Brief Round-Up

A couple of links for your weekend reading:

Jen Robinson has an excellent list of Speculative, Science Fiction and Dystopian Fiction for teens. Some of these books were actually published for adults but as Jen notes have definite teen appeal. Do give it a look.

Also, Carlie has an engaging list of "Guy-centric YA Romance" at the Libraries Unlimited quarterly newsletter. I'm never sure if this is a genre that works with guys as much as it does with girls - or even works for guys at all. To some degree I wonder if guy-centric YA is really a slight variation of the genre that is still going to be predominantly read by female readers, just written from a different perspective.

Any thoughts on guys reading romance, I'd love to hear them.

Airman Takes Off

Reviewed by Steven Wolk

So, imagine that you are 14 years old and have been unjustly imprisoned. It is the 1890’s and you live on the Saltee Islands off the coast of Ireland. You are in a hellhole of a prison, and the guards are under orders to break you, to make you obedient; so they hire a human grizzly bear by the name of Otto Malarkey. Each day he comes to beat you. Your cellmate gives you one bit of advice: You must kill him. And this cannot wait. Tomorrow, when Otto pays his visit, it must be his last. So, what do you do?

This dreadful quandary befalls Conor Broekhart in Eoin Colfer’s magnificent Airman. Fourteen years old, his heart beating wildly for his lifelong best friend, Princess Isabella, Conor falls victim to the leader of the Saltee military, Marshall Bonvilain, who has been plotting for years to take over the islands. I give Colfer tremendous credit because of all the challenges Conor confronts, including his impending date with Otto, this boy uses his head more than he uses his fists. Don’t get me wrong; Broekhart does not shy away from a fight. But he’s also got a heart and he’s got a brain, and he uses them both.

Conor was born to fly. In fact, he was born in a hot air balloon. As the story begins his scientific brilliance saves the princess and he is rewarded by King Nicholas – a kind and cool king if there ever was one – to have the same private tutor as the princess. After years of education from tai chi to fencing to physics, he is set-up by Bonvilian as a traitor and tossed into the dark and dank diamond mine prison on the Little Saltee Island to slave his life away. Well, needless to say, this boy does not accept his fate. Secretly, he spends his time in prison designing a flying machine – an aeroplane. Can stonewalls imprison a boy who is meant to fly?

I’m a sucker for history, and while Colfer creates an entirely fictional history of a fictional country (the Saltees actually exist, but they’re uninhabited), he peppers it with real history, like the Civil War and real people, like Leonardo da Vinci and Queen Victoria and Darwin, and he makes that place come alive. This book is in the rare genre of historical science fiction. While most of the book reads like adventurous historical fiction, many (but not all) of the flying machines are imaginary. This all makes for a fabulous ride. It is a book that good social studies and science teachers should get excited about and have in their hands on the first day of school. It takes fighting, flying, fencing, and a love for science and wraps it in a story that makes the reader appreciate history. This book – a work of adventure fiction – puts social studies textbooks to shame, because Colfer knows that history really is adventures into the unknown. Just maybe, if I had read this book as a kid I would have had my eyes opened to the thrill of the past and the joy of science and the delight of thinking. And I would have seen that a book could be both exciting and intelligent.

While many books that pass their 400th page could have used an editing trim (The True Meaning of Smekday, hysterical but too long, comes to mind), Airman does not waste a word, and what wonderful words they are. Walk into a bookstore and peruse the kids’ and young adult shelves and you will be practically assaulted by the number of adventure books. And while some of them certainly have plots full of gusto, not many have the words. So I’ll be blunt: Airman is chock-full of gorgeous writing. It flows, man, like a kid with wings, sailing above the clouds. Read it. Devour it. Fly with it. Airman soars.

