Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
User Journal

Journal SolemnDragon's Journal: Stories from my childhood 30

Journal by SolemnDragon

George MacDonald, "At the Back of the North Wind."

See also, "The Princess and the Goblin," and "the Princess and Curdie."

All of which may be out from under copyright by now.

George MacDonald is like a more optimistic C. S. Lewis. Instead of believing that we are eternally damned, he believes that the moment we begin to listen to our conscience, we begin to be better people, and that any road which leads us to the divine is valid and acceptable. In one of his many books (though not one of those three, which contain very little christianity except in the kindness of the characters and some minor allegory that will likely be missed by anyone under the age to twenty) that if someone were to cast aside the bible and act with love, one would get just as close to god as with it.

You may not agree, but i find it refreshing. He is very much about his characters being good and wholesome and right, even when they (like most of us) find it difficult, and get cross easily, or get lost in the darkness and don't know their friends when they see them.

They are pleasant, simple books, easy to read and quite charming. I would recommend them to children of any culture without hesitation. They remind me, as an adult, that it's not pretentious to want to be a better person. It's essential. If you don't... then you probably aren't. I'm not necessarily a good person, but that doesn't mean that i don't want to be, or that i won't ever be. It is the miracle of humanity that just as we may become worse over time, we might also become better, and it's never too late to start. We should not be daunted by who we think we might be. The small little grain of real good that we may come up with now is worth whole fields of good that we might be one day. We must begin somewhere.

MacDonald's books have an uncanny way of reminding me that optimism is not foolish, that it is not silly, that to want to be good is the first step to gaining ground in that direction, and that to be good is not the realm of heroes and heroines or saints, but ordinary people who make the world worth living in. Not all good people are the same.

So i strongly recommend this set of brave, beautiful little books, which despite these effects are really just fairy tales, about courageous people who meet interesting circumstances in beautiful writing. But then, i'd also recommend learning to shoot and make bonfires, so take that with the proverbial grain of rock salt in the shotgun.

Whatcha reading?

This discussion was created by SolemnDragon (593956) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Stories from my childhood More

Stories from my childhood

Comments Filter:
  • it also appears to be a fairy tale.
  • Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by Michio Kaku.

    i'm also reading 5 Children and It by E. Nesbit... which heh... of course came from your recommendation.

    i like it... i like the refreshing tone, the lightness but fantastic atmosphere of the story.
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

    It's a good book, though a little long perhaps for me. It follows several generations of a family in a town that started secluded from the rest of the world and how it and they change as it becomes more known to the world. In typical Marquez style is makes great use of magical realism
  • I'm re-reading my favorite book Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I'm also reading Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. I really want to read Curious George.
  • ...well, anyhing with a bookmark!

    Windows 98 Annoyances (D. Karp)
    The Scrabble Companion (G. Brandreth, D. Francis)
    The Message of the Sphinx (G. Hancock, R. Bauval)
    Godel, Escher, Bach ( D. Hofstadter)
    Truckers (T. Pratchett)
    and, technically, aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot org. and I'll think about a subscription when I see two months go by without a basic grammar error [slashdot.org]. I -will- be forgiving if the original submitter has one in a direct quote and the error is relevant. I'm not saying
    • How are Pratchett's books? I haven't read anything with his name attached to it except for Good Omens, and I bought that one because of Gaiman. But it was still morbidly funny. Is there any good starting point if one may be so inclined to pick up a Pratchett book or two?
      • How are Pratchett's books?

        Dire. I have seldom encountered a greater waste of my valuable time in printed form. Note that I seem to be in a tiny minority, and the masses seem to love his work. The masses are, of course, wrong (as usual).

      • The Light Fantastic is good, and so are The Colour of Magic and Small Gods. The rest -- are forgettable.
        • To each their own, I suppose. A lot of people I know have dissed The Light Fantastic, preferring instead many of the middle books. Personally, I own every single one of them, and the handful of ones I didn't like makes a much shorter list than the 30 or so total.

          So, the ones I didn't like:

          • Mort Though it introduces important characters for the series, I didn't like it. Someday maybe I'll have the stomach to re-read it; some people rave about it.
          • Hogfather DEATH as father xmas stand-in. Eh.
          • The Fifth
      • Pratchett's Discworld books are the cure for bad moods. Funny needs a new superlative, because hilarious doesn't begin to cover it. For the Discworld novels, chronologically is best but not strictly necessary. There's a bit of backreferencing 'in jokes' to incidents and characters in previous books, but the majority of the humour survives without being aware of it. Failing that, 'Guards! Guards!', 'Mort', 'Night Watch'.
  • Current reading material is a book on The War in Africa, 1942-1943 [amazon.com], which has been very interesting so far. I am about half way through it. Very interesting just to see how the invasion of North Africa against the Germans and Italians was really an excercise in prepping the Americans and British for the war in Europe. A kind of dress rehearsal before the big show so to speak.

