Blindfolded: a Free Book review

I did not think I'd like Earle Ashley Walcott's Blindfolded when it showed up on LibriVox. The description sounds a bit like an early version of Little Miss Marker. But it was one of Roger Melin's contributions, so I tried it anyway.

To begin with, I'll add to Melin's description. The kid doesn't tag along in typical adorable waif style. That's a relief, anyway. And our hero, Giles Dudley, is soon treated to a box seat at a murder. As a special added extra, he gets a good look at the murderer's face. He turns to the police and gets nowhere: they aren't about to go after the guy he saw.

So he vows vengeance, only to find himself swept up in someone else's scheme under another identity--one he can neither maintain perfectly nor dispose of without danger. Who is behind the scheme? What is it about? Why does the owner of the face he saw at the murder apparently want him to act as his confidential agent in stock manipulations? Who can he trust? We're all in the dark with him.

The plot twists sound as though they should be frustrating, especially when he picks up a romantic interest he cannot pursue and various people realize he isn't who he's supposed to be. But this is a well-plotted and paced story, and the maze does eventually resolve.

I like the story. It's not specifically Christian, though it is generally moral and ethical (moreso than some modern Christian fiction). There's an unexpected scene near the end that is very effective and scary--a kind of reverse deathbed conversion--that points in a Christian direction. And against the prejudices of its day, there's a pointed exposition of the fact that Asians do not all look alike--it's part of an overarching theme very important to the story, but that point aside, it's quite well done and a good counterpoint to a prejudice that still lingers to this day in some quarters.

I should mention that there is a fair amount of violence. It isn't particularly graphic or gory, but it is plentiful. There's a lot of action in general and suspense, too.

The scenes of stock market operations in the late 1800s are informative--you can trace the development of modern practices without much trouble. Also, the depiction of China Town in that era, though brief, is fairly well done.

All in all, it's worth a look, and Melin's audio version makes the text proper even more accessible for busy people.

Why'd it have to be snakes?

Trivia note: I've finally decided to learn Python for text-handling purposes. It was that or Perl, which is more of a slob's language (and thus better suited to me, probably), but I'm still going to try Python, courtesy in part of Text Processing in Python, available here.

The point is to automate some linguistic tasks, including translation and reverse-engineering lexicons. I usually just put together a quick, single-use program for a given purpose, but I'm thinking about producing some long, flexible, multiple-use programs, so I might as well get serious.

It's the indentation that gets me. Granted, it's more obvious than spotting a } lurking somewhere in the code, but it means that the Python Zen soundbite "Flat is better than nested" merely justifies a necessity: Python probably can't handle much nesting without the indentation getting out of hand. That may be a bad thing: Life nests a lot, which means God doesn't use Python. I sometimes think he's more the Perl type too. This would be a very different world without nesting, and in any case, no matter what the Pythons claim, the world is not flat.

But I guess that's why you job everything out to modules.

Anyway, I'll see what it's like in practice. I may try writing a concordance program (it would output where a given word occurred in a group of text files and incidentally list their complete vocabulary); that should be a good opener. Or perhaps a parser--I'll need one of those anyway.

I'll report back on how it's going. Just remember that any incoherent complaints about snakes won't be delirium tremens.

Melin the Machine

This is a different kind of post. I'm about to review a couple books that I doubt I would ever have read in the conventional way but which I consider well worth reading. The only reason I bothered with them was that they showed up on LibriVox and were read by Roger Melin.

It's difficult to do justice to Melin as a reader. Simply put, he is consistently professional. LibriVox readers are volunteers (= amateurs), and many of them sound like it. But there are some who are reliably professional, and Melin is one of them. When I see a new title from him, I'm more likely to check it out, simply because I know I won't have to put up with reader problems. I may not like the story; that's always possible. But in using LibriVox, there have been cases where I liked a story but could not recommend the audiobook; Melin's work is never in that class.

His genre is hard to define. He tends toward adventure stories, often with a romantic angle, but the recent Flood Tide, which I'll review soon, doesn't fit that classification.

Another quirk of Melin's seems like a negative but actually works: he's not a voice actor. Some readers are very good at doing different voices, dialects, and such. (Other fail painfully.) Melin doesn't appear to bother with that, but his reading is not expressionless. In fact, I've had the odd effect of remembering something he's read as though he had acted it: perhaps my own imagination fills in the gap. However one might explain it, it works quite well. (This is especially tricky where voicing the opposite sex is concerned: generally women voice men better than men voice women, though the failures are especially painful. Melin's technique is immune to the problem.)

Melin has, apparently, a list of more than 150 titles he hopes to read out, and he's so productive he may succeed. This is why I call him "the Machine": he churns out an impressive body of work with mechanical regularity and accuracy, but with very non-mechanical quality. He's worth listening to, and while I don't always agree with his taste in texts, he has put me onto some books and writers I might never have discovered otherwise.

