest week of my year.  While I was able to sort these problems out, it made me reexamine my priorities.  With my church responsibilities, school, my brother’s upcoming wedding, the general holiday preparations, and two other slight personal emergencies that have arisen, keeping up this blog is stretching me too thin.  At least to the extent that I have been.

I intend to keep updating once a week, Mondays.  Hopefully I can go back to the four-a-day before long, but until then, thanks to everybody who has been reading as long as you have.

I'm Taking a Break

I said I was going to give my Monday through Thursday pattern for five weeks to see how I liked it, and I gave it eight.  I’ve been so happy with the results.  I’ve gotten to publish on a regular schedule, write about a multitude of topics that interest me, and hopefully is fun for others to read.

It’s been fun and unlike before, I haven’t felt overwhelmed to get something out.

This past weekend, though, I realized that my well is dry and some of my other obligations have taken a lower priority than they should.  So, apologies to those that want to keep reading, but I’m taking a two-week break to pursue my other priorities.  I’ll be back on November 25 to continue this enterprise for another six weeks.

Until then, enjoy the beginning of your holiday seasons!

Solitude

Diana Peters in her little car
was driving oh so very far
through mountains, desert, valleys deep,
and looking for a quiet place to weep.

Wherever she could possibly go
she found it in a place of snow.
The car could find its traction not at all.
Her solitude found, no help came to her call.

Funhouse

I’ve been a fan of P!nk for a long time.  Her singles “Don’t Let Me Get Me” and “Just Like a Pill” were part of my high school experience.  Her work has only gotten better with time and, if possible, even more raw.

I’ve heard several of her songs from her Funhouse album on the radio or seen the music videos for them on YouTube.  To listen to them all collected is an experience.  The album was put together after she and her husband separated, and the songs go through different emotions that come with such a breakup, from blind anger to desperate vulnerability.

I’ve been a fan of “So What,” “Sober,” and “Funhouse” for a while, but the real treasure for me was “Crystal Ball.”  “Crystal Ball” is all about experience; it’s about bad decisions made and facing the scorn of the world, and yet you wouldn’t trade it because those mistakes taught you more than anything else could have.  In the end, others are not able to judge your flaws because you are stronger than any of them could ever believe or understand.

Be warned:  like most rock albums these days, the language is terrible in places, and she deals with some tough subject matter.  However, I feel that the issues she sings about and the music accompanying it is not just powerful, it’s important as well.  P!nk is talking entirely about her pain and struggles, but in the process, she practically speaks for this generation in our loss of safety and the heartbreak we suffer but rarely find a proper outlet for.

Card Games

There is something magical about that standard 52-card deck.  It’s one of the most versatile forms of social recreation ever invented.  Board games don’t possess this.  Despite all the thousands of different versions it has spawned, you can only play Monopoly on a Monopoly board.  Parcheesi only permits Parcheesi.  The same goes with Risk, Clue, Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Othello, and so on and so forth.

The same is true with most other specifically designed cards.  Phase 10, Uno, Rook and the like only permit you to play those games.  They aren’t built to allow anything else.

But with the 52-card deck… I can’t count how many games have been created using these cards with their nondescript numbers and faces.  I’ve been playing with these cards since I was seven and I’ve lost count of how many rounds of Golf and Spades I’ve been through.  The most popular group game I’ve played is Japanese Trump, which I’ve also heard called Ace Trump, Scum, President, and just regular Trump.  Chances are it has three other names I haven’t come across but will in the future.

Last weekend, I learned a brand new game called James Bond.  It was for just three players with our deck that we had, it was very easy to learn, quick-paced, and so much fun.  I’d love to give the rules for it here, but I’ve never been good with written instructions and that would be pretty boring reading.

Fortunately, I can direct you to where you can find the rules to James Bond.  Go to www.pagat.com, which is the ultimate site for the rules to all card and tile games.  It’s a fun site to explore and who knows, you might find something more to play and fill time at any parties or gatherings you happen to be at.

Ender's Game

Ender’s Game is in theaters and it is awesome!

Yeah, I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out ever since I first read it in high school, and many others have been waiting much longer.  The story about a kid being brought into space to be trained as a military commander has stuck with me a long time and to see it come alive is exciting.

Battle School is gorgeous.  It’s been a long time since we’ve had a genuinely unique space station and they accomplished it in flying colors.  But I was especially impressed with Command School and the simulator.  The simulator might be the most breathtaking part of the whole show.

So, for the spoilers:

The pacing is much more condensed than the book, which only makes sense considering how much time the movie has to work with.  Instead of watching Ender grow from 6 to 11, he’s roughly 11 for the entire film; instead of years of training, it’s been condensed down to months.

The Battle Room is the main setting throughout, but only two battles actually take place in the room.

The subplot with Ender’s siblings is gone.  Peter only has two appearances in the whole movie, and while Valentine is given significantly more screentime, her role is still the same as Peter’s: they influence Ender but they have no relationship with him.  Which is how it is in the book, but we get no glimpse at what they want and what they dream.

With their subplot gone, the colonization theme that is so crucial to the entire Enderverse series is nonexistent.

I agree with every decision made thus far.  They decided to make the movie entirely about Ender and not only how brilliant a tactician he was, but about his most deeply cherished beliefs: that when you know someone completely and you can’t help but love them completely, even your most hated enemy; and that it isn’t enough to win one battle, you have to win all the future battles.  The only way to stop an enemy is rob them entirely of their will to fight you.

His leadership is believable.  The danger in this film was not just to accept that kids would follow him, but making us believe the adults would trust the fate of their species to this young, young child.  I bought it, not only that they would trust him but that they would love him.

