In the Company of Ogres

In the Company of Ogres
by A. Lee Martinez
Recommended Ages: 14+

Never Dead Ned lives a life of quiet mediocrity, crunching numbers in the accounting department of a mercenary army called Brute's Legion. His only talent is dying, which he has done hundreds of times and in nearly as many ways. And, of course, there is the bit where he keeps coming back to life. It's not strictly true that he's never dead; he just never stays dead for long. He doesn't know why he keeps coming back from the grave. He has learned to live with little fear of death, but little relish for life either—and even less self-respect. He just wishes it would end.

And then Ned gets promoted to commander of the Ogre Company. It's not a promotion he would have sought, by any means. Ogre Company is the rawest, most undisciplined unit in Brute's Legion, and it chews up commanders as fast as they can be assigned. Ned's only qualification for the job is his knack for resurrection. Even so, nothing prepares him for the series of freakish, fatal accidents in store for him, beginning the moment he sets foot in the Copper Citadel. And that's before the three highest-ranking officers under him vote on whether to assassinate him, like all the others before him; before two deadly females become romantic rivals over him; and before everything bad that can happen in a military unit manned by humans, elves, goblins, orcs, ogres, dragons, and trolls, happens.

While Ned works hard at staying alive more than half of the time, he meets a crazy combination of fantasy characters: an Amazon who wants a man in her life; a siren who wants to be loved for something other than her singing voice; a two-headed ogre named Lewis and Martin; an orc who looks like a goblin; goblins who specialize in shape-changing and roc-riding; a blind seer who can hear the future; a treefolk who considers "ent" a demeaning label; and a wizard who is allergic to magic, yet who is so mad for revenge that he is willing to risk being transformed into a platypus.

All that is very well, and fun in a violent, darkly humorous way. And Never Dead Ned soon starts to show tentative signs of not being a completely useless loser, or at least knowing that he is one and being willing to change. But only when the goddess who has been keeping Ned never dead sacrifices herself to save him, does he himself realize what a complete disaster he could be. For now, suddenly, Ned has a reason to fear death. In fact, if he dies, the whole universe could be destroyed. And that, friends, is when a demon styling himself the Emperor of Ten Thousand Hells swoops down on the Copper Citadel and snatches Ned out of its midst.

Inevitably, this leads to a battle in which gazillions of creatures perish, good and bad; a cosmic confrontation on which the fate of the universe depends; and a test of what is truly in Ned's heart, and the hearts of the ogres, orcs, goblins, elves, trolls, and others who care the most about him. By this point you might be one of them (choose your own species). At the very least, you will have enjoyed yet another hilarious, sexy, apocalyptic fantasy by the author of Gil's All-Fright Diner, Monster, and Chasing the Moon. Other books by A. Lee Martinez that I hope to read soon include A Nameless Witch and The Automatic Detective.

The Suburb Beyond the Stars

The Suburb Beyond the Stars
by M. T. Anderson
Recommended Ages: 12+

Several years ago, during a visit to New York City's Books of Wonder, I picked up a copy of The Game of Sunken Places, by this author I had never heard of, and thought it was great. And though I've read a number of his other books, it was only quite recently that I found out that the above title is only the first book in the "Norumbegan Quartet." This second book in the series did not prove very easy to come by. Barnes and Noble will let you order it, but won't carry it on their shelves. I poked around the online catalog of my city's public library system and found exactly one copy of it, residing in the branch just down the street from where I live, its last-known status "on the shelf." So I put in a request for it, and nothing happened. I went to the branch in person and searched the shelves. Though I found a copy of the third book in the series (The Empire of Gut and Bone), I could not find this book. I alerted the library staff, and they did as thorough a search for it as is consistent with Public Library staff culture, but it never turned up. Recalling my brief experience as a library circulation tech, I applied the principle: "If it isn't where it's supposed to be, it's lost forever." So, thanks to me, the City of Saint Louis now lists this book as M.I.A. And thanks to this book, I now have a card for the Municipal Library Consortium and the power to request books from any of three library systems in the city and county of St. Louis. And, incidentally, I checked out this book (the Municipal Library's copy, that is). I read it in one day. And now I can't wait to read Book 3.

It's been a few years since my trip to New York, and so also since I read The Game of Sunken Places. If you haven't read that book, do so before reading any further. Even if you have, like me, you may need a refresher. In the first book of the series, best friends Gregory and Brian got caught up in a weird sort of game with monsters and magical creatures and spooky, gothic-novel atmospherics, amid the woods of the present-day Vermont mountains. Eventually they realized that they were actually playing against each other, as representatives of two magical races: the Norumbegans, whose elven empire had long coexisted with mankind, but who now lived in another dimension for the sake of peace; and the Thusser, beings of an unimaginably alien nature, who fought to control and colonize our world. The game, to be played once every generation by two young humans representing the parties in the conflict, is meant to settle which of the two races will finally win the right to live on Earth.