Nicholas Christopher's Bestiary

Following up on Justin's post yesterday, Nicholas Christopher wrote an amazing novel about one man's search for an ancient bestiary. Here's a bit from my review last year of The Bestiary:

There is a lot more in store for Lena and Xeno as they travel in and out of each other’s lives, but before that relationship can unfold Xeno has to discover the Caravan Bestiary and begin his long personal journey to recovering it. He is introduced to the book while at school, at the age of 15. His history teacher tells him about it after Xeno professes an interest in imaginary animals (this follows the interest generated by stories he was told by his grandmother). He learns that bestiaries are a category of books devoted to imaginary animals. In printed form, the subject dates back to the Middle Ages, and Christopher draws strongly from the known facts about such books, including real titles and histories, when detailing Xeno’s growing interest in the subject. The Caravan Bestiary is fiction, however. As his teacher explains it was, “an incendiary work, at one time known only to the powerful -- princes and churchmen -- who believed in its latent power, and to scholars who secretly passed it among themselves.” Its contents were, “the animals lost in the Great Flood.”

In other words, as Xeno exclaims, “The ones that didn’t make it onto Noah’s ark.”

According to an interview on his site, Christopher based the Caravan on existing bestiaries such as the one found at the Abbey of Revesby in Lincolnshire, which was compiled by 13th century monks. He also used the lives of true researchers over the centuries who have hunted bestiaries to imbue Xeno’s own hunt with an air of authenticity. This attention to detail, and the namedropping of recognizable historic figures like Lord Byron, add another layer to Xeno’s story, and make it far more believable than other literary mysteries.

Nicholas Christopher is one of my favorite writers; if you have an interest in bestiaries, then you should certainly check out Xeno's adventures.

Make your own monster manual...

Seeing Monday’s interview with Rob Heinsoo, the architect of the new Fourth Edition of D&D, I got an old thrill. I never played 3rd edition—I moved around too much for the last ten years to find a group to play with. But Dungeons and Dragons is embedded into my brain, my way of thinking—for instance, I’ve just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s forthcoming The Graveyard Book, and immediately I saw the possibilities of playing whole campaigns in that world. It’s a way of absorbing and making your own some of the awesome things we read, especially the creations of incredible world-building authors.

And from the interview, it looks like it will be easier than ever to adapt the ideas of folk tales, myth, and fiction to this new edition. I thought I’d write a little about two books on my shelves, two amazing bestiaries, and then toss it out to everybody out there.


First, the classic Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges is an amazing find. I love it just for the depth of Borges’ research (I mean, he includes the Simourgh, a mythical bird from the classic 12th century Persian mystical poem The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar) and for the sense of whimsy he has about these creatures, what they are, and their ultimate significance. In other words, the books gets you thinking about the monsters and beasts in ways that stretch and tantalize your imagination.

The other bestiary I love is the recently published Beasts! edited by Jacob Covey and published by Fantagraphics. Each entry has a small paragraph of mythology or folklore followed by a full page painting or illustration by some of today’s most exciting cartoonists, illustrators, and graphic artists. We’re talking Art Chantry, Brian Ralph, Tim Biskup, Colleen Coover, Mat Brinkman—artists who’ve done some of the coolest comics, rock posters, grafitti, and graphics around today. The first edition sold out, but the paperback will be available in October, about the same time as the second volume comes out.

So, what’s your favorite catalog of strange creatures and mythical things?

How to Rule the World

Evil: When I have the map, I will be free, and the world will be different, because I have understanding.

Robert: Uh, understanding of what, Master?

Evil: Digital watches. And soon I shall have understanding of video cassette recorders and car telephones. And when I have understanding of them, I shall have understanding of computers. And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being!
-Time Bandits

So you want to rule the world. Is that it?

The old way of getting started would have been to read Sun Tzo’s “Art of War,” but really you’re not going to get anywhere with spears and not even with guns or F-15s. Look at Google, do they have guns? No, but they’re pretty close to ruling the world, so you better step on in it.

The first book you need to read is...

“Macromedia Flash MX Game Design Demystified” by Jobe Makar.

