I'd like to speak a moment about a book

I don't want to wait until it's time to do an April Book List to mention something I just read.

Jack's Life is a new C. S. Lewis biography written by his step-son, Douglas Gresham. I have a feeling many of you have already read it--if so, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Before I say anything else, I enjoyed it a great deal. I've read a number of Lewis biographies, so I'm fairly well acquainted with the facts of his life, but this one didn't go overboard on details and instead was a more gentle recollection of the man himself, although tantalizingly slim on some details.

And yet...and yet...the style was oddly disconcerting, or would be to most modern readers. Gresham seems to be writing to children even though it is not a children's book, and not just that, but in the mode of children's lit in the early 1900s. It reminded me of E. Nesbit or, come to think of it, Lewis's Chronicles themselves. It was peppered with such old-fashioned words as "jolly", explains words that any adult reader would be expected to know, and has the habit of talking directly to the reader, as in, "Now I don't know if you have ever tried to sleep in a very cold room..."

I was reading a first edition copy (I'm not even sure if they've had time to hit a second printing yet), and it sure showed. I found at least twenty printing errors, and, as my dad taught me, neatly circled each one in pencil. *grin*

I like brie in sandwiches

I'm not a math kind of person, but I do like numbers. Observe:

An Average Year of my Life, In Numbers

(Remember that a day in this instance is a period of 24 hours.)

83 days are spent at work
6.5 days at church
7 days in the shower (O_O)
5 days driving to and from work
100 days sleeping
6.5 days exercising
22 days eating
5 (or more) days on the phone with savetheolives
2 days at Grandear's house

And the hardest one to figure:
30 days spent reading

I figured that I spend on average two hours a day reading. During the week it might be less, but almost never less than an hour, and I make up the difference on the weekends, I'm sure.

(I added all these numbers up, and that leaves about 100 days unaccounted for. They're probably taken up by shopping, annoying the brothers, hanging out with my mom, cooking, and reading my friends page. Lol.)