Brian, representing the Norumbegans, won the latest round. He has already begun to design the next round of the game, which he envisions as a hardboiled detective story combined with supernatural beings. But then he finds himself being followed by a menacing, red-faced figure—attacked and almost killed by a monster in Boston's underground railway—nearly stabbed by an automaton that was supposed to serve as part of his game design. Brian and Gregory hasten to Vermont to find out why they have lost touch with Gregory's cousin Prudence, who knows all about the game, and the dwarf engineer Wee Sniggleping, who has been building Brian's designs. But where the forested mountain used to be, they find a rapidly growing residential subdivision. The suburb that nightmares are made of.

When you visit Rumbling Elk Haven, you will be chilled by the horror that lurks beneath the manicured lawns and behind the cul-de-sac house-fronts. It is a suburb where confused adults pull out of their driveway every morning and drive out to a vacant field, where they lie in the mud and hallucinate about being at work all day; where children ride their tricycles in endless circles, even while crying from exhaustion; where time speeds up and slows down in a confusing manner; where newspaper articles, brochures, and websites change continually while you read them; where an unknown force is tampering with people's ability to remember a time before the neighborhood existed; and where, at the center of development, there lies a whirlpool of space-time leading to a terrible alien world. A world that is poised to invade ours, if it is not already too late to prevent it. And there's no one left to prevent it but stocky, brainy Brian, his goofy friend Gregory, and a clockwork troll in medieval armor. Which is to say, it's all on Brian.

You simply have to read this book. Otherwise, without giving up atrocious spoilers, I just don't know how to convey to you just how frightening, weird, and disturbing are the menaces that menace Brian, his friends, and the whole human race in this book. Or how movingly the bond between these friends overcomes the serious differences between them. Or how much fun it can be to try to visualize something so indescribable that it can only be suggested, when you're in the hands of an author who is as good at suggesting indescribable things as M. T. Anderson. To give you even a faint idea would take so many words of description that, as quickly as this book can be read, you would be just as far ahead to request it from your local library system, or via Inter-Library Loan, or to order it online and read it for yourself. That's what I plan to do with the remaining two books in the quartet. Let's see if we can't, together, move this book and its companions from the "never checked out" to the "always on request" category in our libraries' statistical metrics. They deserve it, and you'll enjoy it.

M. T. Anderson is also the author of the "Pals in Peril" adventures (five books at this writing), the two "Octavian Nothing" novels, and such tempting stand-alone titles as Burger Wuss, Thirsty, and Feed. Book 4 of the Norumbegan Quartet, by the way, is The Chamber in the Sky.

The Golden Ocean

The Golden Ocean
by Patrick O'Brian
Recommended Ages: 13+

The main characters in this book are two Irish youths who grew up together: parson's son Peter Palafox, now a midshipman on H.M.S. Centurion; and his servant Sean O'Mara, who starts out as a lowly fo'c'sle hand and works his way up to bosun's mate. To be sure, they are fictional characters, and their adventure on the high seas reads somewhat like a very promising preview of the later Aubrey-Maturin novels. But the adventure itself is torn straight out of history. The Centurion really existed, as did her commander, Commodore George Anson; and their 1740–44 circumnavigation of the world, complete with all the main incidents described in this novel, actually happened. Even the journal Peter kept, on the recommendation of Mr. Walter the ship's chaplain, is based somewhat on the real Richard Walter's journal, which became a very popular book in its day. And in spite of the long dashes that frequently interrupt the characters' speeches (showing that the censor's objection to swear words was then still stronger than O'Brian's authority as a great novelist), this retelling of the adventure makes one feel closely, personally, thrillingly involved.

We first meet Peter on his way to catch a transport to his first commission as a junior naval officer. He is soon joined by his feisty friend Sean, and then by a fellow midshipman named FitzGerald, who proves to have no future in sea service. Ill-equipped and ignorant of the ways of warship, and singled out for extra hazing as a member of the despised Irish race, Peter has tough obstacles to overcome on his way to becoming a promising young officer. And that's besides a tropical fever in the Atlantic tropics, a bout of scurvy in the Pacific ditto, a disastrous ordeal rounding the Horn of South America, and shipwreck on the isle of Tinian. Meanwhile, the Centurions raid a Peruvian port, blockade a Mexican one, pursue a Spanish galleon loaded with gold, weather storms and plagues and anxious pauses and, finally, one climactic yardarm-to-yardarm battle with a better-armed and -manned enemy ship.

