Under the Banner of Heaven. I have read very little unassigned nonfiction over the last four years, to the point where I’ve decided that reading nonfiction is kind of a waste of time, and I have decided it’s time to get over that. So I started with Krakauer because he is always entertaining even when he is writing about something scary or disturbing.

Most of what I have to say about this book I already said in the discussion at the Usual Suspects, but now that I have finished the book I’m inclined to be more charitable to Krakauer. As I was reading I occasionally thought he was making some unwarranted connections, but overall I think the book worked, and I think he raises (although without really answering) some very good questions about the nature of taith and how we fit religious beliefs into contemporary society. I do think the book would have been improved if he had included some of those meditations in the early chapters, because from the reviews I see that I was not the only reader who sometimes wondered whether his focus was the true crime story at the center of the novel, or the history of the Mormon church, or something larger than either of those stories. A roadmap might have helped me to know why I was reading what I was reading.

Krakauer has been accused of being unfair to the Mormon church, or of confusing the fundamentalist sects with the mainstream church. I didn’t see that; I thought he was eminently fair, but again, I think his point was broader than a lot of the LDS reviews of the book seemed to think it was, and maybe he would have gotten a better reception had he made that point a little earlier than the final chapters of the book.

My favorite section, by far, was the discussion of Ron Lafferty’s religious beliefs and schizophrenia. I’m still trying to sort out what I think about that.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. You don’t care what I think of this book, either, but I am going to tell you anyway. When the Harry Potter series started, I tried and failed to read the first one; I finally made it through the book a couple of years later but I didn’t really like it. Then this one came out and I gave up. It’s been a few years since I finally made my way through it, which I only did because several people told me that Azkaban was worthwhile but that I’d have to read this one first. I remember skimming a lot, and being irritated by the CAPITAL LETTERS and ellipses and all that nonsense. I’ve always thought that the plot was weak, the characters starting to annoy, and the writing the worst of the series.

But this time I listened to it on audio and I liked it just fine. In fact, I liked it quite a lot. Maybe the Tom Riddle storyline is better when you know what happens later. Maybe Jim Dale is just talented enough to smooth out Rowling’s most awkward sentences and liven up her dullest characters, and even out the pacing in order to make this a good story. I think I have to give Dale all the credit, because both Jeremy and I hated the film version of this novel, and Jeremy (who has less patience than I do for bad writing and awkward pacing) loved this book right from the beginning, and he has only listened to these books, never read them. (Apparently Harry Potter on audio is perfect for being drugged out in bed after major knee surgery.)

So thank you, Jim Dale, and I hope Rowling’s people are paying you well.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. You don’t really care what I think about this book, right? I’m just killing time until the new one shows up. That said, I will note that I hated this book the first time I tried to read it, but I’ve liked it better on every subsequent rereading. This time was the first time I listened to it on audio, and read aloud I think it is a perfectly fine children’s book. In print, it is full of Rowling’s annoying textual shortcuts.

[url=http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/07/23/entertainment/e115832D96.DTL]And naturally, controversy ensues[/url]:

Organizers of the Faux Faulkner competition are accusing Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine that has sponsored the contest for six years, of playing politics by not putting Sam Apple’s “The Administration and the Fury” in its print edition — only on its Web site.

“One of the things they asked was that we didn’t have profanity or any obvious sexual content. We watch for that. But anything else, like a political subject, was funny, it was parody. … We felt that that shouldn’t be censored,” said Larry Wells, who organizes the contest with his wife, Dean Faulkner Wells, Faulkner’s niece.

The story portrays President Bush in the role of Benjy, the mentally challenged son — or, as Faulkner himself said, the “idiot” — in his 1929 novel about the wreckage of a Southern family.

The contest home page is here. But you really need to read the winning entry:

Down the hall, under the chandelier, I could see them talking. They were walking toward me and Dick s face was white, and he stopped and gave a piece of paper to Rummy, and Rummy looked at the piece of paper and shook his head. He gave the paper back to Dick and Dick shook his head. They disappeared and then they were standing right next to me.

“Georgie s going to walk down to the Oval Office with me,” Dick said.

“I just hope you got him all good and ready this time,” Rummy said.

“Hush now,” Dick said. “This aint no laughing matter. He know lot more than folks think.” Dick patted me on the back good and hard. “Come on now, Georgie,” Dick said. “Never mind you, Rummy.”

We walked down steps to the office. There were paintings of old people on the walls and the room was round like a circle and Condi was sitting on my desk. Her legs were crossed.

“Did you get him ready for the press conference?” Dick said.

“Dont you worry about him. He ll be ready,” Condi said. Condi stood up from the desk. Her legs were long and she smelled like the Xeroxed copies of the information packets they give me each day.

“Hello Georgie,” Condi said. “Did you come to see Condi?” Condi rubbed my hair and it tickled.

“Dont go messing up his hair,” Dick said. “Hes got a press conference in a few minutes.”

Condi wiped some spit on her hand and patted down my hair. Her hand was soft and she smelled like Xerox copies coming right out of the machine. “He looks just fine,” Condi said.

