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With a lack of commute and not having to manage any school activities or transportation these last 2 months, along with a 3-day weekend at Lake Huron, I’ve had time to read some books.

The difference this time is that I’m recommending against some of them. So be warned.

I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: The Candymakers by Wendy Mass

This was a very good book. Good characters, a bit of intrigue, no violence, and maybe just a hint of romance. This book tells the same story multiple times from each of the characters’ perspectives.

It may sound tedious when I type it like that, but it is done well and does actually enhance the story.

Next up: Secret Keepers by Trenton Lee Stewart

This was a good book. Good characters, suspense, no violence, and no romance. Oh, and an interesting plot. Two thumbs up.

Next up: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick

This was not a good book. I won’t go so far as to say it’s a bad book, but for me it was meh – not worth spending time on it. I was looking forward to the book, and I had heard good things about the author, so I was disappointed that I never really felt into the story.

There were some parts that never made sense, and some parts (an affair) that I disagreed with, but other books have had those aspects and still managed to engage me.

Adventurers’ Guild by Zack Loran Clark and Nick Eliopulos

This was also not a good book. Well, that requires some clarification. The first book was a very good book, but it ends with a To Be Continued situation, which makes you want to read books 2 and 3 of the trilogy.

However, much like The Matrix, you are much better off stopping with the first one, and ignoring the final 2/3 of the series.

The first book was just about everything I’d want in an adventure/fantasy book for middle schoolers. An interesting world and a variety of characters and a mission, plus an appropriate amount of violence for the genre and no romance.

The second book wasn’t as good as the first book, although good except for one word. One simple word changed the book from “Yeah that’s a good book I’d let my kid read” to “Something fishy is happening”. That word was “romantically”.

That word not only introduce thoughts of romance into the story, but it was, shall we say, non-traditional romance.

Plus the violence in the book started getting a little more gory. Not bad, but another reason to give me pause.

That was when things started gently sloping downhill. But the third book was when that slope turned into a cliff.

One: the romance aspect became a major storyline. Bad because that takes away from the action but also bad because this storyline is promoting inappropriate relationships. Not just telling about it, but having the authority figure tell the youngsters in the story that this kind of love is good.
Two: the violence became more gory yet again. It could be a lot worse, but it was disappointing to see the degradation.

My recommendation: don’t read any of the books in the series.

Last up: Greenglass House by Kate Milford

This was a good book. A little less action than my usual material, but I guess this would be classified as a mystery so the added suspense makes up for it.

The story turns a little too fantastic (i.e. it moved out of the realm of believability) near the end, but I think that’s a personal preference thing. I suppose most mystery stories have to have some way of tying things up, and it was certainly a memorable way for the author to do so.

That’s all so far. But my son just came home from the library with what looks like the sequel to The Candymakers, so I may have a fall book review post too.

They say life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent what you make of it. Or, if life hands you lemons, make lemonade.

I think the Sneetches point out what happens if you just take those lemons and eat them as-is. Or let them sit there and rot.

I’m not going to equate the Star Belly and the Plain Belly Sneetches with particular classes of humans. At least not in this post. This analysis of the two types of Sneetches should not be interpreted as blaming any group of people.

Take a look at the story, if you’re not familiar with it.

The Star Belly Sneetches decide to play ball. They play ball, and they have fun. They are not nice in that they don’t allow the Plain Belly Sneetches to play with them. What do the Plain Belly Sneetches do for fun instead?

Nothing.

Apparently the Plain Belly Sneetches are not able to think of anything to do on their own. They are fixated on the stars on the other Sneetches, and can think only of how to become a Sneetch with a star. They can’t think of anything else, including coming up with something of their own to do.

Another example:

So the Star Belly Sneetches have a bonfire. What’s to prevent the Plain Belly Sneetches from having their own bonfire? Surely the Star Bellies don’t have a monopoly on fire and sticks…

And the Plain Bellies don’t look like they’re starving, so they have access to food somehow. It’s just they are so jealous of the Star Bellies that they don’t think to do anything other than want to be at the Star Belly event.

Last example:

I pay money to go on vacation to a place with a beach. I use some vacation days so I can sit on the beach and do nothing for a short time. A few days with no responsibility at work – I can relax and enjoy the view, swim in the water, help the kids play in the sand, etc. You get the picture.