It is true that people are doing some cool stuff with digital watches, but really I think it's safe for you to skip to computers.

So, you’re going to need to program, right? Personally I like Flash. Everybody’s got a Flash plug-in installed on their browser these days. You don't have to worry about jamming your message down the world's throat only to find that the world got an error message instead.

And just look at what a Flashmaster can do.

Programming in Flash can drive you nuts sometimes, but it handles all sorts of the really annoying stuff for you. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from “Macromedia Flash MX Game Design Demystified” by Jobe Makar. (This is actually a newer version than I used.) The book came with a trial version of Flash MX. When you’re ready to really rule the world, you may have to cough up some dough for the official version.

Starting with a book like this is the way to go. The CD has many of the sample programs on it, so you can rip out code and use it to jumpstart your own programs. If you run into something that's not in the book, you can probably find help online to get you over the hump.

Makar takes you through the geometry behind the games. The Pythagorean Theory is at the heart of a video game and he shows you exactly how and why to use it. It's mind-expanding stuff.

The work in here on tile-based worlds is incredible. I used it to create this faux 3-D train simulator (at my wife's Website). And remember, I'm just a rank amateur. Or I was until I read this book.

In addition to making games, banner ads, web apps, etc..., writing programs is going to make you smarter. You'll become a problem solver. A thinker-arounder. A Gordian Knot cutter.

And you're going to need to be all that when you do rule the world and mortals come to you with their petty problems.

Next time on How to Rule the World: Attracting Minions.

The Claws That Catch

Leave it to artist Christopher Myers to remind us that not all children’s books are merely the “products of wild imaginations and unfettered flights of fancy,” as they are often made out to be. “{M}y books are, more often than not, products of painstaking research,” he writes in the closing author’s note of Jabberwocky, Myers’ re-imagining of the classic nonsense verse by Lewis Carroll, published last year by Jump at the Sun/Hyperion.

And leave it to Myers to present us with another example of a picture book that appeals to teens. Myers takes this legendary poem---written over one hundred and thirty years ago and published in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Carroll, the pen name for the Reverend Charles Dodgson---and sets it on the basketball court in a contemporary, inner-city setting: “The slithy toves” who “did gyre and gimble in the wabe” are jump-ropers, looking over their shoulder to see the Jabberwock’s entrance onto the basketball court. He’s a basketball behemoth, a cyclopean man with seven fingers, looming on the court, ready for a face-off. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!”

In Myers’ world of monsters on the court, “the claws that catch” take on an entirely---and most ominous---new meaning, at least for the young boy who has decided to take on the Jabberwock. His “vorpal sword in hand”? His tennis shoes. The “tumtum tree” he rested by, standing a while in thought? The metal fence surrounding the court. “The vorpal blade” going “snicker-snack”? The slam-dunk that defeats the towering Jabberwock. And the “galumphing” of the victor, as he heads back with the Jabberwock’s head? The thumping of the basketball as the young boy dribbles away from the game, triumphant.

Myers’ vibrant, shimmering art work is stunning. It is a bold palette he uses (dark blacks, deep reds, bright yellows), an electric heat emanating off these players, dripping off the Jabberwock in the dramatic “jaws that bite” image. Even the large, stocky, multi-colored text yells with its own magnetic energy. Myers’ many instances of toying with perspective in the book, as evidenced on the book’s very cover, manage to be both playful and terrifying at the same time, what with the seven-fingered basketball monster with “eyes of flame,” burbling and whiffling through “the tulgey wood.”

