A Good Summer for Reading, part 1

As the end of summer draws near, it’s struck me what a great summer it’s been for reading. Not only have I had ample opportunity to read new books, but I also found a whole bunch of winners in different genres. Today, I’ll start by reviewing the sci-fi/fantasy books I’ve read. In future posts, I’ll tackle some of the other genres.

I can’t remember the last book I had read by Isaac Asimov, only that I liked it and that I read it in middle school. While poking around the library’s sampler collection, I stumbled onto his Foundation Trilogy. Granted by now it’s a whole series, but I decided to stop at the end of the original trilogy. The series is pretty much a fictionalization of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire <corny radio voice> in space! </corny radio voice>. The books are written as strings of short stories, stories that become progressively longer from book to book, until in Second Foundation, there are only two. I found the books to be good, quick reads, and at first I thought, “Why don’t they make this into a movie?” But around the time I found out that someone had similar thoughts, I decided that it probably wouldn’t work too well. The fragmented narrative works fine in book form, but would be difficult to translate into the big screen. And with Roland Emmerich directing, you may want to read the books now before they get spoiled.

The first time I remember hearing about Ender’s Game was as a freshman in college, when my friend Dani told me it was her favorite book. I tried reading it then, but for some reason, couldn’t get into it. Now, six years later, I’ve finally read it, and I loved it. Briefly, the book takes place in Earth’s future. Humanity has been twice confronted by a mysterious alien race and is now preparing for a third invasion by training children to become military geniuses. One of these children is Andrew (Ender) Wiggin. The book follows his progress through battle school up until he passes his final examination. As with many sci-fi books, the series goes on from there, but as with Foundation, I was content to end at the ending. What makes the book great is Orson Scott Card’s ability to get you to care about the characters. Even though there’s a lot of action and excitement, the book is about people and relationships. More than being awed by technology and space battles, you can read it and say, “I’ve felt that.” I liked all the books I read this summer, but this one is in my top 3.

I remember as a kid watching the cartoon version of The Hobbit, it’s folksy music and occasional cheesiness. Around the time, I started into The Lord of the Rings, though I don’t think I even made it out of the shire it moved so slowly. On picking The Hobbit up this summer, I was pleased that it moved much more swiftly than I remember it’s counterpart did. The story of The Hobbit I expect is familiar: a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, goes with a bunch of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf to retrieve the dwarves’ treasure from the dragon Smaug. They have various adventures along the way, including Bilbo’s discovery of a magic ring that lays the foundation for the ensuing trilogy. My thoughts? It was a fun read with lots of adventure. I also appreciated how Tolkein took time to make the world of Middle Earth real without getting lost in it himself (as I remembered him doing in the Lord of the Rings).

Over the next few weeks, I’ll write about some of the other books I’ve read. Until then, if you’re looking for a good book, I’d recommend any of the above. Particularly if you like sci-fi/fantasy. (Though if you do, you’ve probably already read these.)

Swing, or being a musician among dancers

So BYU has a reputation of having a great dance program. In fact, its top team won two firsts at this year’s Blackpool Dance Championships. Since good number of my friends are also involved in the dance program, it was only a matter of time before I decided to take the plunge.

Actually, I already plunged six years ago when, as a freshman, I took the obligatory Dance 180 (“Social Dance”). As my first ballroom experience, I fumbled through and somehow got bronze level certification, even though I was pretty certain that dance was beyond me. One mission and four years of undergraduate degree later, I decided it was time to have another go, and accordingly signed up for Dance 280. In the intervening years, the occasional dancing I’d done convinced me that now I did not have two left feet, and maybe only one and a half.

So this term I am taking “Social Dance 2,” and as I had expected, things actually have begun to click . . . mostly. The class is going just at the edge of my being able to keep up. Most of the time, it’s all I can do to learn the steps let alone apply the technique. The other day the TA came up to me and the girl I was dancing with and suggested that we try to dance in more masculine and feminine ways respectively. Right now, he said, we were dancing too neutrally. He showed us what he meant, and I might have noticed some slight difference, but mostly I thought to myself, “Mr. TA, I’ll accept the compliment that you seem to think I have enough control over what I’m doing to make that difference.”

That was cha-cha. When it came time to take the test, I did okay, though I had only negative (though valuable) feedback on my test sheet. With that, we moved on to triple swing. I think dancers need a translate function, too. There’s one step we were doing, called the “windmill,” that took me forever to figure out. The step involves leading the girl around you, kind of like a windmill. In the mean time, the guy is supposed to rotate himself while triple stepping. I couldn’t wrap my feet around how to do that nor could any of my friends or instructors point me in the right direction (though they tried). Finally, I sat out watching the rest of the class as they did the step until I realized, “That’s what I’m doing wrong!” (I’m not even going to try to describe it.) Then all the advice I’d been given suddenly made sense.

So today we tested swing, and this time there was a positive comment among all the “too much back lean” and “occasionally shuffling”: “You’ve improved a lot since cha-cha.” There it is, folks: I’m moving up in the dance world, one comment at a time. Mostly, I think I’m beginning to learn how to translate dancer sense of space and rhythm into a musician sense of such.

Discovery: My Title Had *Two* Beginnings

Sometimes I write music “about” something. Other times I simply write music. My recent orchestra piece was one of those latter times. All the while I was writing it, I struggled to come up with a title. Even after completing the piece, two revisions later, and after having distributed the parts to the musicians, I still didn’t have a title for it. It was simply “Orchestra Piece.” I had an idea of what the music meant to me—life, light, energy—but I couldn’t encapsulate these feelings into words. Among my initial rejects were “It’s a Magical World” (the title of the first draft), “Sunflower,” and “Bodies Celestial.”

Daffodils
Wordsworth's poem neatly combined two images I had about the music: flowers (specifically daffodils, as seen above) and stars.

In the midst of this struggle to devise a title, one of my friends suggested that I look through some of her poetry books. I went through several, copying down lines I liked and mashing them together until I came up with a title that felt right: “Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars.” It fit, and that was the end of the story. I didn’t bother to remember what the poems were.

Or so I thought. This morning as I was sorting through my papers, I found a copy of Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” dated from February 2008. At first I didn’t recognize the poem until I came to the lines “Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way, / . . . Ten thousand saw I at a glance” (emphasis added). Suddenly, I realized, “Hey! This is that poem I used to come up with the title for my orchestra piece!” I was quite surprised. It would seem that this image has been sitting with me for the last two years, waiting to be rediscovered.

(As for the “Summer Has” part, I looked it up: It’s from Dickinson.)

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