Showing posts with label mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mystery. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Days of Yore: Books

To quote the grandfather in The Princess Bride, "When I was your age, television was called books."

When I was little, I loved reading books. I read every chance I got. In particular, I loved adventure books (still do) and mysteries. I read The Chronicles of Narnia multiple times. I read most of The Three Investigators books (3 series of them...one set when the main characters are in their preteens and early teens, the second series in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" format in between, and then a third series when they're in their later teens). The Chronicles of Prydain come to mind. As an adult, the Harry Potter, Percy JacksonHeroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles books joined the honored list, along with the Ranger's Apprentice books and sequel series. There were many other books that I loved to read, but those book franchises are what come to mind offhand. In fact, I loved reading so much as a kid that often when I got in trouble, my parents would ground me from reading for a few hours.


William Shakespeare's Star Wars Saga
by the great bard Ian Doescher
with bookends inspired by
the great bard JRR Tolkien

On long road trips growing up, my mom would read us books. At one point, someone sent us the audiobook of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on cassette, and that was a new experience for me. I was expecting a somewhat dramatized reading of it with a full cast, and was surprised to hear one person reading the whole book, though he did a fantastic job.

They also had a genre called Choose Your Own Adventure that was popular for a while. Every time a character had to make a decision or there was some other "crossroads" in the story, it said something along the lines of "If you want this to happen, go to page 75. If you want that to happen, go to page 95." It made for interesting variations in the story. If I didn't like the way a story turned out, I generally went back until I found a path that turned out better. Come to think of it, it was a bit like a literary maze. Hmm, I never thought of it that way. (Insert lightbulb emoji here...I tried it and the emoji looked more like a tennis racket, so I'll leave that to your imagination.) 😀



At church when we sang hymns, we pulled out the hymnals in the back of the pews and turned to the song in question. It had basic sheet music for the hymns (there's one in the middle of the picture above, with a gray cover). In the 90s, we used a mixture of hymnals and songs with the lyrics on the overhead projector. Now we use PowerPoint. The hymnals are still in the back of the pews, but only rarely used.

In past years, it was common for families to have family Bibles, which were large and heavy, and had places to record birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and more. We also had smaller Bibles we could carry with us. We often marked them up. They sometimes said that a mark of a healthy Christian is a worn-out Bible. Now I have a Bible app on my phone, which offers hundreds of versions and languages, as well as commentary, a Bible verse meme maker, and more. Easier to carry, and it offers more options, but you can't mark it up in the same way. You can also have virtual Bible studies with friends on the app.

Technically, the internet existed before I was born, but it didn't really become popular and public until I was a teenager in the early '90s. Until high school, research was done entirely by physical means. The closest I got to online research was using microfiche in the library to look up old news reports. They had the glossy black microfiche scans that we fed into the machine and read on the screen. (The print on the cards was tiny and too small to read without the help of the machine.) We had computer classes, but we saved our work on the individual computers and on floppy disks. If we wanted to work on it using a different computer, we had to insert the floppy and pull it up that way.



When we had to look up a word, we pulled out our dictionary. There were also special dictionaries for translating in other languages. If we needed synonyms, we would pull out the trusty thesaurus (which was a little more complicated to navigate than your average dictionary). Researching more complicated things, such as history, other cultures, and many other things, involved pulling out the encyclopedia (notably World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica). When we were younger, we also looked things up in the Childcraft encyclopedias for children. We could also look things up in newspapers and magazines, as well as autobiographies and other physical books. In school, I did many book reports, as well as reports on cultures such as Bolivia, Chad and Newfoundland. (I know there were others, but those are the ones that come to mind.)