Carter Beats the Devil. And finally, just like that, my temporary (post-exam) aversion to contemporary fiction seems to be behind me. I have already communicated this sentiment elsewhere, but I am going to reiterate it here: all of you people who read this book in 2001 or 2002 or whenever and did not order me to sit down and read it immediately? You people are assholes. I bought this book in 2002 and promptly shelved it and forgot about it. And I choose to blame you.

I read a few reviews that said that Carter Beats the Devil was a better book than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but I won’t go that far. Too much about Carter feels like a first novel; there are some serious pacing problems and sometimes I worried about anachronisms. (Wasn’t Thailand still Siam in the 1920s?) In scope and theme, however, this novel reminded me not only of Kavalier & Clay, but also of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. Of the three, Gold’s work is probably the least accomplished, but that is faint condemnation since the other two would go on my all-time favorites list.

I look forward to seeing what Gold writes next, because while I loved this book a whole lot, I do think it had some rough edges and I think he will be a better writer in the future. I plan to reread Carter many times before I die, though, and I will make my husband read it, and I will make you read it so you don’t later find out what you missed and call me an asshole.

The Last Battle. I know many people hate this because it is the most overtly Christian of the Narnian Chronicles (although I would say The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew are certainly contenders as well), but The Last Battle has always been one of my favorites. I think there are two reasons for that: first, I love Jill. I loved her in The Silver Chair, and I love her even more in this novel. She is Lewis’s best female hero in this series, much more compelling than insipid Lucy or snotty Susan, less off-putting than Aravis (who is pretty cool, as well). And her best moments are all in this book. Lewis allows her to be brave, tender-hearted, resourceful, skilled, and rebellious in a noble way. I love Jill.

The other reason I love this book is the same reason that everyone loves the part in Christianity where you get to die and go to heaven. I mean, who doesn’t love the idea that even if the whole world goes to shit and you die a horrible death, you don’t even have time to feel any pain before you wake up in a whole new and perfect and more beautiful version of the world you just left, where every single thing you loved is better than before, and everything you did not love is just done away with? It’s enough to make a girl go out and get some religion.

This book has one very major flaw, however, and it is one that I did not really notice as a child. The anti-Arab sentiments in this book and The Horse and His Boy have been noted before so I won’t dwell on them, but I will note one thing that really struck me in this reading: the equation of “Narnia” with the entire Narnian world. At some points “Narnia” is just a country, and at others it seems to represent the whole planet (or whatever the hell Narnia is, since we know it’s flat). Lewis occasionally does the exact same thing when speaking of “our” world — he says “England” to encompass the entire planet/world/universe.

It’s a very colonial way of looking at things, and while Lewis’s on-the-sleeve Christianity does not bother me at all, this business of Narnia being equal to the entire world (with other countries like Calormen being subordinate to Narnia, aberrations from the Narnian norm) really bugged me this time.

And since I have finished the series on audio, I should say a word about the readers. Some of them did not make much of an impression on me — I cannot even tell you, for instance, who read The Horse and His Boy, which probably means that whoever it was did a fine job. Two of the readers irritated me a lot, though. Michael York’s reading of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was sort of twee and sentimental; I would not have made it through a much longer book. And Patrick Stewart’s reading of The Last Battle was almost laughably bad. He does terrible voices, mispronounced a couple of words at the end (it’s Tumnus, not Turnus), and overinflected throughout.

Lynn Redgrave (Prince Caspian) was the best reader overall, possibly the best reader I’ve encountered with any audiobook. (I just noticed that she did an unabridged version of Through the Looking Glass, as well.) Kenneth Branaugh (The Magician’s Nephew) was also very good and probably does the best character voices. Any of these readings would be excellent to play for children, I think. All are available from Audible.

The Magician’s Nephew. When I first read this novel as a child, I did not really like it. I hated the old-fashionedness of the characters as compared to the other books, the ones set around World War II. I also hated Uncle Andrew and Jadis and the name “Digory.”

It was not until I went to college and read Paradise Lost that I learned to like this book, because I was really excited when I read the creation story in Milton and realized that Lewis had borrowed it for Narnia. The stags rise out of the ground in exactly the same way in both stories. I had always known that the Narnia stories had Christian overtones, but after that Milton class I reread the series with new respect for what Lewis was doing. I still don’t see them as hamfisted prosletyzing so much as a more playful attempt to write a Christian myth in the mold of Milton.

I should probably confess here that even though I am the biggest atheist on the block, I love Milton. Between the two of them, Milton and Lewis allowed me to reconfigure my childhood devotion into a more basic appreciation of Judeo-Christian mythology as mythology, the same way I love Homer and Ovid.

Plus I like the part where the elephant comes out of the ground and makes a little earthquake. That’s just cool.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I just went back and read what I originally wrote about this book the first time I read it, and since I still feel the same way about it, I will just repost that:

I did not hate this as much as I thought I was going to. Order of the Phoenix is pretty badly flawed, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t hate it. The main problem, as I see it, is that there is too much going on here, so that the last quarter of the book has absolutely nothing to do with the part that came before. The introduction was too long, too slow, and too repetitive, and then the ending was rushed and felt tacked-on. Those are pretty major complaints, as are my complaints about the bad grammar and sloppy language. (Kids learn proper sentence construction from reading, not from diagramming sentences in school, so don’t publish kids’ books that are full of dangling modifiers, for pete’s sake. Jesus.)