Peter is a lovely protagonist and sometime (through his journal) narrator. His speeches have an Irish lilt that reminds me fondly of Stephen Maturin, especially in his conversations with Sean. His experiences are laced with passages of anxiety, confusion, grief, excitement, and laughter that unfailingly rub off on the reader. And when, for example, he takes a heavily pregnant wild sow by the tail—and, the more fool, lets go—the result is a flash-forward of O'Brian's mature genius wedded to youthful high spirits:

But as Peter let the tail slip through his hand the sow whipped round with astonishing agility, and foaming with rage she rushed upon her pursuers. The tide changed on the instant, and now, scouring the grassy plain with feet that twinkled in the sun, Keppel headed the urgent rout. Immediately behind him came Bailey, whose laboured gasps persuaded Keppel that the sow was on his back: then came a mixed flight of midshipmen, running with the utmost perseverance, then the dogs, mute with alarm, and then the gravid, persecuting sow, with glaring, crimson eyes, skimming over the flowery turf, the embodiment of pallid fury.

I can't remember the last time I read anything that was at once so funny and so beautiful. If anyone else can, I would be glad to hear about it. In the meantime, I am eager to begin reading this book's sequel, a novel concerning the fate of one of the ships that was separated from Anson's squadron while rounding the Horn—a novel whose main characters are an even more exact early model of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin—a novel titled The Unknown Shore.

Hymn for Patience

hou holy Christ, my soul's own Liege—
My Hiding-Place, my Mercy-Seat—
Who once for all, in public view,
In thorn and nail and rattling breath,
By lowering sky and sundered tomb,
Was Victor crowned in hard-fought fight;

Within my darkness shine Thy light!
To fallen passions give no room;
The foe within me put to death;
And grant that I to Thee may hew,
As in the battle's fiercest heat,
So also in the long cold siege.

The pain that bites with sharpest fang
Thou knowest how to soothe, to heal;
Teach me as well the slow dull ache
To bear, and find Thee by me still.
Loosed from entangling sins each day,
Thus shall I know full joy indeed.

Unto that end, Lord Jesus, feed
My trusting soul, my doubting clay;
According to Thy word and will
Let me of Thy life's blood partake,
And through Thy body—no less real—
Absorb the peace the angels sang.

Love Among the Chickens

Love Among the Chickens
by P. G. Wodehouse
Recommended Ages: 12+

You may already have met Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge: a big, loud, swaggering adventurer whose taste in clothing is as doubtful as his respect for other people's property rights. Always "borrowing" his friends' money, often spending it on get-rich-quick schemes that are not quite foolproof enough, and involving his innocent chums in legal trouble and other disasters, Ukridge is the kind of nuisance that you never wish would go away—because wherever he is, something funny is bound to happen.

In this book, his chronicler is a struggling novelist named Jeremy Garnet. "Garny, old horse" (as Ukridge calls him) willingly submits to being dragged along to Dorsetshire on an experiment in chicken farming, Ukridge style. Naturally, anything that could go wrong, does. While Ukridge and his longsuffering wife fend off creditors by every means short of paying them, Jerry falls in love with the daughter of a prickly Irish professor named Derrick. But it's difficult to woo Phyllis when her father has taken offense at Ukridge's tactlessness and declines to be on speaking terms with either of the friends.

Spurred on by jealousy of a rival wooer, Jerry conceives a desperate plan. He bribes the waterman who rows the professor's fishing boat to upset the old fellow, then swims to the rescue and becomes Professor Derrick's hero. This works beautifully for a while—until the waterman exposes the plan, and our hero is more deeply "in the soup" than ever. His only hope of gaining the Professor's consent to marry Phyllis depends on the outcome of a round of golf, just as the trouble at the chicken farm comes down (more or less) to a contest of bare-knuckle boxing between the hired man and a mob of debt collectors. And of course, if Ukridge can be counted on for anything, it's to come through with another outrageous scheme.

This hilarious novel of romance, sporting life, social and financial mischief, and poultry farming features the title character of the short-story collection Ukridge. It was first published in 1906 (UK) and 1909 (US). It was, however, the revised and improved edition of 1921 that I heard on a 4-CD audio-book narrated by the late Jonathan Cecil. A lighter touch on the heart-strings, and a more hilarious flow of wit and absurdity, could hardly be found together under one title.