When I was younger, some people generously gave me subscriptions to magazines like Ranger Rick and Clubhouse. I loved reading the Highlights magazine. When we got our Stars and Stripes newspaper in the Philippines, I would go straight to the comics section. I loved reading the comics, particularly Peanuts, Garfield, The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Cathy, BC, Family Circus, For Better or for Worse, Blondie, Dick Tracy, Calvin and Hobbes, multiple superhero comics, and others. Though I didn't see it in the newspaper when it was syndicated, I'm also a big fan of the Kim & Jason comic strip (though I might be a bit biased because the author is a dear friend...I've mentioned Jason on my blog before). I borrowed the Asterix and Tintin comic books from friends and read them voraciously. The Adventures of Tintin is still one of my favorite comic strips, and I now have the full collection.

When Amazon introduced the Kindle, I downloaded it on my cell phone and read books that way. The Kindle format all but eclipsed the physical books for me. It's much easier to carry a phone in my pocket with an entire library in it, than sometimes big and heavy books.

In more recent years, as I've gotten more busy with work and other things, I've done a lot of my reading with audiobooks. I find it helps to listen to them while I'm working (depending on what I'm doing), as it helps to focus my mind to keep it from wandering thanks to ADHD (which I wish I had known as a child that I had). On the other hand, some tasks require listening to music instead, as it can be distracting at times. I know, I'm sure everyone is shocked that yet another "Days of Yore" post ends with me pointing out that I do most of this on my cell phone now (although some of my audiobook listening is done on a computer).

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Seeds and Soil

People all over the place had heard about the great teacher in town, and they wanted to hear Him teach! Jesus was out by the lake, and the crowd on the shore got so big that Jesus had to get in a boat and row out a bit so everyone could hear Him! He taught a lot of things using stories called parables. At one point, He said, “OK, listen up! There was a farmer who went out to plant some seeds, scattering them throughout his fields. He covered a lot of ground, and parts of his farm were better for growing seeds than other parts. Some of the seeds fell on the pathway. All that happened was that the birds thought the really nice farmer was giving them some food! They swooped down and ate the seeds and they didn’t get the chance to grow. Other seeds fell on dirt with rocks underneath. The crops grew quickly, but the soil wasn’t very deep, so as soon as the roots hit rock, the plants burned and withered in the heat of the sun because they didn’t have space for the roots to grow. Other seeds landed in a part of the field that had a lot of weeds and thorns. The weeds grew with the crops and smothered the good plants because both the weeds and the plants wanted their roots to get deeper. The weeds kept the good plants from making a crop. The rest of the seeds landed on good soil. The farmer had plowed the ground and worked hard to get it ready for his seed, and the seeds in the good soil grew. They produced a bumper crop! Pretty soon, some of those seeds grew 30 times more, some 60 times more, some even to 100 times more than they had been at first!”

Then Jesus said, “If you can hear me, hear what I’m saying!”

Later, Jesus was alone with His disciples, and He explained a bit more. He told them that He used parables sort of like a code. If you really think about what is happening in the stories, it’ll make sense. But so many people see but don’t really get what they’re seeing. They hear, but don’t understand the words. If they did, they might realize they need to be forgiven for their sins!

But the disciples still didn’t quite get all this about a farmer and seeds and a path and birds and rocks and weeds and dirt. It’s a nice story, but what was He talking about? There had to be a point to the story! So Jesus said, “Don’t you get it? No? Then how will you understand any of the parables I tell you? The farmer plants the Word of God. Some people hear it, but like the seed on the path, the devil takes the Word away from them and they don’t give it a second thought. Some people hear the good news that they can be saved from their sins, and they are excited and accept the gift! But then they have hard times and want more, and pretty soon they decide maybe this faith thing wasn’t such a good idea after all. Their faith doesn’t last long because they don’t have the roots to make it grow. Other people hear the good news, but they also hear other messages from other places that disagree. Lies from the world start coming in. Pretty soon they don’t know what to believe and their faith gets smothered in lies. Then there are the people who hear the Word of God and accept it. They let it take root in their lives, and they spread it around so it grows 30 times, 60 times, sometimes even 100 times what was planted!"