Faith and questions: A lesson from Kate DiCamillo’s work
One of my recent projects is that of “deep-reading” (i.e., reading all of) Kate DiCamillo’s work. It has been a helpful and enjoyable practice, particularly as I think through my own writing projects. I like the way her mind works and the themes that make it into her writing. Authors are not always immediately aware of the themes that appear in their work, though readers are often quick to point them out. It appears that even for DiCamillo, this is an ongoing discovery (watch a video of DiCamillo discussing themes in her work).
She is not afraid of engaging real-life issues—tragedies of loss, death, abuse, denial, or even childlessness. For example, The Tiger Rising engages (more…)
Book Review: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
by Janna Levin
Anchor Books, 2006
230 pages (paperback)
Available
Amazon.com
Indie Bound
Warning: Some Spoilers
Some things cannot be proven and will forever remain uncertain. To accept that dangerous idea, one may need to be mad or be willing to risk it. Janna Levin’s novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines looks at the real lives of “two mad treasures,” the most important mathematicians of the last century, Kurt Gödel (1906-78) and Alan Turing (1912-54).
Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity were not the only challenges to early twentieth-century Enlightenment certainty. (more…)
PW: YA Novels Take Heat for Biblical Reinterpretation
Publishers Weekly is reporting on a hard-working YA novelist, David Michael Slater, who finds himself in a difficult place: on the one hand, people are finally talking about his books, on the other, they find them to be heretical:
In the first installment, The Book of Nonsense (2008), the twins uncover secrets about their own family history while also getting hints of a larger cosmic drama, learning about a secret language that God may have used to create the world. In The Book of Knowledge, they follow clues to the original Garden of Eden and discover that the record of primordial events recorded in Genesis may not tell the whole story. Read the whole story at PW…
Book Review: The Sparrow
The Sparrow
by Mary Doria Russell
Ballantine Books, 1996
408 pages (paperback)
From the beginning, we learn that the mission to Rakhat was a total failure. In 2019, a signal unexpectedly reaches Earth and the world is stunned to discover evidence of life on another planet. Bureaucrats did what bureaucrats do: debated whether they should send a mission to meet their newly-discovered neighbors. And while they sat on their fingers, the Jesuits did what they have done best for centuries: put together a team to engage in first contact with “God’s other children.” (more…)
