Appreciating O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi

I've always loved O. Henry's story "The Gift of the Magi" since I first read it in school.
Ben Witherington has written an interesting appreciation of this classic story.

The story is at once a beautiful romantic story about true self-sacrificial love, and also a Christmas story, which talks about gift giving, in the tradition of the Magi. If you would like to read the precis of the story you can find it at this link which you can cut and paste into your browser. http://www.online-literature.com/o_henry/1014/.

What I like best about this Christmas story is not merely that it is free from the materialism and narcissism that so plagues the Christmas season of our era but also that it reminds us of a simpler time in our country where there could be an innocence and self-sacrificial quality to a romantic story without it being a fairy tale. Indeed, I could tell you a story very much like it from my own family. In the meantime, if you are looking for a Christmas story to read your children, forget about Grinches that steal Christmas or Scrooges that sour it, and go for this one which shows how to keep Christmas....or give it away.

Problems with Christian Fictions

Do you read Christian Fiction? I don't. The few titles I have sampled were low in quality and did not catch or keep my interest.

Dan Edelen at "Cerulean Sanctum" blog has listed some of The Problems with Christian Fiction I tend to avoid the genre for some of the reasons he lists. For one thing, I'm a guy!

"But what I find to be the most disheartening news comes from the A-list Christian authors of today. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a novel by a Christian author that I found worthwhile.

Now I have to qualify this comment by saying that the Christian book market is a woman’s market. One of the most damning statistics is that the vast majority of Christian men never pick up a book after they graduate from school—save for the Bible (and I can attest that a lot of them don’t pick up that book, either, if our ampant biblical ignorance is any indication). Christian women drive nearly all the sales of Christian books, including Christian fiction.

So there’s a lot of Christian chick lit out there.

Newsflash: I don’t read novels that cater exclusively to women. Christian novels aimed at women could be Pulitzer Prize-worthy and I would not know it. (So if you’re an author of Christian novels that cater primarily to women, you can take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.)"

He goes on to mention authors struggling with what it means to be a Christian, the need for a high suspension of disbelief to enjoy the story, mimicking secular trends and unreliable reader reviews. And then there is this:

"....I’m bothered by the excessive padding I read in novels. All modern novels suffer from this, but the Christian novels I’ve read of late are plagued by it. What makes this even more remarkable is that I’ve already noted that many Christian novels lack sufficient worldbuilding. If those elements are missing, what’s being padded?

Too many authors repeat elements of the story or revisit a pattern of character behavior with slight modifications. I read one novel by a Christian A-lister where the middle chapters consisted of the same two groups of people wandering around in the woods, going through the same motions, asking most of the same questions, ad infinitum. Tedious is the word that springs to mind."

Okay, all you fiction readers out there - What do you think? Is Dan right?

More Thoughts on “The Shack”

By now most evangelical believers have read or at least heard of the book The Shack. I have posted some reviews of the book and some of my thoughts on it here, here, here and here.

Trevin Wax published Some Thoughts on “The Shack” at his blog Kingdom People. This is one of the better balanced reviews that I have seen. I think I can totally agree with what he says about the book, both positively and negatively.

"I have heard people rave about this book (in a good way), and I have heard others rave about this book (in a bad way). Some described it as the best book in the past 50 years. Others described it as the worst heresy to ever hit the Christian bookstore.

In the end, I found that The Shack wasn’t nearly as good as some had said, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as others had charged. It has everything positive about contemporary evangelicalism, and yet it has all the drawbacks of current evangelical expression too."

I commend this review for your consideration.