Kirkus Reviews wrote, “{t}he choice of setting is brilliant, allowing the reader to join the artist in seeing the heroic possibilities in play.” And for those curious as to why exactly Myers did choose this setting, there is a “short note on the origins of this book” closing the tale. Evidently, Charles Dodgson had an interest in “sport as a moral battleground,” Myers writes. Myers also describes stumbling upon the word “ollamalitzli” in the margin of one of Dodgson’s many diaries at the British Library:

“It refers to an ancient Mesoamerican game of religious and ritual significance played by several cultures, including the Olmecs and Aztecs. The object of the game was to manipulate a rubber ball though a stone hoop affixed high on a wall. Dodgson surely had read about the game, much the same way that James Naismith, ‘inventor’ of basketball, had read about it, in one of the many missionary journals that were popular in that day, especially among doctors of divinity (which both men were). Clearly, a basic familiarity with this nascent form of basketball is central to understanding the work.”

This title, published last Fall, is hardly brand-new, but if you haven't seen it yet, it’s more than worth a look, especially for those interested in the work of contemporary artists, as well as those interested in classic poetry revisited in striking ways. Publishers Weekly wrote, “{w}hile the merit of imposing a narrative logic on a work celebrated for its nonsense remains debatable,” this is still a one-on-one game on the basketball court to be celebrated. O frabjous day!

{Quoted excerpts from JABBERWOCKY: THE CLASSIC POEM FROM LEWIS CARROLL'S THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE, reimagined and illustrated by Christopher Myers © 2007, published by Jump at the Sun/Hyperion. All rights reserved.}

ADDENDUM: Here's a quick addendum, since---as Monica pointed out in the comments section---URLs cannot be posted in comments.

I want to briefly link to the New York Times letter-to-the-editor and response from Myers of which Monica spoke. It is here. Registration should be required to read, but it is free.

Back to your regularly scheduled reading . . .

Tracking trash in the Pribiloff Islands

I was very impressed with Tracking Trash by Loree Griffin Burns, an in depth look at just what we dump in the ocean every year and how it affects marine wildlife (and the water itself.) Here's a bit from an interview I had with her for the Winter Blog Blast Tour last November:

To be honest, the environmental part of this story snuck up on me. I was still very focused on the science of ocean currents the first time I interviewed Curt. At some point during that interview I asked him how many containers fall off of cargo ships each year, and his answer shocked me: between one thousand and ten thousand. Ten thousand! That was the moment I began to wonder how much trash was actually in the ocean, and the direction of my research changed dramatically.

The very real impact of trash in the oceans (including literally tons of abandoned or lost fishing nets and gear, is felt every year on St Paul Island where the fur seals congregate between tens of thousands of pounds of debris. The pup population is on a steady decline in the Pribiloff Islands and all this trash is considered one of the problems. The Anchorage Daily News reports:

Meanwhile, concerns about fur seals becoming entangled in debris and dying are increasing. From 1998 to 2005, there were 795 sightings on St. Paul Island of fur seals that appeared to be entangled in debris. Of those, 337 capture attempts were made and 282 fur seals were disentangled, according to the island conservation office.

"There is a culture that has abused the oceans for decades and decades and that has got to stop," said Bob King, debris coordinator of the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation.

Cleanup efforts are one way to attack the problem. Last year, 20,000 pounds of debris were removed from 2½ miles of St. Paul Island beaches -- enough to fill two 20-foot truck trailers. Cleanup organizers expect even more this year.

If you want to have your mind blown, go read Loree Griffin Burns' book and then see what you can do to clean up the area in your hometown.

Interview: Rob Heinsoo, lead designer of D&D Fourth Edition

Rob Heinsoo has been lucky enough to take his passion growing up and turn it into his career. This demigod of gaming has worked on everything from trading-card games to board games to miniatures games, as a freelance designer and now working for Wizards of the Coast. Most recently, he led the team behind Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition--a new installment of the game with a faster, more fun play-style that's likely to pull in new players. Rob talked to us at Guys Lit Wire about the new D&D, how he got involved in gaming, and what books got him inspired as a teen.

What was your first experience with role-playing games?

In 1974 I was 10 years old, living in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I’d just read the Lord of the Rings. I was already interested in wargames, and I read in a military miniatures magazine that there was a game that was about elves and orcs and dwarves. I ordered D&D from a wargames catalog and received the original three booklets in the brown box.

