I’m strangely charmed by the observation that if you close your eyes in a karate class, it can sometimes sound like a crowded birthing room full of laboring women, with choruses of gutteral grunting from all directions.   Perfectly suited to reading.  Not.   Which is why I usually knit during karate class.   But the similiarity of  background noises lend the pinache of Blackbelt achievement to motherhood.  And I think that’s just about right.

Three weeks ago, I was seated on a bench at Daniel’s karate school “watching”  his class perform a self-defense  maneuver  with my gaze riveted to the screen of my kindle, upon which I was reading yet  another debate text………(insert agonizing groan)… .    ( It turns out that there are some very engaging debate books, but I had not yet discovered them three weeks ago.)

I was reading Leverett S. Lyon’s Elements of Debate……….dry as the Sahara.  And I was still hopeful I might find some savory tidbits about how one might  build a solid and compelling debate case which finessed everyone in the room into the very palm of one’s hand.

I was in the middle of some juicy sentence like “The issues when stated in declarative sentences are the fundamental reasons why the affirmative believes its proposition………”  when Daniel’s ultra energetic karate instructor  yanked me out of my stupor with the news that Daniel was being “invited” to join a special training class, the demo team which does karate demonstration (for recruitment purposes)   all over town.  This was presented, and actually is,  a great  honor which is not to be sneezed at .   It was four days later that  I realized the  fullness of the price hike that accompanied this profound  upgrade.   And I’m thankful we can do this for him.

But since that fateful day, Jon and I have parted with something close to $300 in unanticipated fees.    So, I won’t read in karate class for  a while.  I’d better stay alert.

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And then there was Hesiod’s Works and Days.   I did not read Theogony, even though it was included in the same volume I have which was translated by  Stanley Lombardo.  The main reason I didn’t read Theogony is because I found that Works was just a little more Greek god than I need on any given weeknight.    It’s almost a Theogony all it’s own, with some good difficult labors and oxen tossed in.

I was mostly interested in reading Works and Days because it was described to me as one of the earliest known narratives on economic thought.  The First of anything is always interesting, and always turns out to be less auspicious than expected.  Having always thought of Hesiod in conjunction with Homer, I expected  Works and Days to be formal and majestic in the way, I guess, that one would expect epic narratives to be.  But it was more like epic poetry for the common man.  Written in the first person and, as I already indicated,   a little bit over the top in his invocations of Zeus and all his mates.    But Hesiod does have a keen eye for the frailties of man, our tendencies to mischief and squabbling,  and the need of hard work and no more insolence towards the gods.

The kids and I have been reading about the  establishment of Greek colonies all around the Aegean, Sicily, and even as far flung as Hemeroskopeion in  modern  Spain, and a dozen or so colonies spread all around the Black Sea.   This colonization was ongoing for five centuries after Hesiod’s lifetime, and was neccessary because of an endless need of more and better farm land to feed the growing population.  It’s interesting to interpret the farming crisis of these islands, and rocky colonies along the seacoast in view of Hesiod’s portrayal of the rigorous like of the Greek farmer, and his much repeated perception that hard labor is the lot of men, and that success will come to the one who is willing to work for it.   And not complain, or expect a life of ease.   I think he must have been a great parent.

So, Works and Days was a well timed read.  It helped that I could fit it right into it’s historical context.  Otherwise it might have felt too repetitive and a bit much Greek Diety-filled for most of us.    I think this blog should be called something like Classics for Rednecks, because that’s really the flavor of these reviews, isn’t it?

So those were two books for February.   Glad I read them.  Glad I am all done with them.

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Exactly one year ago, at an early morning ladies prayer gathering here in Spokane, I unravelled little bit when my turn arrived to tell everyone what I needed prayer for.

My issues of the moment were over the fact that our family had not yet settled in a permanent home after seven months in Spokane, and that there seemed to be no house which met all our criteria,  anywhere.    That this led to a chaotic home life which made home schooling almost impossible.
And I had an  unsettling terror arising from the fact that my first-born child was about to become my first-graduated child.
And further, because I had been such a negligent home educator, that he would  certainly be spending his adult years living under an overpass………. because, surely,  no university would allow him to darken its door.     He had no foreign language, no understanding of what a gerund phrase was, insufficient extra-curricular activities,  and the scanty  course records I had kept were lost among the hundred or so unpacked boxes in our recently flooded basement.   I wasn’t sobbing, but I was close.

