Well, she’s done it again. This time the book is called Help! Mom! Hollywood is in my Hamper!.

I’ve not read the books, but I doubt they are really meant to be read to children.

Anyway, I just thought that since I’ve been grousing about Madonna and others like her, I’d point you to this new book, which apparently has a Madonna-like character just in case you were interested. Apparently the stars have already seen it:

Much to the chagrin of many of the Hollywood stars parodied in the book, it ironically made its way into the gift bags at one of the big Oscar parties. “Oddly enough, I didn’t get my invitation to the Academy Awards this year,” laughs DeBrecht.

Kylie Minogue has apparently written a children’s book now. Don’t know her? Just plug her name into Google and look at the pictures that come up. What could this women possibly have to say to children? Use a condom?

I mean she seems to want to follow in Madonna’s g-string. And the article says that Madonna “has written five books for children so far, all of which contain strong moral messages and multiracial and denominational characters, as well as being beautifully illustrated.”

So I wouldn’t be surprised if Kylie is also putting out a moral message.

OK I’m sorry. Even people who don’t have a shred of self-respect may have something to say that others want to hear. So, seriously, what’s the book about? Well Puffin says it, “will appeal to little princesses everywhere who love to have fun” and that “little girls who dream of dressing up and going on stage” will enjoy it.

Excuse me but I think you meant to say little girls who dream of undressing and going on stage will enjoy it. Unless Kylie has broken one of the cardinal rules of writing and has written what she doesn’t know.

But go read the article. It gives a roundup of celebs who have written books, from directors to super models. It’s a very popular pastime, this writing of children’s books.

I’m with Herbie Brennan, who says:

“To my mind, if a celebrity writes a good book, I think that’s brilliant because the name means it will reach a wider audience than before. If it’s a bad book, I think the publisher should be ashamed of themselves, because then it’s just a commercial proposition.”

Except I don’t think the publishers should be ashamed for making money off of idiot consumers. I think they ought to be ashamed for putting out books written by amoral women. Why does anyone give Madonna the time of day? Why not just ignore her? Well, I know why men don’t ignore her. But why on earth would any mother introduce her daughter to this woman?

Georgiana Walsh has a daughter who is four and is “already a fan of both Madonna’s books and her music.” Yikes!

When Georgina Walsh, Alex’s mother, read ‘The English Roses’ with Alex last week, it brought up an unexpected issue.

“I think there’s always a big message in the Madonna books,” says Georgina. “‘The English Roses’ sparked this conversation about death and Alex is four years old! She said, ‘Are you going to die?’ and I said, no. Then she said, ‘but you’re going to get old and die.’ Death stopped us in the middle of reading for a good 10 minutes. I ended up promising I won’t die,” she says, laughing.

On A Christian Worldview of Fiction, Rebecca LuElla Miller, has been working for several days at defining Christian fiction. She’s heading toward purposefully weaving theme into a story to make a point. Now she’s not saying we should write fables and give a moral at the end of every story, but I think she’ll advocate that we need to have a purpose for writing the story and that purpose will have something to do with communicating some bit of truth to the audience.

On Novel Journey, Gina wrapped up today a two part interview with Walter Wangerin Jr. and he also has something to say about message in fiction. He says, “It is our obligation to embrace truth and to allow it to be the experience of the reader.” But he wants us to refrain from driving home a point or quizzing our readers to see if they got the message. That kind of moralizing, he thinks, vitiates the power of the story.

And in the New York Times, last week, Naomi Wolf talked about the Gossip Girl books, which were the topic of my very first post ever on this blog.

First Wolf tells us about the sex in the books–oral sex, sex with multiple partners, sex in public places–and then she says:

But teenagers, or their parents, do buy the bad-girls books — the “Clique,” “Gossip Girl” and “A-List” series have all sold more than a million copies. And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren’t really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers. The books have a kitsch quality — they package corruption with a cute overlay.

Well, I’m sure that the value system is a problem but I am floored that this woman finds tacky sex scenes annoying but not really a problem.