The Plain Belly Sneetches live in enough of a paradise that they have enough to eat without having to work, and they have a beach that they can enjoy.

But do they enjoy it? No! Why not? Because they’re losers!

Why are they not swimming, building sand castles, and playing on the beach? Because they’re so focused on what they don’t have (approval of the Star Belly Sneetches) that they can’t enjoy (or even use) they things they do have.

I’m being a bit harsh, but it’s a fiction book about made-up creatures so I can exaggerate my criticism. I would not have the same attitude to a real person, although I would still want to convey the same lesson.

Why would the Star Belly Sneetches want to include such a useless, dour bunch of Sneetches into their activities? From what I can tell, the Plain Bellies would dampen anyone’s mood and ruin any party – I don’t blame the Star Bellies for avoiding them. Hey Plain Belly Sneetches, how about you do something interesting on your own? And get the Star Belly Sneetches’ attention that way?

I prefer the Berenstain Bears book “No Girls Allowed”. That book is specific about the classes of people it is discussing (or classes of bears rather), but it gives a solution that made more sense to me. The boys don’t let the girls into their fort, so the girls get their own fort that makes the boys jealous.

But they both have the same root problem – people are basing their happiness on comparison with others. Do your own thing, that you like for yourself. Don’t depend on other people for your happiness.

And if you are curious, I think the most applicable facet of humanity to this book is the fashion industry. People go through so much effort and money to have the right clothes/accessories/cars/things that really don’t matter, other than to impress others.

In case you wanted to order bamboo plants online but didn’t know where to start, here are my experiences with 4 of the places. I’m listing them in chronological order, which for all practical purposes is random.

I was trying to find bamboo online, and I found a lot of bamboo online. But many of the places were either local pickup only with their stock online, or wholesale/commercial only. I did find a few places that would sell and ship to anybody on the internet, so I tried them out.

• Maya Gardens – mayagardensinc.com
  This place is everywhere it seems. You can order off their website, or off Ebay or Etsy or Amazon or other places. So this place has by far the easiest ordering ability, along with prompt service.

  But it is also the most expensive for what you get. Smaller plants, and limited selection, is the tradeoff for ease of ordering, it seems.

• Bamboo Garden Center – www.bamboogardencenter.com
  This place also calls itself Bamboo Plantation. I could order online, but it seems all orders go to the Pending status as default. My first order, I waited a couple weeks then I sent an email asking about my order status. They said one item was not in stock, so they’ll cancel that item and ship the rest. I then got an email saying my order was now in the Processed state, and it shipped and arrived soon after. The plants were decent size, so that worked out okay.

  The next season, I placed another order. I figured these items should be in stock. But the order still went into Pending. And sat for a couple weeks. I asked about a possible ship date, and I did not get a reply this time. But my order did change to Processed a few days later and then it shipped. Decent plants, again. Just not my favorite customer service.

• Bamboo Garden – www.bamboogarden.com
  This place was not exactly what I wanted, because I couldn’t place an order on their website. They have all the info – prices, sizes, shipping, etc. – but you have to email or call to order. I decided to try it, so I emailed them my order with my calculated total cost. They emailed back quickly, saying they were out of stock in that size of an item but I could get the next size up if I wanted. Friendly tone to the email, prompt responses, and willing to work with me. Once we settled on what the order should be, they then emailed me an invoice which I could pay online.

  So while I couldn’t order online all in one shot on their website, I could basically accomplish what I wanted all online. It wasn’t as painful as I thought it was going to be.

  The plants arrived and they were good sized. Plus this place has the best packaging, with rails of bamboo to protect/stabilize the contents of the box.

• Tripple Brook Farm – tripplebrookfarm.com/
  This place let me order fully online, like I expect to be able to do in the Year of our Lord 2021. I got an email right away saying my order was received, but I never got a shipping notice (nor an actual shipment), so after a couple weeks I emailed them. They replied right away, sounding apologetic, and in a short time I had shipping info and then the plants arrived.

  I don’t know what happened to my order at first, but they fixed it and were communicative, so it’s okay. The plants were a good size.

