The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I was really impressed with this book and I really enjoyed Kathryn Stockett's writing style. I'm not going to lie: I usually judge whether a book's worth reading by the first few pages, and this one didn't have me pulled in as much as I'd like at the beginning. However, I'd had it recommended to me by one of my sisters-in-law, so I decided I'd give it a chance. I'm glad I did. A few more chapters in, and I was hooked.

The characters were beautifully shaped and had such different voices! It was wonderful. It was also fabulous how, near the end of the book, as the characters got closer to each other and more united in their purpose, their voices (while still distinguishable) started to blend together. INCREDIBLY written.

I will admit that there were portions of the book that I was uncomfortable with (particularly chapters 24 and 25), mostly due to the graphic nature of the things she was describing. I'm not particularly opposed to the points she was making, or even to the scenes she was illustrating/portraying. More that she spent too much time focusing on and describing things that were distasteful and didn't need as much time and focus spent on them. However, except for the aforementioned chapters and a few other snippets in the book, she handled the material very tastefully.

I didn't look at the author's picture until I was more than halfway through the book, and I found myself wondering what race she was. I was surprised to find out that she was white. She did a fantastic job handling the risky turf of "writing in the voice of a black person," as she calls it.

Sexualizing kids: No child left behind — and fighting back

This article in the Deseret News is intense and there are a plethora of things that I could comment on. But the one quote that got my ire up more than any other was the following:

"Aubrey, the University of Missouri professor who teaches classes to future advertisers, tries to help them see the effect certain images can have on youths. She says some students have a cynical outlook, thinking certain decisions marketers make are purely business, that they shouldn't have to think about ethics."

Hello! In case you didn't know, there is no separation from ethics in any situation, least of all business. Actions are actions, whether they are done in a professional or personal setting, and they should be governed by good ethics. How are you going to sleep at night, if you decide to teach little girls that they are nothing more than a sex object to be used for someone else's gratification, when in reality they are beautiful, intelligent, wonderful, and talented?

I say the same thing that I said during the whole scandal with Clinton and Monica Lewinsky:  Ethics and morals are all-encompassing. You can't just pretend they don't apply when you want to do something that goes against what they proscribe.

1 Samuel 19-22

It says in these verses that the Philistines (who I believe were ruling over the Israelites at the time) did not allow the Israelites to have a blacksmith shop in their lands "lest [they] make them swords and spears." So, the Israelites went to the Philistines' shops and sharpened all of their farming instruments to use them for battle. This is the opposite of what the Lord says is going to happen in the Millennial Day (Isaiah 2:4). I never knew that there was an instance when the opposite of what Isaiah speaks of ("beat[ing]...swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks") had happened. That makes the prophecy of Isaiah that much more powerful to me.

Judges

I just finished my first complete reading of the biblical book of Judges. And my thoughts on the book? It is not something that I would like to read again. I understand that it is a book of scripture and that there are things to be learned from it, but it is also full of descriptions of horrible, abominable acts and it was really hard for me to read a lot of it. Nearly every time I finished a chapter I was disgusted and saddened that such horrible things happened, let alone that they had to be recorded. It makes me even more grateful for Mormon's discretion in the Book of Mormon - saying that there were horrible things going on in his society, but that he was not going to go into detail about them because they were so terrible.