I only have one quibble: the thing that got condensed were character personalities, specifically among Ender’s friends.  Fair enough, they didn’t have the time to develop everything relationship.  So what they did was combine several characters attributes into one.  In this case, Petra took over the roles that Dink Meeker and Bean played in the novel, and that does bother me a bit.  What makes Petra’s character fascinating to me is that she is Ender’s mentor and friend, but she’s also extremely competitive and really jealous of Ender’s talent at one part in the story.  There was always a distance between the two in the novel.  It was always Bean that was closest to Ender; they thought alike, they were treated alike, and there was nothing Ender knew that Bean didn’t.  And considering the role Bean plays, not just in Ender’s Game but in many of the sequels, I was hoping that they would give him a much larger role.

Oh, well.  This movie’s good.  I hope it makes enough money to put out not just Enderverse sequels, but more Orson Scott Card adaptations.  There are stories that deserve to be on the big screen.

Sarah: Part 3

There’s a point when you start to realize that the Bible may not always be told in strict chronological order.  I reached that moment in Genesis 20.  After all the storytelling of Abraham and Sarah’s promise that they would have a son in their old age, suddenly we’re given a story that is almost an exact repeat of their experience in Egypt.

While Abraham and Sarah travelled, they “journeyed from thence toward the south country…and dwelled in Gerar.  And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister: and Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah.”  (Gen. 20:1-2)

The story itself is very interesting.  Abimelech never touches Sarah, but while he kept her in his house, he was visited by God and told that he was a dead man for taking another man’s wife.  A curse is put on him and all the women in his household, where none of them can have children.  Abimelech returns Sarah to Abraham, along with many treasures and permission to dwell in any part of his kingdom as recompense for taking her.  Abimelech does censure Sarah for her part in deceiving him, but by the end, all is well and he and all the women in his house are healed.

The reason I’m sure that this takes place before the promise of Isaac’s birth is that Sarah is 90 years old when she conceives.  Somehow, I don’t see Abimelech kidnapping an old lady who passed menopause years before.  I’m willing to admit I could be wrong and this is still chronologically correct.  But when I look at the placement, this seems more like a backstory to help explain their relationship with Abimelech in future events; after Isaac is born, Abraham has a property dispute over a well with Abimelech’s servants.  It gets solved calmly by both men, and I think a lot of that has to do with their prior experience with each other.

Well, anyways, Sarah has Isaac, and it’s quite a miracle, what with both her and Abraham’s age.

“And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me.  And she said, Who would have said unto Abraham, that Sarah should have given children suck? for I have born him a son in his old age?” (Gen. 21:6-7)

As I wrote in my last “Sarah” post, “laugh” can be interpreted as “rejoice,” which I actually prefer, as it eliminates some confusion “laugh” has engendered among other people.  “Rejoice” also packs a punch of sheer exultation in this moment of Sarah’s life.

There was a problem, though: Hagar and her son, Ishmael.  Last week, I mentioned how Hagar was cruel towards Sarah, and even though she eventually returned and submitted herself, I imagine she must have been bitter ever since.  Her bitterness towards Sarah would have been noticed by Ishmael, and emulated by her.

“And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born unto Abraham, mocking.” (Gen. 21:9)

That’s a little vague.  What or who was Ishmael mocking?  We get insight into this from the apostle Paul, who in his epistle to the Galatians spoke about Isaac and Ishmael.  “Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.  But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.” (Gal. 4:28-29)

Ishmael was persecuting, or attacking or troubling, his half-brother Isaac, who was 14 years younger than him.  Ishmael was a danger to Isaac, and Sarah acted to make sure that her son was safe.  “Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.” (Gen. 21:10)

Abraham struggled with this one, and you can feel for him.  Ishmael was his son and he loved him dearly.  But “God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy seed be called.” (Gen. 21:12)

Sarah might seem harsh, urging her husband to exile Hagar and their son, but bear in mind that the Lord fully supported her decision.  In this case, she was perfectly in tune with what the Lord’s will was.  Ishmael was not only a danger, he was not the heir the Lord chose.  We get insight into this from Paul in the above scripture, when he said that Ishmael was born after the flesh but Isaac was born after the Spirit.  Ishmael was born because Sarah decided to solve her and Abraham’s lack of children her way.  It was her decision to give Hagar to Abraham.  But the Lord was the one who brought about Isaac’s birth.  The Lord showed through Sarah’s barrenness and old age that he commanded miracles and that he was in charge over every aspect of their lives and blessings.  Also, Isaac’s miraculous birth to Sarah in her old age can be viewed as a type of Christ’s miraculous birth to Mary.  The Lord uses all things to testify of his divinity.

On top of that, because of this, Sarah remains an inspirational figure for us today simply by seeing her faith.  Paul would testify, “Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she judged him faithful who had promised.” (Heb. 11:11)

I don’t believe the miracle of Isaac’s birth would have happened if Sarah had not had the faith necessary for it.  But because she believed, the Lord worked the miracle, and the testimony of that has carried out after all these millennia.

Sarah was 127 when she died, and “Sarah died in Kirjath-arba; the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.” (Gen. 23:2)

As wealthy as Abraham was, he was effectively a nomad, and though the Lord had promised him that his posterity would possess the land of Canaan, that time was yet still in the future.  At that time, Abraham had no land to bury his dead.  There is a rather sweet story about how he purchased some land from Ephron and the children of Heth for 400 shekels, “the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children of Heth, before all that went in at the gather of his city.  And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan.” (Gen. 23:17-19)

I don’t know where any of these places are on the map, but this is significant because this would be the place not only where Sarah would be buried, but Abraham, and later their children and grandchildren.  This cave may be one of the holiest sites in ancient scripture, the resting place for these holy men and women whose faith has carried on after all this time and will carry on through eternity.