A Vacation Read

 Dystopian teenage literature is typically not the genre of fiction I'm throwing in my bag for a vacation. I couldn't even make it through the entire Hunger Games series. I tried, really I did, but I just couldn't stomach it past the second book.  So I was a little skeptical when a few people recommended Veronica Roth's teen thriller Divergent.  A recent Northwestern grad who attended our church during her college years, Roth wrote the New York Times bestseller in her spare time during her senior year.  By the time she graduated from college she had a book deal with Harper Collins. A year later the book was on national bestseller lists including the New York Times, Indie Bestseller List, Publishers Weekly, and NPR's Best Books of the Year!  The second book in the three part series is titled Insurgent, and it is being met with equally rave reviews.  Fans are anxiously awaiting the final book in the trilogy scheduled to be released this Fall (read more on her blog).  There is even talk of a movie being made (Read More on that). 


The story is set in a futuristic Chicago where the world is divided into five factions- Candor, Abnegation, Erudite, Dauntless, and Amity. Everyone must choose the faction to which they will commit their allegiance...but there are consequences. It is the kind of page turning thriller that actually has a rich vocabulary and a philosophical background.  Throw in a little romance, some action scenes, a small dose of 'coming of age' angst, and you've got a book you won't be able to put down.  The story clips along at a pace that will keep you reading whether by the pool or in the car with two children on a seventeen hour road trip! 

Rocky Mountain High

Steamboat, CO

Today

Day-blind Stars

*Thank you to my friend Caitlin for your beautiful post today  (Here).  I'm shamelessly posting this poem after reading it on her blog.  The poem says everything I wanted to write about tonight in much fewer words!*

The Peace of the Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Hiking in the Colorado Wilderness
 Summer 2011

As I read Wendell Berry's poem several times I can't help but note the similarities that it has to Psalm 23.  From despair to rest and freedom, from fear of evil to a table of feasting and grace, the journey of Psalm 23 is one by quiet waters through the very shadow of death.  There is rest and yet yearning, waiting for light while coming into peace.  This is the reality of our lives.  We live in the tension of 'day-blind stars.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about using the Psalms to give us words to pray.  Part of his writings have been compiled in a little book called Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible.  It is a mere 65 pages, but it is so helpful in directing our hearts to find words to pray from the Psalms.  Bonhoeffer, whose life ended in execution at the hands of the Nazis, knew first hand the growing despair of the world around him.  Yet he could say "If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart.." (14).  Bonhoeffer has helped me to remember that there are words even when we have no words.

Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd, 
I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters, 
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.


Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me,
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.


You prepare a table before me 
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me 
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.

A Forgotten Ship

Some say the ghosts still haunt the river.  In another layer of forgotten Chicago history lies a story of a mass watery grave.  Three years after the famous Titanic hit an iceberg, two thousand people boarded a ship docked on the Chicago River for a company picnic. On a cool July morning in 1915, a massive ship called the Eastland quietly rolled over sending 844 passengers and crew to their deaths in the murky waters of the Chicago River.  Ever heard of this tragedy?  Neither have I!  Glancing mindlessly through a little magazine called Streetwise, bought outside a Walgreens from an elderly homeless man eating Cheetos, I learn that "it was Chicago's biggest disaster in terms of fatalities, but somehow...it has escaped the city's memory"(Colleen Connolly "Streetwise" 11 July).

The immigrants that boarded the Eastland that morning were dressed in their Sunday clothes and carrying picnic baskets.  They imagined a day at the beach with their families.   No one imagined the horror that would take only six seconds to change lives forever. The majestic ship, top heavy with new lifeboats from recent regulations put into effect after the Titanic tragedy, leaned and then rolled over into waters so polluted the river itself was known to "self ignite from industrial waste...spontaneously combusting" (Bonansinga, The Sinking of the Eastland 24).

I'm not sure why this story captured my imagination so poignantly over the weekend, but I couldn't get it out of my mind.  How could the Titanic be so famous while this story is remembered only by a tiny plaque on the Clark St. bridge in the Loop? Why do we remember some things in history and forget others so quickly?  What is the point of remembering when our overloaded hearts can barely hold the emotional strain of our own struggles, much less our friends, much less the world, much less people who lived 100 years ago?!

Escape

Drawing by Roy Lichtenstein

“I just don’t see how a book can win a Pulitzer Prize when the author makes a mistake like using paper napkins.”

“Yes, no one used paper napkins in the 1940s.  I mean, really, he should have been more careful.  Why didn’t his editor catch this?.”

Is this conversation really happening, I think to myself, cooling my hands on a sweaty glass of ice water and pulling aching feet under my sundress.  Why did I choose to wear these three inch canvas espadrille wedges to the city anyway?  One too many trips downtown in sneakers, I conclude.  The defining difference between Chicago tourists and those who seem to emerge right out of the concrete of the city is shoes.  Wispy women in tall high heels of leg lengthening stylishness float between buildings as though their feet effortlessly defy gravity.  “Next trip I will claim Chicago is home by stomping these sidewalks in some different shoes,” I resolutely decided to myself last Friday on the train ride home.  Now, sitting in an oversized room of tidy Danish modern chairs with ten women born at least three decades before me, I look down at my summer torture devices lying on their sides in defeat. Wondering at the wisdom of my conclusion I begin to fantasize a plan to subtly escape this room.   There is no escape door. I'm sitting on the wrong side of the table.

Whaam!!

Polka dots will never look the same...

Summer Reading

I was going to wait until next week to give an account of an arranged date, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, between two artists of different mediums and eras brought together by their innovative creativity in the world of comic book art.  As a voyeur in this blind date of creative entrepreneurs I hope to attend the Art Institute's summer book club discussion next week. Inspired by the largest exhibition of the influential Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Chabon, the Art Institute of Chicago continues its tradition of integrating literature with current exhibits.  Tune in next week for a sneak peek at the exhibit and the book discussion.  I'm enjoying the book so much I thought I'd give it a hearty "Go Read This!" even before writing a review.  Chabon's writing is so incredibly gifted and insightful that you will want to linger upon every sentence like a cool sip of lemonade on a summer day.  Pop art and comic book illustration as a means of capturing the imagination is new to me.  Reading Chabon's novel I now understand for the first time the appeal of comics. The fantasy of transformation, escape from the mundane, and good triumphing over evil offers, in the words of Chabon,  "a necessary counterbalance to the daily trial of mere coping and an inoculation against its wasting effects."  

Happy Fourth!