Ten Whines Against Weekly Communion

I am currently blessed to attend a church that celebrates the Lord's Supper every Sunday, plus some religious holidays. Several other congregations I have belonged to and/or served also celebrated the Eucharist weekly, at least at one of multiple Sunday services. My last LCMS church, while it did not have weekly Communion on the Lord's Day, had a Wednesday evening parlor service with the Sacrament every week except during Advent and Lent. Nevertheless it seems I have very often been in a position to hear these Top Ten Whines against the proposal that the congregation move from having Communion two or three times a month to every-Sunday Communion. And I kid you not. I have heard all of these whines pulled out, in person.

WHINE #1. "It will make Communion less special." Answer: Say that to someone who has experienced weekly Communion and then has to visit another church on "Non-Communion Sunday." Their hunger and thirst for the Lord's Supper puts the lie to this objection.

WHINE #2. "It will be too expensive." Answer: Maybe we should revisit our spending priorities. Most families in the congregation could well afford to commit to a higher standard of stewardship. But you should bite your tongue off before you compare the value of Christ's body and blood to any other treasure.

WHINE #3. "It will be too much work for the elders & altar guild." Answer: This could be an excellent opportunity to invite new people to join the Board and the Guild. Don't just give up before you've even tried to find the resources (human and otherwise) to make it doable.

WHINE #4. "It will make the service longer." Answer: We're quibbling over the sacrifice of a handful of minutes on top of the hour, +/- a quarter of an hour, most regular worshipers spend in God's presence each week. And this isn't time idly wasted. This is time devoted to one of God's most powerful means of reaching His children.

WHINE #5. "What if I don't want to take Communion every Sunday?" Answer: If you don't feel remorse for any sins or need for the grace of God, then by all means, abstain from the Sacrament. But that's a pretty mean reason for refusing to make the Sacrament available to someone who does need it, any given Sunday.

WHINE #6. "We'll never be able to invite our non-Lutheran friends to visit this church without getting into a fight about closed communion." Answer: If your friends and loved ones cannot be reasoned with on this delicate subject, then declare it a closed subject and refuse to argue about it. Meantime, the value of their feeling comfortably at home in our worship hour is probably overrated. Why not let the discomfort and strangeness of what they experience here work on them for a change?

WHINE #7. "We're going to miss saying the Apostles' Creed during the worship hour." Answer: On the other hand, once you stop going back and forth between Communion (Nicene) and Non-Communion (Apostles') Sundays, there won't be so much stumbling over the differences between the two Creeds. And if you really miss the Apostles' Creed, you can relieve your sorrow by attending the opening of Sunday School or learning to follow Luther's instructions for daily prayer (cf. the Small Catechism).

WHINE #8. "Are you trying to convert us into Catholics?" Answer: Pull the other one. It would be thrilling just to see you act like a Christian.

WHINE #9. "When I was growing up, four times a year was good enough." Answer: That was either because of a necessity that no longer exists, or because of imperfect knowledge that has been corrected since then. Some of us grew up before polio vaccines came along, and most folks got by well enough; and yet, everyone has been better off since we started taking polio vaccines.

WHINE #10. "You can't resist changing things, Pastor, so you obviously have no respect for our traditions." Answer: I have no respect for this objection, but that's not the same thing. If there are good reasons to make the change, and no good reasons not to, the last resort is to plead, "You just don't respect our customs." But really, how sacrosanct are these customs? I've heard this whine from a congregation that had existed less than 10 years. I've heard this whine from people who had let a whole series of previous pastors lead them farther and farther from historic Lutheran teaching and practice. I've heard this whine from people who, out of the other side of their mouth, were pressuring their congregation to switch to "contemporary" or "blended" worship. Whine #10 is basically unanswerable because it's irrational, dishonest, and/or a baited trap, loaded to spring against any possible answer. And so the best answer is to shrug this one off and move forward.

The fact that I have heard each and every one of these whines entertained, many times over, is a consequence of a fundamental mistake. The question of whether or not the congregation should move toward weekly Communion should never have been raised for discussion. The result is only and always an endless, unresolved, and increasingly contentious debate. And because the objections are irrational, they cannot be reasoned away. Rather than arguing pointlessly about the feasibility of instituting weekly Communion, why not just do it and take your lumps?

Great Expectations

Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Recommended Ages: 13+

There was a time in the British Commonwealth when crimes that would formerly have been punished by death were commuted to a sentence of "transportation." This is to say, the convicted criminals were packed into prison-ships and banished to Australia, to become forced colonists. There they led such a hard life that only the toughest succeeded—but even the most successful colonials would have gone home to England, if they could have. And that's why the second half of their punishment was an automatic sentence of death if they ever came back.

