Warbreaker

The novel Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn series) has just given me more data to support my opinion of him as a writer. This is a man with great imagination for building worlds and systems of magic, and for making them a relevant and organic part of his story arcs. I found Warbreaker to be a real treat. The story involves two kingdom, Idris and Hallendren, that split several centuries ago. In Idris, the old royal family of Hallendren, rules and maintains an uneasy truce with the more powerful Hallendren. Hallendren is now ruled by a group of immortal gods who serve a much feared and mysterious God King. Long ago, the Idrian king signed a peace treaty with Hallendren in which his daughter, when she came of age, would be sent to Hallendren to be the bride of the God King. Vivenna had been trained her whole life for this role, and her father loved her with his whole heart. When the time came to send her to his enemies, he couldn't bear to let her go and decided to send his youngest daughter Siri instead. While Vivenna was mature, learned, and stately, Siri was a wild child. Her whole life had been lived in rebellion because she saw herself as unimportant and unnecessary. With her untamed and disrespectful attitude, her father decided that she was expendable in the name of peace.

The story then follows Siri as she is given over to the God King, a being whose reputation in Idris is one of a hideous monster. Yet Siri finds a man who is not what she has understood. Once Siri is chosen to satisfy the treaty, Vivenna's self-image unravels as the role that she has dedicated herself to play for her father and her kingdom is taken away from her. She decides to sneak away to Hallendren to save her sister and restore her image as a hero to her kingdom. Living in the streets, working with Idrian rebels in Hallendren, and being forced to live in and among the people of the slums, Vivenna comes to understand who she really is.

The story is very well laid out with a very intricate plot of forces working to bring Hallendren and Idris toward war. Both Siri and Vivenna are striving within the bounds of a very unfamiliar world to understand the rules and the politics, to adapt to the lifestyles, and to recognize the different factions and how to ally themselves with them, all in the name of preserving their people. Simply a gripping and compelling human drama wrapped in a neat bow of heroism, conflict, determination, love, and well-developed fantasy. Sanderson plans another entry in this series at some point in the future. The present working title is Nightblood.

Weathering the Storm

It is 4:30 a.m. and my cell phone goes off. I left it on vibrate before I went to bed, but the buzz, buzz, buzz still wakes me from sleep. I had kind of been expecting the call anyway given that the overnight weather forecast called for 4 to 8 inches of snow. In an area where even the threat of snow that might not even come leads to cancelled schools and a general air of panic, a "snow-maggedon" event is downright enough to bring the entire area to its knees for an extended period. The phone call was a robo-call from the folks at my lab declaring that due to inclement weather conditions, work would be closed today and that only those folks explicitly called in would be allowed to entire the site. After I got done checking the message and deleting it, I made my way in the dark of the bedroom over to the french doors to look outside at the mayhem. It sure seems that the forecasters got this one right. There is even more snow in the forecast for the next few days that will add even more of a burden to our existing woes.

In anticipation of this storm, I managed to ensure that my cupboards were well stocked and I brought some extra stuff home from work so that at least I wouldn't let work stuff pile too high. However, on Friday I had plans with my daughter that might have to be cancelled because I won't be able to get to where she is. That causes me frustration and worry. It leads me to feel small and powerless. I also have a long driveway that is covered in a good bit of snow, and due to a pinched nerve in my shoulder, I am presently little more than a one-armed man. As my town has not invested significantly in the way of snow-removal equipment, they only manage to plow the main roads during snow storms. They never even attempt to do anything about the secondary/neighborhood roads. They just rely on the temperature rising up out of the 30s at some point to do their work for them. However, sometimes that tenth of a mile from house to plowed highway remains unpassable for days.

Maybe this is all an opportunity for me put into practice some of the things that I have been reading about in my devotional on worry. Maybe because it is now 5:04 a.m., it is just time for me to go back to bed and let my cares melt away for a while longer. Why worry about things now that I can put off worrying about until later?

The Classics

When I use the term "classic", as in that song is a classic or that movie is a classic, most folks tend to immediately conjure up images of their own standards of what defines a classic. This notion of "classic" therefore spans an extremely broad range depending on who you ask and which generation they belong to. What one person considers enduring, memorable, or vintage, another likely will label as wholly antithetical and completely inferior. This is especially true of someone from an older generation hearing the opinions of someone from a younger generation. The most often heard response of someone from an older or younger generation to your own definition of "classic" might be, "I have never heard of that." Thus you can imagine that the playlist of the "oldies" station is not fixed and changes from decade to decade.

After a bit of noodling around, I made up the following table of classics defined by generation.

Age Group	Music	Movie
Senior	Benny Goodman	Casablanca
	Jimmy Dorsey	Gone With the Wind
	Glenn Miller	Ben Hur
40s,50s	Fleetwood Mac	Chinatown
	Elvis	The Godfather
	Elton John	Dr. No
20s,30s	Britney Spears	Raiders of the Lost Ark
	*NSYNC	Rainman
	Eminem	Jurassic Park
teens	Taylor Swift	Avatar
	Iggy Azalea	Hunger Games
	Selena Gomez	Spiderman

Perhaps these differences are as they should be. There is no right and wrong, good or bad. Each group should be allowed to hold onto whatever gives them comfort and resonates the strongest with their memories and their times.

