Erin Vincent, Delacort Press, 2007.

Say you’re fourteen years old, and your parents are involved in an accident. Your mother is killed instantly, and your father is severely injured. A month later, your father succumbs to his injuries. You, your older sister, and your toddler brother, now need to strike out on your own. Along the way, you deal with unsympathetic family friends, thieving relatives, insensitive news reporters, nattering classmates, questionable school counselors, predators of many stripes, and, thankfully, a few helpful friends and neighbors.

Vincent writes her true story in the frank, direct voice of her fourteen year old self. She not only describes her navigation of the emotional rapids, but also gives honest voice to the thoughts and feelings that one is not “supposed” to have. She includes enough humor to get the reader through the experience, although she made me cry several times before she was done.

Unlike most books billed as “uplifting,” Vincent’s doesn’t end with a triumphant epiphany, or a blazing message of hope for all humanity. There is a accomplishment, a victory of sorts, but it’s a much shakier, more human: an emerging-from-the-crucible kind of victory. There really is a message of hope for humanity there, but it’s not writ large, nor accompanied by the swelling of the orchestra. The message is much quieter. People experience terrible things. And people can, and do survive them, but it’s not easy and there are no guarantees.

P. H. Ditchfield, 1894, read as an e-book from manybooks.com

This litany of imprisoned, tortured, condemned, burnt, exiled, hounded, bankrupted, beaten, abused, reviled, and otherwise rejected authors is a fitting followup to god is not Great. While Ditchfield gave brief histories of authors doomed for their writings in a range of fields (which he groups as Theology; Fanatics and Free Thinkers; Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic; Science and Philosophy; History, Politics and Statesmanship; and Satire), the majority in all of these categories were condemned for ostensible violations of theological dogma. Some of these theological associations are pretty tenuous — for example, Ditchfield references “a recondite treatise on Trigonometry” that was condemned “because they imagined it contained heretical opinions concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.”

Ditchfield repeatedly waxes poetic on the plight of the writer, who nobly labors to share intellectual riches with a world that responds with scorn and violence. I can’t find much information about Ditchfield himself, other than that he was a prolific English writer and the Rector of Barkham Antiquary. His biases come through when he writes of critics, who hound poor authors to death. With regard to religion, he tries to maintain neutrality, but can’t help but chide some authors for their theological errors.

Even if the “fatal” of the title is not necessarily our modern usage of “leading to death,” reading this gives me renewed appreciation for where and when and how I live. I don’t have to think twice if I choose to blaspheme, criticize my government, or even write about trigonometry.

Christopher Hitchens, Twelve Books, 2007

Reading this book is kind of like coming into your first freshman seminar class where you are harangued by an extremely well-read and well-educated but overbearing, bullying, and quite possibly drunk professor. It’s intimidating, impressive, and, dare I say? amusing.

From the title on, Hitchens flaunts his disdain for religion. He offers up example after example of the philosophical contradictions of various religions, skewers beliefs by pointing out logical flaws, and condemns faith by describing crimes of organized religion. Hitchens spends most of his time on “the big three” of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but he is ecumenical in the contempt he heaps on other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism in the little time he devotes to them. He comes up swinging, winding up with a call for a new Era of Enlightenment, one without religion.

I can’t help but feel ambivalence. Yes, religious fanatics the world over are trying to create their own respective theocracies and suppress everything but their own threads of belief. I can oppose this without reservation. Yes, many of these same fanatics are ignorant, and don’t know much about their own religions. Attacking some of these people (like the kind who say “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me”) is shooting fish in a barrel, and doesn’t do anyone any good. The deeply faithful admire the believers for their faith, ignore their flaws, and take umbrage at the attack, while the nonbelievers already think of them as asinine idiots.

However, in what I feel is the weakest part of the book, Hitchens defends atheism from responsibility in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany by casting the personality cults as religions, and, in the case of Germany, by showing how religious groups lent early and vital support to the fascists. It comes off as awfully glib. Furthermore, it seems to me that the evidence supports the idea that religion is not the problem, but that the sins of religion are symptom of a deeper pathology. The universality of the crimes suggests that the accumulation and abuse of power is hard-wired in (at least a portion of) humanity. Religion is a useful tool to incite believers into evil behavior, but tribalism, nationalism, racism, or countless other means of division have done just as well.

As a devout and pious member of the Church of Sacred Doubt, I found some of the attacks on religion appropriate, I found some of them gratuitous, and I found many of them engaging. While the book could be dismissed as an atheist preaching to the choir, it is definitely thought-provoking, and, if nothing else, entertaining.

Ever since I saw a “how to” in Popular Photography back in the early 80s, I always thought it would be cool to make my own super-macro lens by mounting an ordinary lens backwards.

So, on Saturday, using 58mm skylight filter, a dremel tool, hot glue gun, and camera body cap, I created a reverse mount. Into this contraption, I inserted the kit lens (28-70mm) that came with my Nikon N-80, and, tried it out on the Nikon D-70. Obviously, autofocus and automatic exposure are out of the question (although it might be interesting to run wires across from the lens’ connector to the camera. Hm… maybe it’s not out of the question!), so it entails a lot of manual twiddling of focus and looking at histograms.

It’s too much magnification (even at 70mm) to hand-hold, and, even with my old tripod, it’s hard to get a sharp image. Also, with this kind of macro, there’s not a lot of depth of field to play with. I started by taping the aperture lever at full open, and didn’t get dramatically different results when I allowed it to stop down somewhat. I tried to figure out the optics of the situation, but quickly realized that with a variable aperture and a collection of lenses, I would need to go back and hit the books to understand the physics.

Here’s the stinger of a wasp, who was found dead on the driveway:

J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, 2007.

So, based upon
my predictions, I probably only got a C+ in Divination. Which is just as well.

Rowling managed to pull off a mostly satisfactory ending to the series. This last book abandons the leisurely pace of the previous two, and kicks into high gear right off. It accelerates from there.

I enjoyed the resolution to the Snape Question, which I thought was at least plausible within the framework that was set up. The tying up of the loose ends with regards to Horicruxes was satisfying. The body count was about what I expected, although Rowling toyed with us in a few cases. The disposition of Dobby and Kreacher and the house elves worked well, and felt like the groundwork had been well laid over the course of the previous books. The whole kerfuffle with the Elder Wand and how it plays out, on the other hand, is a little out of left field. We didn’t have much background from previous books to help with that.

I find that I have some dissatisfaction in retrospect; things that didn’t bother me while I was reading the book feel unsettled later. Some of the deaths were kept emotionally distant, or even rushed over — Harry sees bodies laid out on tables, and that’s pretty much it. Obviously, he’s got other issues at hand, but we don’t ever come back to experience any of the feelings. I would have liked the story to come closer to full circle with the Durstleys. But my strongest objections both involve scenes in train stations: the expository segment in the latter part of the Battle of Hogwarts didn’t feel right to me. We needed the information, but the circumstances felt forced. Again, I understand why the other train station scene was necessary, but the thought it generated more than any was “damn, what a bunch of breeders!”

Perhaps I’ll do what Karl’s doing, and re-read the whole series. If I do, I’ll write more, and probably with much less vague avoidance of spoilers.