This little melt down was followed by a tender prayer by one of those dear ladies in which she asked God to help me to persevere and see his kindness in the midst of my insecurities and lack of faith.  I had not recognized that it was insecurity and lack of faith until she labelled it for me.   And God did carry me through,  and we did find a place to live and David did manage to get into the school he wanted with a partial  academic scholarship, and I see in retrospect that my freak-out was  overdramatic.   And I have reflected often since that day that I have a tendency towards insecurity and a lack of faith, and sometimes I freak out needlessly.

I mention this because it’s happening again.  I am having a freaking-out, insecure failure of faith.  My mom is moving into our house in three weeks, and I  have begun to wake up at 2am chronicling all the ways in which I will be failing her, my husband, my children, this ginormous renovation project in which we live,  the  dog, and probably everyone else I know.  This calamity will begin when I  reach that point of no return as I close the door on her empty apartment and drive Mom and her stuff down the hill to our house.   For good.

There’s a little voice in the back of my head, occasionally audible when the sun is up, which says “it’s all going to be fine.”    Of course it will.   But there is a more strident voice at 2am which ticks off every possible way in which all who depend upon me will be lost in the quagmire of my disorganization, probably causing Jon and the remaining five children and my mother to spend the rest of their days living under an overpass.

I finished a book which I had started last year, Octavius Winslow’s Help Heavenward.  I picked it up again because I wanted to find a particular passage in his chapter “Human Care Transferred to God”.   The entire chapter is helpful for getting my sights corrected when worry begins to pull me under.   Here’s a little bit:

“Is not the voice of the Lord mightier than the voice of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea?    Is not the Care-taker mightier than the care itself?  Yet how we magnify and multiply our cares, anxieties and sorrows!   But for the immutability of our redeeming God, whose unseen hand guides and whose power, almost insensible to ourselves, sustains us, our care would consume us.    How often we are upheld, we scarcely know how, preserved in safety, we scarcely know why.  But ‘the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him” and sooner or later, we learn that Jesus has done it all, and has done it for his own glory.”    p. 99

And there’s a great deal more good encouragement where that came from.  Winslow is one of those soothing and comforting Puritans.  It does me good to think that those Puritans brought their own mothers into their homes when the time came, and that they did it with a sturdy heart which loved duty and obedience.  It’s helpful.

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For a whole different kind of  treat, I  read a little PG Woodhouse as the finishing flourish to calm my jittery nerves.  This time it was Plum Pie, which is one of his short story collections.  Not my all time favorite of his books, but it was relaxing and mindless.  And that’s helpful.

I was escaping to the rich oxygenated leisure of  Woodhouse because the other book I’m dragging myself through is Martin Cothran’s very dry Material Logic text.   I have never read anything on the subject of material logic before, and so have nothing to which I can compare this text.  But, as it’s  a formal logic course,  a systematic study of the structure of reasoning, I am a few inches over my head.  I have rare intervals of lucidity as I read through this, and most of these moments come as I read a paragraph for the second or third time.  It’s helpful, I am gaining a better understanding of how to reason and to build arguments logically and coherently.   And to follow a debate round and flow it (almost) effortlessly.

Not surprisingly, I just happened to own this Material Logic text.
It  was languishing in the distinguished company of a few other unread logic texts in my “compulsive home-school purchases”  book-stash.
(Sometime I’ll write something about victory over my compulsive curricula purchasing days of yore.)
Anyhoo……I cracked this Material Logic book open for the first time after  yet another weekend at an NCFCA debate tournament where I had the opportunity to judge way more Team Policy debate rounds than I probably should have.   Much as I want to give these debaters intelligent feedback, I was continually reminded of the fact that they know TONS more about logical argumentation than I do.   I’m running to catch up with the kids again.

And, on the same subject, only more so, it looks like we’re starting up a speech and debate club here at our house next fall.   So I’m working through Richard Edwards’s Competitive Debate,  and Meany and Shuster’s  Speak Out,   to get my head oriented to what’s required to run edifying debate and speech instruction for highschool kids.

And this brings me back to the need for God to help me to persevere and see his kindness in the midst of my insecurities and lack of faith.

Somewhere in the late 1990′s, I read a line in which EB White said something to the effect that his life was the story of conquering his fears and insecurities, one at a time.  I have never been able to find that quote a second time, so maybe it’s my own idea of him.   It’s also my idea of myself.  I am a fearful mess sometimes, and it is God’s kindness that he shows himself to me through my weakness.   And I am thankful for the many many ways I find I am redirected to that perspective.