31 Flavors

On the road that passes by my house, they can be found at nearly every intersection. 31 flavors of what might amount to the same thing, or not. Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist, Pentecostal, Unitarian, Protestant, Episcopal, Mormon, and who knows what else. I only went a mile in each direction.

Solid structures, built to last. Campaigns to raise untold millions to erect brick and mortar structures to reflect our desires to be with our own kind, to feel assured about our morality and our salvation. Altars built to celebrate us and our greatness, until we decide to move on to the next thing and start again.

Clawing and scratching to drum up money to keep the lights on and pay the salary of folks whose focus is forced on setting up for the next show. Those stage sets and fancy lighting displays don't come cheaply, so schemes are put into place to fill up those metal plates with envelopes using whatever tactics their advisors push on them. However, most of their draw struggle to put together enough scratch to pay their rent or have gas money to get to their crummy jobs. But you can't punch your ticket to eternity without playing this game apparently.

Most of these places sit with nearly empty parking lots on Sundays. Yet a couple of times per year, another one opens their doors to siphon off customers that the others already can't afford to lose. More altars built to ourselves and to celebrate us.

Will I get a different definition of Jesus and God depending on which door I walk through? Is there one right answer? What if I choose the wrong team because I happened to like the landscaping of one place over another? If there is no difference, then why is everyone so divided? How can any of these myriad possible directions make any sense to the unchurched? If we "insiders" don't present a unified and clear picture, doesn't that prove our disarray and impact our message of the one true God? Can any of this be pleasing in our God's sight?

Quick Hits 34

Sometimes I hear an utterance or catch a quick visual of something that sticks in my mind. As this sensory input rolls about in my head, several different outcomes are possible. It might be the case that after a moment of consideration, the input is deleted as uninteresting, trivial, or too much for me to deal with. However, another possible outcome is that the input keeps demanding my attention. It somehow wants me to wrestle with it and give it more than just a passing notice. In such cases, they can end up here, in my blog series called Quick Hits.

Have your ever heard some purporting to be a Christian state that "they are a Christian but not some kind of freak or fanatic" ? What on Earth does this mean? Does it mean that they believe in God but it has minimal impact on how they live and interact with others?

What do you think?

The Prisoner of Heaven

The third entry in Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series is entitled The Prisoner of Heaven. This story takes place mainly in Barcelona in two different time periods, in the late 1930s and the early 1950s. The narrative in the 1930s sets the stage for the later story elements. Zafon then seamlessly bounces back and forth between the present and the past in weaving his tale of darkness and of light. As this work is part of his ongoing series, we come to understand further the history and the makeup of several of his previously developed characters. It is interesting to note that Zafon indicates that the different books in this series can be read in any order without issue. This is because the individual novels really do work as stand-alone novels on the one hand, and on the other hand, he has a way of connecting the present to the past across several generations in a way that allows his readers to keep up without losing a single thread.

This story begins in the late 1930s in a dungeon in the depths of Montjuic Castle, where anyone labeled as a revolutionary, a subversive, or a Communist is dumped into a cold, dark, and vermin-infested cage in the bowels of this ancient fortress until they expire. This is a place without mercy, sympathy, compassion, or hope. There we find David Martin, the main character in The Angel's Game, in a cell next to a man named Fermin. David earned his place after he left a trail of death and unanswered questions in his dealings with forces that he never full grasped. His past has left him a broken man. Fermin is a man with a checkered past that eventually caught up with him. However, he has always been a survivor. Fermin and David strike up a friendship through the common iron that links their cells. While Fermin dreams of a future, David slowly succumbs to his regrets and his loss. However, David has his lucid moments, and through them he develops a clever plan to help Fermin escape that pit of hell upon the hill. His only request is that he watch over the matron of the Sempere and Sons bookstore, a woman who through patience, fiestiness, and compassion, connected with David and calmed his spirit.

Zafon deftly brought his characters to life with a skillful touch that developed a Barcelona that was real, from its packed neighborhoods, to its politics, to its smells and sounds. I have thoroughly enjoyed each of the works of Zafon in this series and they have each left a mark on me. At this point, it seems apparent that Zafon has not brought this series to conclusion. I look forward to the next part of the tale.

Observations 81

My occasional blog series "Observations" was created to be an outlet to share a variety of topics that pop into my field of view as a result of a condition that many bloggers are afflicted with known as "blogger's eyes". In this state we view the world on the constant look-out for topics on which to write about. Today's blog came about from random odds 'n ends of things that I have noticed over the past few weeks.

• Why would anybody come to work in a professional environment with a severe case of bedhead?
  
• A lady of some importance came into my laboratory at work where the regulations state that all visitors must wear a hard hat. She had immaculately styled hair of amazing girth. It was utterly hilarious to watch her perch the hard hat up on top of her coiffed mound.
  
• The other day I was rushing in a downpour to get from my car to the building I was heading toward. As I reached the sidewalk, a lady dashed right in front of me with the same intent on her mind. However, for some reason, she stopped in the middle of the path blocking further movement and began apologizing for cutting me off.
  
• There was some lady at church the other day who felt moved to shout out a boisterous "amen" after every word my pastor uttered. It reached comical proportions after he gave an allegory about cooking a frog and she belted out her full support. Apparently she was a major frog cooking afficiando.
  
• Cooking shows on T.V. like to set up their "money shot" at the end when the host tastes whatever concoction they just whipped up. The trouble is it always results in a closeup of someone eating and talking at the same time. Yuk.