    After that, I am not sure what I am going to read next. I have a stack of about 6 books on my "to read" shelf. Some historical nonfi
  • It's Summer, meaning that I start reading a lot of books, usually three-four at a time, but never finish any of them.
  • Patriot Games Clancy
    Emotional Intelligence Goleman
    A Farewell to Arms Hemingway
    Head First Design Patterns some people who put a cute looking girl on the cover.

    I suppose it's not just me that has noticed this, but isn't Hemingway's style fscking annoying? The mountain was brown and tall and 100 feet away and in Italy and the army was right behind it and I met a pretty nurse and I'm learning Italian. Jeeezopeeet, could he have used any more "ands"? :)

    [Ignorant computer geek]I think the story is pretty good t
  • Bret Easton Ellis, Brat Pack author who might have seen his best days long past, pens a book featuring Bret Easton Ellis as the protagonist, Brat Pack author who might have seen his best days long past. Fictional Ellis lives in the burbs where he lives an estranged lifestyle with his ex-model wife when suddenly young boys start disappearing and someone begins recreating the brutal murders from Ellis' own American Psycho.

    I don't actually have it yet (get's released tomorrow) but I specifically held off afte

  • Cool (Score:2)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) *
    I will have to take a look at these books, I am always looking for new things for my kiddo the avid reader :-) It looks like a bunch of his stuff is in the public domain:
    http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/m#a127 [gutenberg.org]
  • "Night lamp" by Jack Vance. Highly recommended so far, which shouldn't really come as a big surprise, given the author.

  • Oh... (Score:2)

    by ryanr ( 30917 ) *
    I'm one of those people who are chronically in the middle of 100 different books at a given time. Most of which are at home, so I don't know if I can make a very good list. Let's see what I can do from memory...

    -There's a Cthulu anthology I've just about finished
    -Just finished up Half-Blood Prince (wife and I read it aloud to the older kids, so it took a while to get through.)
    -Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity (yes, one of my own... I wasn't the main tech editor this time, so I didn't read ever
  • By David Allen.

    Of course, I can't seem to make myself read the last chapter :-)

  • On the recommendation of one E. Unraed of this parish. :)

    Or I will do, when I can fit some time in to start on the thing... *doh!*

    Otherwise, I'm mostly listening to podcast from the BBC website - they're doing a trial service offering a selection of programmes from the various BBC radio stations, including World Service.

    -MT.
  • Christina Rossetti | Goblin Market [utoronto.ca] - This poem is pretty fucked in he head. Victorians were twisted people.:P

    What am I reading? Err. I'll get back to you on it.:)
  • No, I didn't read it as a kid. But I'm pretty sure you are right that it is out of copyright, since I got a copy from Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] a year or so ago, and started reading it. In fact, that page has 43 of Mr. MacDonald's books ready for download. I actually haven't finished it yet... Where did I put that?
  • ....the first "Harry Potter" book. Seriously.

    I was reading a book about Katharine Hepburn and feminism, but my cognition really sucks right now, and I just couldn't follow it well enough to make it worth my while. So I completely copped out and went for easy to read escapism and borrowed my friend's "Potter" books. I'm not proud of myself, but I figure it's better than giving up on reading.

    I will be reading a book on fibromyalgia next so I can write a review on it, if I can harness enough brain cells. Then
  • From memory in no particular order:

    Essential X-Men Volume 1
    Midway through the fifth book of the Dune trilogy (can't remember the name...)
    The Peopleware Papers
    The Gideon Bible I swiped from the last hotel I stayed at. (Watched "The Passion of the Christ" on the weekend and decided it was time to re-read the book...)

    Plus countless comics (notably Fables, 100 Bullets, Desolation Jones, Planetary, Ex Machina, just about every Marvel with Wolverine, Street Angel, Assassin School, Soulfire, etc)
  • i'm glad you mentioned these books, because i discovered their existence and was interested, but then forgot them. i'm a little scatterbrained.

    anyway, here's a link for anyone interested.
    books by george macdonald on project gutenberg [gutenberg.org]

    i'm reading the story of the irish race by seumus macmanus. well, i've read the introduction to it anyway. haven't had much time for reading the past week or so. so i can't say whether it's any good or not yet. but i have always liked the name seumus. i'm also reading a fe
    • and you're NOT interested in a long rambling essay on faith, start with the ones i mentioned.

      If you're into the whole christian ramble, start with 'there and back again.'

      • interesting that he calls it there and back again, since things tolkien named macdonald as an influence and that's what bilbo named his book.

        thanks for the warning. i just wanted to read some interesting fantasy. i am a (type of) christian, but that had nothing to do with my interest in reading the fantasy.
        • apparently i reworded what i was saying, but left the word "things" in that post when i should not have. or maybe you like the off-beat, nonsensical edge it adds to that sentence, in which case i did it on purpose.
        • there and back again is the story of a young man in the course of becoming good, in the christian sense, in the context of his adventures through life. Apart from the fact that he's sexist, i don't mind a lot of his views. In particular he takes an interesting stance on the matter of religion, mainly that people ought not to worry about it and should worry more about their fellows, which i'm sure ruffled more than a few feathers when he suggested that people might not mind crossing themselves just to make t

Slashdot Top Deals

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.

Close