I Begin Facing the Hydra

Just completed an application for the University of the Philippines College Admission Test. UP was never a first choice, but, hohoho, it's the first college I've applied to. We'll see how I do on the test (which, unlike most of the other admissions tests here, includes two sets of Filipino).
One down, but a lot more to follow. And the only fiery torch I have is to finish all the exams and applications. But it's exciting, nevertheless.

Updated Summer Reading List

I didn't anticipate the busyness of this summer, but, still, to have read about ten books over two months is pretty good, considering my abysmal reading rate at the moment. I added and subtracted from my last book list, and I very likely won't be adding any more, since school year starts next year.

Final list (unless nothing short of a miracle happens and I finish some other book before the end of the week):
1. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
2. Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body?
3. John Currid - Against the Gods
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
5. Dorothy Sayers - Clouds of Witness
6. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
7. Chaim Potok - The Chosen
8. Padraic Colum - The Children of Odin
9. Truman Capote - In Cold Blood. If all nonfiction were written this well, my fiction books would lie dusty.
10. O. Henry - The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories. I read it sparingly, since twist endings lose effectiveness when taken in rapid doses.
EDIT: Miracle happened. I finished another book since this post. I bought a hardcover edition of Leif Enger's So Young, Brave, and Handsome at Booksale (along with the Capote book above).  It was an easy read, hence, my fast pace. The book itself was a disappointment, in light of Enger's first book, Peace Like a River. It felt forced and unbelievable, which Peace Like a River could easily have been. That said, it still is a better book than the usual trash paperback.

What I left unfinished:
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. 62% through, about 600 pages. EDIT: If you consider Kristin as a trilogy, similar to LotR (this is how many publishers go on about publishing this work), then I've finished two more books: The Wreath and The Wife; but you may count that as a desperate attempt to look impressive.

Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I stopped when I had to read through the uncomfortable cross-dressing incident, but I've added it to my required reading this quarter.

Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories. I think I've read a bit more than half of the stories in here, but nearly all are worth rereading, and I've done that multiple times. Moved to required reading.

Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. No surprise that I didn't finish this. I enjoyed the quinque viae section, but it's only about 0.2% of the whole Prima Pars (First Part). It's the most daunting book I've ever picked up.

G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology. Kindle stopped reading PDFs, and so, I haven't made progress whatsoever, which is a pity, since the subject matter was becoming quite interesting.

(something I forgot to add to my list last time) Existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's Practice in Christianity and The Sickness Unto Death. I started reading both on the same day; I initially enjoyed Sickness Unto Death, which deals with despair and, eventually, original sin, more than Practice, which, after a not short first part, deals with Kierkegaard's famous leap of faith (or leap to faith), but reading about despair is not as uplifting as discussions about belief and faith; hence, I've read more of Practice than Sickness.

I dropped a few books altogether. I hope to improve next summer, but that's not likely.

Gojira

I paid to see Godzilla and Heisenberg, and there isn't much of either. So much for that.


It wasn't bad. The last few scenes were quite good. The first full shot of Godzilla and the blast of his roar seemed worth the nearly hour-long wait, but action was lacking, to my mind.

I -- and, I'm sure, many others -- wanted something like Pacific Rim. We got some of it, but whenever the action started getting interesting, we have the puny little humans closing their windows or the scene shifting to somewhere else on the Pacific.

I'd give it something like a B.

But I really hope the next Gojira film will be like Pacific Rim. (Mechagodzilla?)

Summer Reading

Reading has more or less consistently been a major activity for me during summer. I remember when I was about nine or ten, spending about five hours or more on my bed, zipping through all seven Harry Potter, all seven Narnia books, and a few other inconsequential paperbacks. It was during that summer that I set a reading record for myself: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix's 800+ pages in three days. The closest I've come since to meeting that pace was the summer after Harry Potter: Paolini's 800-page Brisingr in four days. I remember being severely disappointed with not having broken or at least met the record. Now, it takes me about a week to finish a 200 page book. But that's really because I read many more books simultaneously now -- which may or may not be a good thing.

I've tried to keep my list a bit more varied than what is usual for me, but it's not much of an improvement. But there is improvement, nonetheless.

So far I've read:
1. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars. Agh, what a terrible way to start off summer reading for an antisocial homeschooler. But it was a pretty good book. Green seems much more honest in dealing with cancer than I think any other author would be.
2. Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body? Peter Whimsey (and Bunter and the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Parker and the lot) gave me one particular impression: hey, look! it's Bertie Wooster (and Jeeves, etc.) walking around England solving crimes.
3. John Currid - Against the Gods. The first book really to give my list a sense of variety. Against the Gods is a short, recently-published book that introduces Currid's arguments for polemic in the Old Testament. It was a good read to interrupt all the New Testament reading I'd been doing.
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game. A rare time in my post-preadolescence (haha) in which I read through a book longer than 300 pages in roughly six hours. (You'll be shocked at how many times the characters use the word "fart".)
5. Dorothy Sayers - Clouds of Witness. I enjoyed this better than I did the first (Whose Body?). Yet more Wooster-Jeeves dynamic, except that Whimsey goes to America without Butler.
6. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner. A rare gem in modern fiction. To my mind, it transcends nearly everything wrong with contemporary lit.
7. Chaim Potok - The Chosen. One of the two books I've finished today (yay!). I love it, especially since it tells the story of two boys from their late high school to immediate post-college life. Of course, following C.S. Lewis' advice, I really should read it again, maybe when I'm well past college, but for the moment, I love it.
8. Padraic Colum - The Children of Odin. The other book that I've finished today. Finally, I can say that I've read a book of Norse mythology, and not just World Book and Wikipedia. (Of course not original text, but still.)

There still remain, started but unfinished:
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter (which really is a trilogy, of which I have finished the first book), G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology (about 80 pages into this 1000-page book), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I've defended Twain against those who would accuse him of racism, but I've never really read him, save through shameful *gasp* abridged versions, so this should be good. [And the explanatory note on Twain's "infamous" use of the n-word is deftly dealt with in the opening chapter. Vindicated.]), Beowulf (I've read an almost hilariously shortened version from my World Lit, but it does good to read the full. I think it's J. Hall's translation.), Veronica Roth's Divergent (snail's-pace reading, not horribly excited about it), Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories (I don't read it frequently, but when I do O'Connor never disappoints.), and Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica (or Theologiae, since I'm also trying to read it in Latin. I can read the original with some help from Wiktionary, and I can read the translation with relative ease, since I've read Chesterton's biography of the guy and multiple layman philosophical surveys. Not that I'll claim to completely understand what he's saying. [At least it isn't Talmud]).

I probably won't finish some of those books (Summa, in full, is about 3000 pages), and I'll definitely be reading others over the course of the summer.

(And, it really isn't as varied as I'd hoped for. Oh, well.)

Rereading Tolkien

"Who's watched the movies more than he or she's read the book?"
And, of course, I have to raise my hand.

(Not that the movie trilogy veers too far from the original content, at least not like the mutilated adaptation which is the Hobbit trilogy.)

Rereading The Return of the King has made me realize the richness of Tolkien's narrative, something which, when I was young, I missed.

Basically, it's awesome.

Ordinary Books

But then I suppose that the converse must be true as well, that if one only reads ordinary books, one will never know what a Great Book is.

Great Books

"... if one only reads Great Books one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is..."
~Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Well, rats.