The urge to wrap up the year is a persistent one in humanity. Send out the old, send in the new, remember who we were, make plans for who we want to be. We're sentimental calendar-based critters. Even the most jaded among us tend to take stock of their lives in late December.

I might or might not post that sort of thing today. I haven't decided.

I finished Henderson the Rain King last night and was actually a bit taken aback by the ending. This is a good thing, actually—I'm always annoyed when an author cannot muster the skill to keep me wondering about how a book is going to end while attempting to entertain me in the meantime.The first hundred pages or so of Henderson were probably the most difficult of the book. Instead of directly describing the central character, Bellow forces the reader to draw their own conclusions about Eugene Henderson, the narrator and focal point of the story. Eugene Henderson rambles—and not in a good way. An example of money and nobility without focus or direction, Henderson has reached his fifty-fifth birthday and has nothing to show for it except a few children, a couple of wives who don't like him very much, a fat fortune, and a crisis in his soul. Who is he? What is he supposed to do with his life?

As a man of leisure, he takes a safari to Africa. But he is inexplicably taken by the beauty of the land, and asks his guide to take him to the most remote, most inaccessible part of Africa he can find.

Through chance, happenstance, and his own stubbornness, he muddles his way through his trip. In a dysentery-ridden haze, he meets a Western-educated king who sees potential in this overweight, heavily-sweating white man. He challenges Henderson to confront his fears, face himself, and admit what he really wants out of life.

It is difficult to foster such changes in adulthood without help from calamitous and endangering events, but through a combination of chance, fate, and a king with a plan, these events occur.

Most writers find it easy to let the spiritual and mental growth of their protagonists fall by the wayside in favor of the simpler and more immediately gratifying narrative of the events that transpired to create that growth.

Character introspection is difficult to achieve in the form of a novel without lulling the reader to sleep. While I would contend that the first hundred pages of the novel are slow in places, I also found the tactics used in the rest of the novel to be absolutely brilliant.

I use the same criterion for movies as I do for novels: Show me, don't tell me. I find it insulting when directors or novelists assume their audience is incapable of taking a situation or a character and drawing inferences and conclusions from the actions and events portrayed. Why? Because the act of telling strips away the complexity that is the essence of meaning in a work of art.

You know this for yourself, but probably don't think about it much. You take richness of detail for granted, but I can assure you that you do know when that level of detail is gone. Consider the differences between reading a movie review and seeing the same movie for yourself: the plot, ending, and characters are the same. But what you lose in the translation is complexity, is detail, is richness, is the experience of a piece of art.

There are no Oscars for movie reviews.

Henderson the Rain King shows, but does not tell. It's left for the reader to understand what changes the events of the novel have wrought on the main character. While not perfect novel, I would not hesitate to classify it as worth reading.

Next up: Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.