The system went way over my head, but I loved everything about D&D’s feel. I couldn’t understand most of the rules and didn’t realize that polyhedral dice existed, so I put together my own system adapting the melee rules from a Napoleonic miniatures wargame book my father had bought for me earlier, basically rolling six-sided dice and adding bonuses for things like magic weapons.

I drew three levels of a dungeon and ran games for my friends. I know I ticked everyone off pulling a cheap stunt with a werewolf that changed shape and ambushed the characters. And I killed a few other characters in a room that was based on the Lord of the Rings scene outside the gates of Moria, with a tentacled Watcher in the Water. My friends hadn’t read the Lord of the Rings and the monster in the water came as a surprise.

Those first games in Kansas ended when my friends found the most interesting part of the dungeon, something I’d labeled as a School for Dragons. I loved the idea, probably because I was reading Anne McAffrey’s Pern books by then, with humans and dragons cooperating to preserve their planet’s ecology. But my imagination wasn’t up to actually envisioning what would be going on in a school for dragons, much less what would happen when my friends’ characters went there. About the same time, I realized that we weren’t actually playing by anything like the real rules. So we went back to playing the Napoleonic wargame and took turns telling each other fantastic adventure stories that were similar to what we thought we might be able to play using D&D if we could actually understand the rules.

So did you keep on trying to play D&D and eventually get it right?

Yeah, by 1977 in Oregon, when I was 13, I’d figured the rules out, and put a sign up in an actual game store saying that I had a dungeon ready and would be happy to run a game for players. I had two grown-ups answer the ad, graduate students at the University of Oregon. When the gargoyles in my dungeon attacked and I started drawing slips of paper out of a blue plastic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cup, these guys said, “Wait, what are you doing? Let’s just use dice,” and brought out twenty-siders, which I’d mentally filed as mythological objects.

What else were you into at that age? Were you a big reader in your teens?

I got into soccer because we had been in Germany during the 1974 World Cup, so when we moved back to the States I started to play organized soccer and loved it. My brother and I played a lot of other sports just for fun, and a couple of neighborhood ball-combat games that I’d invented the rules for and managed to get everyone else to play. I had a good voice and sang in choirs and musicals. The other 60% of the time I was into reading and gaming.

Who were your favorite authors?

If we’re still talking 1974 through 1975, I was into Edgar Rice Burroughs, all the Tarzan books and all the John Carter of Mars books. I even made a board for the Martian chess game that was in one of the books, it was called Jetan, on an orange and black board, and it wasn’t terrible. I read a lot of Andre Norton then too, my favorite of hers was called Star Guard. But my favorite book at that time, along with the Lord of the Rings, was Watership Down.

I transitioned steadily toward authors I’m still fond of today. Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories were huge for me, I read them a long time before I read Moorcock’s Elric. My favorite author was Roger Zelazny (Nine Princes in Amber, Lord of Light, Jack of Shadows).

And it’s no accident that a lot of these books had some echo or wandering splinters in gaming. I’d read Watership Down before I started playing the game it inspired, Bunnies and Burrows. But Monsters! Monsters!, an RPG in which the monsters attacked human villages and cities, was the first place I’d seen Roger Zelazny’s name, since they’d borrowed his "shadow jack" concept for a monster, so I started reading Zelazny because of the monster-RPG based on Tunnels & Trolls, one of the early D&D alternatives.

The list goes on. Andre Norton’s Star Guard led me to a science fiction miniatures game of the same name by McEwan Miniatures. The game had no relation to Norton’s book, instead it owed a debt to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which turned out to be a much better book, and got me reading Heinlein.

The other strand in my reading was military history. My dad had a huge military library and I read shelves of it before I was in junior high.

So gaming had a big influence on you growing up? Even in just shaping how you thought about things?