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I mentioned, in the little post in which I said I was not going to make excuses, that I was likely to fall off the rails when it came time to actually write up the blog posts.   Three weeks ago, I lost the book I want to write a post about.   The battery charger for my camera is fritzing out on me. We are frantically doing educational projects 14 hours a day in order to catch ourselves up, as we have fallen behind schedule.    I am never ever alone.    I have an undeniable compulsion to knit rather than read or do anything I ought to be doing.  I am four months behind on the book-keeping   (thank God for automatic  on-line bill pay).   And the 9 month old German Shepherd never tires of being walked, run, chased, and frisbee’d.      What all these  things have in common is that they  make blogging less and less possible.

Indeed!

But here’s the lowdown.  I got four books all done since the last time I wrote a post here.  I have absolutely no shame at all, and am going to claim for this list every single book I finish, as long as I get to the last page with honor.    (Even if it’s a kids book I read at bedtime to the babes.)    And that said, I will tell you that in the past two weeks I have finished Dorothy Sayers Letters to  Diminished Church,  Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth,   Kate DeCamillo’s Tale of Desperaux, and Nina Brown’s Children of the Self Absorbed:  A Grown-Up’s Guide to Getting Over Narcissitic Parents.   I’ve got three books on Africa going,  but they are slow and aren’t mindless enough for my old gray head to absorb while surrounded by the kind of mayhem that swirls around me currently.

But isn’t that an eclectic little foursome there?   I loved Sayer’s Letters…..and I have a little review of that one going as a draft.  But I’m delayed on that because my notes are tucked into the book, which I lost at a Hampton Inn in Portland, Oregon.  The housekeeping staff  is  hopefully reading it now.  It would certainly do them good.  That book is one helpful piece of dogmatic theological opinion.    I have to locate another copy so I can dig up the quotes I liked best and say why I think almost everybody  should read almost all of it.   It’s essays…..and some are way better than others.  And the edition I was reading had such a pile of distracting typographical errors.     Dorothy deserves a more meticulous editor.

Tollbooth and Desperaux  are certainly not up to Dorothy Sayers’s standard, but they were both fun.  How can it be that I have been parenting for almost 19 years and have never read either of those books until now?  I have heard my marvellous husband read The Phantom Tollbooth aloud to the offspring  at least twice.  Nevertheless, I’m  including it in my 100 because I have never read it with my own eyeballs.    And  I’m desperate for any morsel of literature that will take me to 100.

Which brings us to the book about children of narcissistic parents.   I found that title on a list of books recommended for people who’s parents are moving in, and I couldn’t resist.   Who wouldn’t want to see what lurks under that rock?     One thing that book did for me was convince me that my mother is the very least narcissistic  parent of her generation.  It’s a collection of tales of unhappy families and work sheets and quizzes to help adult children of the self absorbed work out the issues they have inherited.   The stories in this book left me so deliriously appreciative of my mother’s flexibility, humor,  uncomplicated nature and sensitivity to everyone around her.   Sin is misery, and it really is handed down from one generation to another.  What a sweet gift that we get to take care of someone who is kind and loving and fun!

And I’ve got one more “read aloud” to include…..I am almost finished with Livy’s Early History of Rome, some of which I got to read aloud to Daniel and Helen.  And that is such a great book to read to a boy.   I remember reading Herodotus aloud with David ten years ago, and he was so completely captivated.  And Livy had the same effect on Daniel.  Daniel is listening to Herodotus on audio in the afternoons.   These books are so perfect for middle school boys.   Loads of battles and double crossing, death and crazy acts of courage.

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So, that makes six finished books and four underway.   Must finish two more before February 1.     Those two will be Livy’s Early History and Moyo’s   Dead Aid.

I have a week at home to finish books and begin new ones.    Then some of us will head off to our third NCFCA Speech and Debate tournament for the year.   At these tournaments, I don’t read as much as I knit and talk.   Lots and lots of  interesting people to talk to at a tournament!

But,  I have to say that as I am reading these books on foreign aid to Africa, and what a disaster it has been, my opinion of our role in the world is changing.   As I listen to the NCFCA   kids debating the topic of whether or not countries are morally obligated to help other countries in need, it’s all I can do not to jump up and quote passages from Dead Aid  and What’s wrong with Nigeria, about the miseries we have caused by pouring in monetary aid, food aid, cheap loans, all kinds of unhelpful help!  But there are so many perspectives on this problem of foreign aid, entitlement, charitable kindness, a global welfare state……and what the World Bank really ought to be doing.   I wonder what God is doing with us all.  One day we will see all, and know.

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