Gift of tongues

Slightly more than a week ago I saw another friend posting about the Duolingo language learning app. I decided to check it out and was quickly hooked. I then spread the contagion to Joy and to Superstar.

I'm brushing up on my mission German, filling in the many holes in my Spanish, and starting Mandarin with Joy. Joy is brushing up on her mission Spanish, starting Mandarin with me, and has started poking around Dutch as well. Superstar is mostly working on Spanish, but he's also played with Italian and German a little.

Each of us has been diligent for an entire week so far. I can tell a real difference in my own comfort level. I've read the Book of Mormon twice in Spanish, but when it's time for me to actually say something and form a coherent sentence, it took several minutes of concerted thought. Now I can actually share some basic thoughts about my day with Joy and be understood.

So three cheers for Duolingo!

Favorite Books for 2017

I officially finished the last of my 2017 books today and wanted to jot a few thoughts of praise for a year of really good books. I finished about 30+ books during the year.

#1 - George MacDonald by C. S. Lewis
MacDonald was Lewis' inspiration and part of the reason he switched from atheism to Christianity. This book is a collection of quotations from MacDonald's writings - including his overtly religious and his fantasy and fables. I highlighted about 1/6 of the book and look forward to rereading it over and over. I already shared some other quotes here.

#2 - The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, and I try to sample some of the work of the most recent winners. This is easily my favorite of the works I've read in that endeavor. It tells in introspective retrospective the story of a butler looking back on what his life has meant. We see his attempts to sacrifice everything he held dear for the golden ideal he held - though it is never phrased in those terms - only to wonder at the end whether that sacrifice was really worthwhile. It is a very subtle work, with a great deal hiding beneath the surface. I think I will have to read it with Joy next to get a deeper understanding.

#3 - This is How You Die (Machine of Death #2)
For Christmas 2016 I got this book of short stories about a machine that tells you with 100% accuracy how you will die. Rather than focusing on the machine itself in this second collection, the authors tried to find very different directions to take it. I shed a few tears at the extremely touching first story about a twin sister who [spoiler spoiler spoilers]. I ROFLd at the supervillain's henchman who is assigned to do away with the people who come to stop him in increasingly interesting ways; because obviously, someone who dies by gunshot wound is easy to know how to kill, but what if they die of hypothermia or a bug bite or by Victoria Falls? Then there's the choose your own adventure where you are a guy trying to commit suicide... (that one was tough going!). Cyberpunk, small town America, turning of age story, B-movie horror... A few of the stories I needed to skip over because I am not a mature enough audience for them, so buyer beware. But a few of those stories have stayed with me, so it gets the #3 slot.

Honorable Mentions go to some fellows I enjoyed enough to buy more than one of their books this year:
Nathan VanCoops - I'm really looking forward to the third installment of his time traveler series
Drew Hayes - Who introduced me to the litRPG genre.
Andrew Rowe - I read three of his epic fantasies and am looking forward to more.