It is at this time in history, in a village close to the marshes along a stretch of the Thames River where the prison-ships anchored, narrator "Pip" cites his earliest memories. He begins his adventures while still a small orphan boy, terrorized by the older sister who has "brought him up by hand," and comforted only by the affection of an earthy, humble brother-in-law, a blacksmith named Joe. One day young Pip falls into the clutches of an escaped convict hiding in the marshes. Trembling under the convict's threats, the boy steals food from his sister and a file from Joe's forge and brings them to the manacled escapee. And though his conscience torments him, and he fears being found out as a thief and accomplice to a fleeing criminal (at least, until the convict is recaptured), Pip does not realize until years later how much this encounter will shape his life.

Meanwhile, an eccentric but rich lady named Miss Havisham sends for Pip, requiring him to play with her adopted daughter Estella. Pip is at once struck by Estella's cold beauty and upper-class pride. Once it becomes clear that Estella will always be the love of Pip's life—and an unrequited love at that—Miss Havisham pays him off by buying him an apprenticeship to good, honest Joe. But by this time, the seeds of discontent have been planted: discontent with the life of a village blacksmith. Pip now dreams of being a gentleman. He swears that he can never love any woman but Estella—even though she makes him miserable. With his ambitions set higher than his place in life, he does injustice to his true friends and passes on a good, caring girl's offer of love. And when a London lawyer announces that Pip has been named as the heir of a mysterious person of property—that the lad has what one may call "great expectations"—Pip abandons his home place and people in pursuit of his selfish dream.

During his years of education and young manhood, Pip does little credit to the honest, sensible folk who brought him up. He racks up big debts. He leads his best friend, schoolmaster's son Herbert Pocket, into wasteful habits. He falls among ill company, such as the thuggish Bentley Drummle. And he lets the unspoken assumption that Miss Havisham is his patron lead him to the assumption that he is intended for Estella. After having committed his heart and his credit in the most reckless way possible, he finds out that his "great expectations" are actually founded on—well, not wanting to spoil it for you, I'll only say that it isn't Miss Havisham. Rather, it's somebody whose presence in England puts him in jeopardy of death, for the reasons stated above. And that means young Pip must face the fact that he has, all along, been entirely and hideously wrong.

Pip's narrative of his "great expectations" is not the steadily-upward, through-adversity-to-greatness, coming-of-age-novel-hero's expected path. It is, in fact, a guilty confession by a young man who misjudged everyone, especially himself. And only when adversity has crushed his ambitions, ruined his fortunes, and brought him back to his humble beginnings, does he begin to go the right way. Not the way of effortless leisure and luxury in which the characters in novels at that time were expected to live, move, and exist; but the way of hard, honest work for a modest living, a disappointing outcome for most of his boyish dreams, and at best an ambiguous ending to his lifelong romance with Estella. It's a thought-provoking story in which money—not just the lack of money or the need for money—is the cause of all problems; in which a man's life (not to say his character) proves to be better after he has lost it all; and in which the most surprising plot contrivance is the lack of any plot contrivances, allowing the ending to embody the natural outcome—for the most part—of what has gone before. Happy, sad, or mixed, it is an ending that will touch and move you, if anything can.

The thirteenth of Charles Dickens' fourteen novels was first published in weekly installments in 1860-61, in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, then as a three-volume book later in 1861. Since then it has become one of Dickens' most loved and well-known works, frequently filmed and dramatized, and esteemed among the highest achievements of English literature. And yet it took me some ten years to get around to reading it, after a tear-bespattered copy of A Tale of Two Cities ignited my enthusiasm for the novels of Dickens. At this writing, only one Dickens novel remains that I have not read. It is strange that I should have left this one almost for last. I cannot explain why I hesitated. Perhaps I was turned off by a bad movie adaptation. Perhaps there was something in the dust-cover synopsis that left me cold. Or perhaps I instinctively wanted to save the best for last (or next-to-last). Although I have found delight in nearly all of the Dickens novels I have read in the past ten years, this is the only one that has risen to the same height of near-perfection and concentrated, high-powered genius as A Tale of Two Cities.

I am indebted to audio-book reader Simon Prebble, not only for contributing his expressive and versatile voice to the characters and narrator of Great Expectations, and so helping me overcome my shyness of this masterpiece, but also for concluding with a vocal footnote in which he explained why Dickens changed the ending of the novel during the proofs stage of its publication, and then actually read the original ending. If this novel has one major flaw, it is the revised ending in which, abruptly and out of continuity with the character of what has gone before, Pip and Estella end up together. Only one thing is needed to make this one of the Perfect Novels: imagining that it ends as Dickens originally wrote it.