I liked the Umbridge story line. I have read complaints that she is too cartoony as a villain, but all I can think is that the people making those complaints have been asleep for the past four books. The Dursleys? Straight out of Looney Tunes. The evil face sticking out of the back of his minion’s head, covered by a giant turban? Please. Umbridge may be cartoony but she is a totally fun kind of villain, the kind where you cheer when the students finally stand up to her. She’s like Principal Snyder with magic powers. My only complaint is that her story was abandoned without a good resolution, leading me to think that Rowling should have put Umbridge earlier in the series and not tried to tack on the big Voldemort ending.

The final section of the book was really pretty terrible, I think. The big fight was confusing and hard to follow (which is pretty standard for Rowling; I never know what the hell happens at the end of any of her books), and moreover, it was really hard to care. They dragged out the suspense about what was going on with Sirius for so long that it no longer felt pressing and scary, because the kids had been traipsing around the forest for so long that if Sirius had been in any actual danger he would have been dead for hours by the time they finally showed up. The giant story was totally superfluous and should have been cut because it interrupted crucial action while adding nothing of worth. And then, in the final battle, we get all these new villains who have barely been introduced, and the big horrible murder is committed by someone we barely know (I couldn’t even remember who she was by the time I got to the end of the book) and don’t care about. We’ve been set up to care about Umbridge and suddenly we’re in a different book altogether, and it was a big fat letdown. I know she had to advance her larger story arc, but this was a bad way to do so.

But I do want to know what happens next, so I guess Order of the Phoenix is a success in that sense. I have two predictions for how this will end, and they both involve Neville being the actual subject of the prophecy. First thought: Neville turns out to be the prophesied one, and he does something noble and brave and heroic and completely stupid, and Voldemort kills him and all is lost. And then Harry kills Voldemort, not because he’s the child of the prophecy but because he’s suffered and learned and death is his gift and he is full of love and yadayadayada. Second thought: Harry faces Voldemort in what he thinks is their prophetic battle, and he is heroic and saves some people but in the end he’s just not strong enough, and he dies. And then Neville steps in and kills Voldemort, probably through sheer bravery or maybe with a Voldemort-eating plant, and it turns out that it was Neville all along. But we get to see Harry in an afterlife with his parents and Sirius and whoever else Rowling has killed off along the way.

Or maybe not. I guess we will know in another three or four thousand pages.

Actually, I felt better about the big fight at the end this time around, maybe because I read the book instead of listening to it, so I was able to follow things a little better. I still think the Umbridge story needed a better resolution, and I think that the centaurs and giants should have been left out of this book since it was too long to begin with and those plot elements felt forced and frankly kind of stupid. I mean, I get that she is setting up something about half-breeds and non-human magical creatures and whatnot, but the giants and centaurs were distracting in this novel and should have been left out.

And Rowling is still a a pretty terrible writer sometimes. The CAPITAL LETTERS drive me crazy. I actually think she is getting better — her writing is much better here than it is in everyone’s favorite, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That may have been the tightest story of the bunch, but the book is full of dangling modifiers and CAPITAL LETTERS and ellipses. Bah.

I know I am alone in this, but I have enjoyed the last two books far more than the first three, and especially the first two. I do think she’s getting better, but wow does she need an editor with a big red pen.

The Da Vinci Code. I am listening to this as part of my effort to not be such a book snob. I don’t think it is going to work, because this book sucks.

The Horse and His Boy. Still my favorite after nearly thirty years, even though as an adult I’m a little bugged by the anti-Arab imagery. It’s still a great story and will always be my favorite of the Narnia books.

The Silver Chair. I am running out of things to say about the Narnia books. I think I liked this one better this time through than I’ve liked it in the past. When I was a kid, I could not get past the creepiness of Puddleglum; now he is one of my favorite characters in the series. But I am with Jill: I just don’t care for giants, not even in stories.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I believe this was either the last or the second to last of the Narnia books that I read the first time around, when I was ten and reading them out of order from the town library. It explained a lot — I had never really understood who Eustace was (I think I had him confused with Edmund) or how he was related to the other kids. I think it might be my least favorite, either because I read it last or just because Eustace is so unbearable.

Northanger Abbey. Am I done with the Jane Austen yet? I am ready to be done with Jane Austen. This is still my least favorite of her novels. I don’t think it quite works as a satire because the satire is so uneven, and I think the target of the satire jumps around too much. Her later books are so perfect in their construction that the flaws in this one are especially obvious when you read it immediately after something like Pride and Prejudice.

I read this in a hammock on a Carribean beach while I was so sick that I lost seven pounds in five days. It was the only book I finished — I took the George MacDonald along as well, but it really sucked. I got so desperate that I was actually looking for a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code in the airport before the flight home, but the bookstore only had hardbound copies, and I am not buying a hardbound copy of that stupid book.