Alright, the Gossip Girl books are not art and they don’t pretend to be. But they are shaping children.

So how can Christians take back some ground in the culture that is so foreign to them? If I’ve read the Christian bloggers correctly today then I agree with Wangerin that we shouldn’t tack on morals or beat our readers over the head. We should write powerful stories that make our readers experience truth. I agree with Rebecca that we should write purposefully with a theme in mind. And I agree with Mark that we should write what we want but we should critique the work before we put it out on the road.

But what I think we need, and we may be missing, is a burning desire to see our agenda pushed forward. I do think that the Brokeback Mountain people wrote with influence in mind. I think the guys who are writing all the young homosexual coming out books are writing with influence in mind. I think that Katherine Paterson, as much as she denies it, is writing with influence in mind (maybe in her subconscious mind–she’s trying to influence herself as she writes, but she manages to influence everyone else while she’s at it).

I think we Christians in the US have had it too easy. We’ve not been persecuted for our beliefs. In fact it’s often hard to tell the difference between a Christian and a nonChristian these days. We have all the same things the world has. We have the cars, the houses, the electronics, all the toys. We have the divorces, we have the out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Far from wanting desperately to have the world accept us and hear our message, the church chases after the worldlings, feeling a bit put out that they get all the fun. They have rock music, we want it too, by golly. They have novels, we want our own novels. They have fortune cookies then we should have testamints and our wwjd bracelets are every bit as trendy as as anything the world has.

I agree with Mr. Wangerin, we do need to learn the craft, and up until last week I would have said that was the big problem with CBA books–poor craft. But I begin to think that that is not the real problem. I begin to think that the real problem is that we aren’t hungry enough. We aren’t hurting enough. We aren’t desperate enough. We aren’t driven to influence the world for Christ–to strengthen the church, to save the oppressed. We don’t want to press back the evil, we’re too busy dancing with it.

It was Horatio Alger Jr. If you’ve never read a Horatio Alger book you’ve missed a bit of history.

He was a minister in the Unitarian church and he was booted out for pederasty. Ugh. I only just read that. And now I’m saying, “Oh, now I see why all the little poor boys in the books all found rich men to mentor them. Horatio was playing out a fantasy or being some boy’s Sugar Daddy, maybe.”

And yet I loved those books. There was no hint of improper conduct or abuse in the books. I thought the men were helping the boys because the boys had worked hard and were honest and deserved to be rewarded.

I’d like to read the books over now, as an adult, and see what I think of them. It really ruins books to do that, though. I tried reading a Nancy Drew book once a few years ago and I was so disappointed to find that the writing was so awful. So maybe I’ll just leave Horatio Alger pleasantly residing in my memory.

The racers were out in some brutal temperatures this year. They like it cold–frozen snow doesn’t bog you down like wet, mushy snow does and the dogs don’t get overheated when it’s cold. But 40 degrees below? That’s a little nippy even for Iditarod mushers.

Thinking of the Iditarod has got me thinking of some of the mushers who have won their way into our hearts over the years.

Libby Riddles, the first woman to win, took a drastic risk and raced into a storm when the other racers had packed it in to wait out weather. She writes about her mushing career in a children’s book–Storm Run.

There are many Iditarod books you might enjoy:

• Dogs of the Iditarod, by Jeff Schultz
• The Great Serum Race : Blazing the Iditarod Trail written by Debbie S. Miller and illustrated by Jon Van Zyle
• Akiak : A Tale from the Iditarod and Togo both by Robert J. Blake
• Balto and the Great Race by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel
• The Bravest Dog Ever: The True Story of Balto by Natalie Standiford

The book I’d like to highlight today, though, is written by Susan Butcher, a four-time winner of the Iditarod, now retired. She’s had two children’s books written about her, Susan Butcher and the Iditarod Trail by Ellen M. Dolan Susan, and Susan Butcher, Sled Dog Racer by Ginger Wadsworth. But now Susan has written a book, herself.