I expect that ordering bamboo plants is not a typical activity, so I have no idea how helpful this blog post will be to the general public. But I felt like writing it so this is what you get.

Since we took our vacation during spring break instead of the summer, I started my summer book reading in April. I’m writing about it now because I didn’t realize the book I took was the first of a trilogy (i.e. this is a review of 3 books, enough for its own blog post).

It was The Sea of Trolls by Nancy Farmer.

The book had an interesting setting, and interesting characters, and in general it was a good read.

It did stand on its own and had a good enough ending, but there are two other books after it.

Those are The Land of the Silver Apples and The Islands of the Blessed.

I’m just going to review the series in one lump – no need to get into the specifics of each book. If you like the first one, you’ll like the other two.

One note: the first book had a good ending, but the end of the third book left a lot open and much more of an expectation of another story. If you don’t like that to-be-continued feeling, stop at the first book.

No plot recap here, that’s what basically all the other reviews are for.

If you’ve seen any of the Marvel movies about Thor, you’ll understand a bit of what’s going on in these books. Or I suppose it could work in the reverse – if you’ve read these books, you’ll understand a bit of what’s going on in the Thor movies. If you are undecided about the order though, I recommend seeing the Thor movie first, if only for the reason that you’ll know how to pronounce Jotunheim when you see it in the book.

I saw one review blip that said the story has a bit of Star Wars in it, and I’d say that’s true. And that aspect of the story is the main concern with it – the spiritual aspect.

The story asserts that all religions are different, say, facets of the main “force”. That implies that the life force is the real religion, and all others are built off it. The story weaves together Norse mythology annd Christianity and Picts and elves and hobgoblins and it all gets jumbled together, to further the idea that they’re all different leaves on the same tree.

Oddly enough, this tree that is the provider of the life force in the book is known as the “tree of life” which sounds a lot like what was in the Garden of Eden. I’d go so far as to suggest that the author substitutes the Tree of Life for God. Yes, she took it from the Norse traditions of Yggdrasil. I’m just saying the way it’s presented in the book (calling it the “tree of life”) reminds me of a corrupted version of Genesis.

Whether that encourages or discourages you for reading the book, I’ll let you make that call.

One of the sayings that I didn’t understand for a long time was “You have to know the rules in order to break them.”

That and Outback Steakhouse’s slogan “No rules just right”.

But I always thought it was easier to break rules if you didn’t know them, because how are you supposed to obey something if you don’t know what it is. In fact, it seemed more likely to me that you would break the rules if you didn’t know them, and knowing the rules would spur you to follow them. But the phrase was meant for guidelines and I was applying it to laws.

Then I learned something from Picasso. I now get to share my favorite illustration (literally and figuratively) of that concept. Pablo Picasso was an artist who was known to not follow standard rules.

First off – a quiz! Which of these pictures was drawn by Pablo Picasso?

Figure A.

Figure B.

Figure C.

If you answered B, you are correct.

And if you answered C, you are correct.

Also if you answered A, you are correct.

Those pictures are from a sequence he drew to demonstrate his process for reducing an object to its essential elements. In order for him to draw abstractly, he had to be able to draw the items “correctly” in the first place.

In other words, he had to know the rules and be able to follow them, in order to be able to break them.

But they aren’t rules, so he didn’t break them. He just understood his discipline well enough to know how to change things to accomplish his goals.

Complete this phrase: Rules were made to be ________

Did you think “broken”? If so, no hard feelings, but you’re wrong. I guess most modern Americans would complete that phrase that way, probably without even thinking about it. For some reason that phrase has stuck.

But it isn’t right.

Rules were made to be followed. That’s kind of the point of rules. Rules were made to keep things working well, keep you safe, and prevent problems.

Gee thanks dad, for that life lesson. That’s just the background information; that’s not the whole blog post – stick with me for a bit.

If your first instinct is to try to break the rules, then you’ve been trained wrong and life will be more difficult than it needs to be. Not that rules can never be broken, but now we need to delve into some nuances.

I’d like to remove the word “rules” and use “laws” and “guidelines” instead – split the term into those two general categories. If you think of rules that way, then it helps to understand when you could try to break them.

