At the Middle of a Great Book

My good friend Bloggopottimus recently introduced me to AudioBooksForFree.com, from which I downloaded At the Back of the North Wind, a children's fantasy by George MacDonald. I've been listening to it in the car and have been enjoying it more with every chapter. This morning I passed the halfway point, file 19 of 38 MP3s.

A brief word about Audio Books for Free: The "free" versions are low-quality, but you can pay a small fee ($2-$8) to get higher-quality recordings. I went the free route, so the British reader I'm listening to sounds like Ringo Starr through a garden hose, but it takes me only a few seconds now each sitting to tune my ear to it.

Hopefully, I'll take time for a full review of the book after I'm finished with it, but for now I wanted to mention that this morning's segment, chapter 18 in the book, was so touching it had me in tears. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a marshmallow, even more so when the story is about a gentle child with the kind of compassionate nature I pray my son will have. The 7-year-old boy in the story, an English cabbie's son named Diamond, heard some awful noises one night from the house next door. The neighbor, also a cabman, came home drunk as he often did. Diamond heard the screams, the hitting, and the baby crying, and he decided it was time somebody did something about it.

I've really grown to love this fictitious boy. His innocence, curiosity, trust, his sense of justice and seemingly innate compassion are wholly endearing. What I loved about him in this chapter is his courage in walking into the house of a dangerous drunken man to bring peace and protect the most vulnerable victims. MacDonald writes:

"Now the way most people do when they see anything very miserable is to turn away from the sight, and try to forget it. But Diamond began as usual to try to destroy the misery. The little boy was just as much one of God's messengers as if he had been an angel with a flaming sword, going out to fight the devil. The devil he had to fight just then was Misery. And the way he fought him was the very best. Like a wise soldier, he attacked him first in his weakest point -- that was the baby; for Misery can never get such a hold of a baby as of a grown person ..."

Diamond picked up the baby, sat him up and told him to look at the light, which in this case was a dim streetlight outside the window. He sang to the baby and talked to him about his parents in beautifully sympathetic words. Out of context, this sounds like defending the drunken father, but it's not at all so in the text of the book. Diamond finally left the baby asleep, covered him, and left, after which the father spoke:

"Wife," said the cabman, turning towards the bed, "I do somehow believe that wur a angel just gone. Did you see him, wife? He warn't wery big, and he hadn't got none o' them wingses, you know. It wur one o' them baby-angels you sees on the gravestones, you know."

I can't convey the scene very well in this format. I just enjoyed it very much. I found it especially interesting that Diamond told the baby to look at the light. When my son Jack was a baby, he always smiled at lights. Some lights he knew well and smiled at them even when they were turned off.

I just discovered you can download the text of the entire book, with illustrations (like the one above), here.

Of course, the best way to read a book is to read it, but my ongoing frustration is how my "books to read" list keeps growing and I can barely chip away at it. Audio books are a great sugar pill for me, because they make me feel like I'm reading, and I find they're the most enriching way to spend my commutes.

Footnote: Focus on the Family Radio Theatre will soon be releasing their radio production of At the Back of the North Wind. I gather it will also be broadcast on radio. I look forward to hearing it.