Glengarry School Days: a free book review

Glengarry School Days was written by Ralph Connor in 1902. It's available both as an e-book and an audiobook.

The story is difficult to explain. There is no one main character, though there are only a few major characters, and the baton passes from one to another a few times. Yet I never felt lost in the story.

Simply put, however, it's about some kids at a rural school in Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century and how they interact and mature. The schoolmasters also figure prominently for good or ill.

It is a Christian story in the best possible sense: unlike much modern Christian fiction I've encountered, it is neither preachy nor worldly. It will inspire you to be better, to follow God more closely. It models the change that a few truly righteous people can make. We need more books like this, and I doubt we have the guts or skill to write them.

I will also recommend the audiobook in particular. I usually recommend a text, and I may find the reader(s) of the audio version tolerable. But Bruce Pirie is the perfect reader for this classic text, and the even better news is that he is now preparing another Ralph Conner story, The Man from Glengarry.

Even if this isn't your preferred genre--it surely isn't mine--this is worth reading, or better yet listening to.

Glengarry School Days:
E-book
Audiobook

I've been a Bad Boy...

I haven't given up on the blog; it's just that I tend to have other things to do. However, I have an amazing backlog of books to review, and I need to get back to Dark World. Believe it or not, I actually have that written out a few chapters ahead of where I ended it, and it's plotted out to the end of that specific arc and a bit beyond. I think hereafter, I'll write up the complete arc before posting here.

Anyway, I'll do a few reviews here before heading back to the story. I'll also be doing a parody series soon that will probably get me in trouble with somebody.

On with the show!

Humility 2: Follow Your Nose?

I said last time that the common view of humility is false: humility does not deny itself, and it does not decrease our self-knowledge so we only have humility when we don't realize it. So what is real humility, and how does it work?

I'll tell you a secret: I can see my nose.

Not the whole thing, of course, but most of it. And I doubt I'm especially blessed in this regard. You don't need a long or large nose to see it. And all going well, you can see past the end of your nose, which is like seeing the forest for the trees.

So what?

Simply this: again, no doubt like you, I am humble about my nose. Some people may be obsessed with the protuberance, thinking it either beautiful or ugly, but most of us probably don't think much about it.

That's the point.

I can go for amazingly long periods without noticing the thing, usually because I'm looking at something else--words on a page, vehicles on the road, and so forth. But it's there, and I know it. I can shift my attention to or from it at will.

That's humility. I've had a few moments when I realized, to my surprise, that I was being humble. Now, I often ruined it by wanting to advertise the fact. But sometimes I would just think, "Huh. That's interesting." Then I returned to the matter at hand.

If you are humble, you do not lack self-knowledge but self-absorption. A humble person can be aware of his own humility without feeling any urge to publicize it. "Look at me--I'm humble!" is wrong not because of the last clause but because of the first. A humble Christian will always say, "Look at Jesus!"

But then, a humble Christian will always be looking at Jesus, not at his own nose.

Humility 1: False Humility

I recently heard a gentleman talking about humility. He mentioned asking people at a retreat whether they were humble. Some sucker bit and raised her hand--Ha! She isn't humble, or she wouldn't raise her hand!

How droll!

How totally, almost damnably false.

This peculiar view of humility is common, unfortunately: it is the Virtue That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The first (and perhaps still the only) writer I've seen get this right is C. S. Lewis. Unfortunately, many of his "fans" have never read his writings. Pity, that.

Anyway--it doesn't take much examination to locate the problem. Suppose there is a truly humble person. You ask him, "Are you humble?" What does he--can he--answer?

1. If he says "Yes," we automatically dismiss his claim: it's a trick question for which an affirmative answer is impossible even though we have already stipulated that it would be true. That is, we have excluded truth as a possibility.

2. If he says, "No," then he is at best mistaken or deluded and at worst lying. So the only answer we will accept is a mistake, a delusion, or an outright lie. And this is a virtue?

Note that real virtues do not cost us self-knowledge: it's the vices that numb us to reality. That's why we like them. We drink to forget, in other words, though we get drunk on Pride, Wrath, Lust, and so forth. If we concentrate on vices, they will blind us to the guy on the cross and to the same guy not in the tomb but enthroned at his Father's right hand. If you fight vices and exercise virtue, you'll know as much about yourself as your friends and enemies do.

So the fact that this so-called humility at best calls for loss of self-knowledge tells us that it's really a vice. Its patron sinner is of course Uriah Heep.

Someone will probably claim that my thought experiment assumes an impossibility: no one is truly humble. Untrue: at least One was truly humble--and he said so in Matt 11:29! So by the usual reasoning, Jesus himself was guilty of the sin of pride, which would interfere with his being our Savior. Drat.

Next time, I'll explain what real humility is, and why it's as plain as the nose on your face.