People have used the term “rule” in such phrases as “rule of thumb” or “unspoken rules”. I would put those into the category of guidelines rather than laws. A rule of thumb is a guideline that you follow if you don’t really know what you’re doing, or you do know what you’re doing and thus you know it’s not worth spending time to do a proper analysis on this minor part of the project.

Also unspoken rules aren’t real rules.

There are other rules that would fit better in the category of laws – things that are prohibited for a reason. Things such as “no glass in the pool area” or “fire door – keep closed”. If you know the reason for the law, you understand that it doesn’t make sense to try to break them because nothing good can come of it.

But guidelines, on the other hand, if you know the reason for the guideline then it helps you to know when not to follow the guidelines. Things such as “don’t go swimming within 30 minutes of eating” are good ideas but once you know it’s to prevent cramps from strenuous exercise with a full stomach, you know you can splash in a pool right after having a snack. Some people might call that breaking a rule, but I don’t like that phrase because it gives people the attitude that they know better than the rules in general, thus it diminishes the law-types of rules.

And I do believe there can be a time for breaking law-types of rules, but that requires a consideration of risk vs. reward (or consequence of breaking the rule vs. consequence of following the rule). An example would be breaking traffic laws in the case of a medical emergency – is that right or wrong?

In summary: if you don’t know what you’re doing and why, then just follow the rules.

I used to wonder how my wife could read essentially the same book over and over again. I mean, the books did have different titles and different authors, but if you summarized the plot in one or two sentences it could probably apply to all of them.

Then I started reading Joel C. Rosenberg books. They were interesting, I liked them, I kept reading, and then I realized how my wife could keep reading variations of the same book. And I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Here’s my summary of the books. Note that each series is meant to be read in order. And the title of this blog post is winter 2021, but I’ve been reading these since July 2020. It’s just in winter 2021 I finished all of them.

I started with the original series – The Last Jihad, alternatively known as the Bennett and McCoy series. This seems to be his earliest work, as the writing is slightly clunkier than his later series. But it was engaging, and educational in some spots. You will certainly come away with a better understanding of some of Ezekiel’s prophecies after the 3rd book.

What I also liked about this series was that it showed how the end times and the anti-Christ could happen from a geopolitical perspective. My exposure to end times stuff has been from the spiritual and theological angle. Not that these books discount or ignore that – indeed there is much scripture referenced in the later books – but the focus is different.

My comparison is that this series starts out like Tom Clancy and ends up more Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins.

Also, the series ends pretty conclusively, but not completely so. There could be another book after the 5th one, but it understandable why he ended it there.

I then read the next series available at our library: The Third Target, alternatively known as the J.B. Collins series. This series was different because it was Rosenberg’s foray into first-person perspective. It didn’t take much getting used to, but he didn’t go back to it for his other books so I think he didn’t care for it.

This series came to a definite conclusion – no chance for another book. Well, I suppose there always could be, but it would be a stretch for this one. This was a little darker than the other series, probably the same amount of violence but a little more depravity to contrast the bad people from the good people.

Next up: The Kremlin Conspiracy, alternatively known as the Marcus Ryker series. This one was back to third person perspective like the original series, but centered around Russia rather than Israel and not much in the way of end-times prophecies. Mostly just military action. The third book ended well enough, but there were a couple of question left unresolved. Then a couple weeks after I finished the series (and was halfway through the next), I saw that Mr. Rosenberg had a fourth book coming out for this series.

Finally: The Twelfth Imam, alternatively known as the David Shirazi series. This was more in the spirit of the original series, but focused on Iran and surrounding countries. And not the standard end times settings, but a possibility of what could happen. This series ended fairly well; I’m not expecting any surprise fourth book for this one.

Basically, if you like any of JCR’s fiction books you’ll like them all. But you can’t just pick a book at random and read it, you need to read them as a series. You can pick a series at random and read it – there’s no overlap or crosstalk at all between series.

And you may be wondering why I’m reviewing only this one guy’s books in this blog post. No ulterior motives – his books are the only books I’ve been reading for the last few months. But now that I’ve read all the fiction series he has, I’m adrift in looking for what to read next. Browsing through the library, I happened upon a Jules Verne book I hadn’t read yet, so I’m in the middle of that. I’ll try to include that in my next reading update.