Yeah, a huge influence. Especially when I discovered Greg Stafford’s brilliant Glorantha, the world for the game Runequest. Glorantha simultaneously led me away from D&D and more or less away from my family’s religion, because it got me reading anthropology and comparative religion and starting to question reality, which I hadn’t managed on my own before then. I ended up majoring in social anthropology in college as a direct consequence of attitudes shaped by reacting to Glorantha and the strands of the real world woven into it.

Working on Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, has that fulfilled any dreams you had about what a game should be—especially a role-playing game?

I’m really happy with Fourth Edition because it ends up being a lot closer to those crazy stories my friends and I were telling each other as kids, back before we understood how the rules were actually supposed to work! I think there have been a LOT of people over the years who wanted to like D&D, and tried to play it once or twice, but bounced off it because the rules were too picky and esoteric or the groups they tried to play with had been taught to value simulation of a potentially slightly tedious fantasy reality over having fun.

One mission of Fourth Edition is to make it easier for players to find out what’s fun about role-playing immediately without taking away the Dungeon Master’s ability to invent new worlds and adventures with their own creative vision. For experienced players, Fourth Edition is designed to stay fun over all its levels, so characters you love and enjoy playing won’t have to drop out of your gaming life when because they’ve risen to levels where the system breaks down. This is the D&D I’ve dreamt of playing.

How does the new D&D stack up as an experience against other games—whether a trading card game, World of Warcraft, or a multiplayer console game?

Playing any tabletop role-playing game is a lot more like doing a blend of cops ’n’ robbers and improvisational theater than the other gaming styles you mentioned. You get to make your D&D character, then you role-play to try and see the world through their eyes, speak their words, and choose actions that make sense for what they’re experiencing.

The pacing of the tabletop game gives you time to let the scene unfold in your imagination and to react to the interesting elements that the other players and the DM are adding to the mix. The interaction between multiple imaginative people is why I say it’s a bit like improv theater, not that most other people involved in gaming think of it that way.

Compared to earlier editions, Fourth Edition will seem a bit more familiar to people who know trading card games. In a sense, Fourth Edition is an exceptions-based game like most TCGs. The actual key rules required to play Fourth Edition occupy around 20 pages in Chapter 9 of the Player’s Handbook. The rest of the stuff in that book are all the cool exceptions that you get to choose from as a player to build your character, the powers that make your character different from other characters, that control what you can do in the world against enemies who are trying to put the hurt on you. TCG players are used to sorting through cards to see what they want to use, Fourth Edition players sort through powers and feats. And in Fourth Edition, Dungeon Masters can also choose to sort through monsters and encounter ideas, so DMing may have a bit more in common with skills you can learn in TCGs than it did in the past.

World of Warcraft doesn’t let you change the world you’re interacting with, nor does it let your DM craft their own game world and set stories in motion. D&D characters always seem much more like real people than WoW characters, and you’re likely to remember them as such. WoW players coming to Fourth Edition will probably be comfortable with the idea that Fourth Edition player characters get to make an interesting choice of a new power or ability every time they go up a level. That was missing from earlier editions of D&D.

Any words of advice for someone growing up, hoping to become a game designer?

The culture is changing, gaming is changing. So I won’t try to address future social trends I don’t have a handle on, nor can I fully account for the intersection of game design and computer gaming. Instead, I’ll paraphrase the best writing advice I ever read, from Stephen King. He said something like, “Anyone who spends three hours a day writing for ten years will be a good writer when the ten years are up.”

Game design compares well with writing. Anyone can be some sort of writer by writing. If you want to be a game designer, you need to design games.

Your best bet is to design the games you want to play but can’t, because no one else has designed the game yet. Think about the type of experience you want players to have. Think about which players you want for the game. Then aim at ways to give those players that experience. Check your work by playing to find out if the game is fun. If it isn’t fun, few people will play it, no matter how elegant or clever it is, so you shouldn’t hesitate to muck up an elegant design that’s no fun.

Don’t get stuck on your first good idea. Writers who get stuck on a good idea can end up with dead end stories, dead manuscripts, because they can’t scrap a good idea and look for something better that would enable the entire piece to work out. Game designers who don’t scrap an ultimately fruitless good idea may be in worse shape than writers in the same position, because one fruitless game mechanic can screw up everything about a game. The good news is that changing one fruitless idea might be enough to turn such a design around. In this sense, game designs are more like mathematical proofs than short stories.

Which brings up math. You don’t need to be a math wizard to design games, but you (or a friend or three) should have some grasp of probability, or you may not be able to balance your designs well enough to know whether their problems are due to bad design or terrible balance.

Play games from all sources and all genres. It’s fine to spend most of your time playing good games you really enjoy, but you’ll learn a lot by trying things you wouldn’t experiment with if you weren’t interested in improving your art. If you have wider experiences than other game designers, you’ll find that ideas you take for granted may not be understood by everyone else, allowing you to come up with surprising systems or insights.

And finally, use your opportunities to learn and practice other creative skills. Game design is a bit of a chimera and talented designers come from all over. If you love drawing, writing, painting, mapping, sculpting miniatures, DMing, designing levels, designing web sites, or doing graphic design, don’t hold back. Confidence gained from any creative work you love and do well can serve you well when you’re wrestling with other creative work.


The Fourth Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual were released earlier this month.

Rudyard Kipling and The Cub Scouts

Via an email from the fabulous Midori Snyder, I found this fascinating article in the WSJ on Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book and - bizarrely - the creation of the Cub Scouts:

Another fundamental reason "The Jungle Book" has maintained unsurpassed prestige in the competitive jungle of children's books is that it was literally institutionalized in 1916, when Robert Baden-Powell created the Cub Scouts based on "Mowgli's Brothers," the first story. The largest captive audience of boys ever created still adopts the names of Kipling's animals in their games, and recites a promise to do their best to do their duty to God and country, to help other people -- and to obey the Law of the Pack.

In tone, Baden-Powell's version of "The Jungle Book" veers closer to Beatrix Potter than to the original; yet the most significant departure of the Cub Scout's Promise from Kipling is its declaration of duty to God. Although Kipling routinely (in every sense) invoked the Christian God in his patriotic verse, he himself was an atheist. This passionate champion of the British Empire was just as hostile to Christian missionaries as he was to Hindu pandits; if there was a religion he admired, it was Islam. In conversation, he habitually referred to the deity as Allah.

God plays no part in Kipling's jungle; more crucially, neither does Empire, the principal theme of Kipling's life and work. Writing about animals, ironically, enabled him to observe humanity (for the animals in the stories are plainly people) without the strictures of nationalism, which eventually strangled and embittered his thinking.

Kipling is an incredibly powerful and significant Western writer whose real life was no less interesting than what he wrote about. For a look at the great tragedy of his life, the loss of his son Jack in WWI, I strongly recommend Geert Spillebeen's novel, Kipling's Choice. Read my review for the many reasons why I love this book.

If the Pacific Ocean isn't your thing

(Even though Kristopher's post on Kon-Tiki made me want to read the book.)

Ever heard of the book Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid? I hadn't, until this NPR interview with Sean Bloomfield and Colton Witte.

In 1935, a seventeen-year-old Sevareid and his nineteen-year-old friend made the 2,250 mile journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. By canoe. Inspired by Sevareid's memoir, which Sean's father gave to him when Sean was in seventh grade, Colton and Sean "just decided that we're just going to do it." So, after graduating from high school early, they set off this past spring on their own journey by canoe.

As for their inspiration, you can read parts of Canoeing with the Cree at Google Books.

How much easier it is to sit in a chair at home and read about "the things to do when camping." Things look so easy in print, but when the tent won't go up, when the beans tip in the fire, when the water won't boil and when it suddenly begins to rain in the midst of supper, then all the directions in the world won't help and it's every man to his own method. (12)