Reading anything?

[Sister Grace]

I've now moved on to Michael Slade's Headhunter. I got into his Special X thrillers a couple of years ago, and read all the ones that were readily available. Now I'm tracking down the earlier ones that keep getting referenced. Headhunter is the first. Slade is an amazing author. He comes up with stuff that is sick beyond belief, yet very compelling. And the stories always have a lot of real history behind them. They're sort of a mix of police procedural, horror and history lesson.

I have a copy of Headhunter that I've cherished for long time.
Lately, I've been reading Brian Keene's The Rising. So far so good, but not as promising as I thought it would be. Someone told me I had to read the sequel to really appreciate the first one...

[Rev. Powell]

Picked up Hermann Hesse's STEPPENWOLF today at the library.  I've been meaning to reread it since my college days, when I didn't really enjoy it.  According to the preface, Hesse says its about middle-age, and he was surprised to find it championed by young people...

[Fausto]

Right now I'm reading Whispers of the Moon: the life and times of Scott Cunningham. Also, I'm reading parts of The Dread of Difference, which is basically a collection of papers on gender in the horror film.

[ER]

Michael Tolliver Lives, by Armistead Maupin.

[Pilgermann]

I've been reading the trade paperbacks of Y: The Last Man that a friend loaned me.  It's a pretty interesting last man on earth scenario, but I'm not too crazy about the artwork.

I just got a copy of Russell Hoban's The Moment Under the Moment in the mail and I'll be digging into that tonight.  It's a collection of short stories, essays, poems, and a libretto.

[Hammock Rider]

[The Burgomaster]

Last year, I signed up for the 100 Greatest Books Ever Written from the Easton Press.  They send me one book every month.  They're really nice leather-bound books with gold leaf pages and illustrations on some of the pages.

Currently, I'm reading THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (one of the best novels I have ever read, by the way).  I'm about 700 pages into the story with about another 500 or so pages to go.  Next up is probably either A TALE OF TWO CITIES or OF MICE AND MEN.

Also last year, I bought the entire James Bond paperback collection in a boxed set.  I'm reading them in chronological order and am currently near the end of DR. NO (which I already read 2 or 3 times many years ago).  Next up is GOLDFINGER. 

[ER]

The Last Rock Star, Or, Liz Phair, a Rant by Camden Joy.

Despite the warm fuzzy title this crazy book is not actually about Liz Phair, which sucks. Now I know how an equally mislead Otto felt all those years ago when he left Stoners' Pot Palace. (Um, you know, Simpsons reference? Back from when the show was good?) Seriously, this novel is about almost nothing except the writer's fictionalization of his own life as he goes off the deep end and takes his girlfriend, Brian Jones' daughter, more or less with him. In college my boyfriend said I was in love with Liz Phair, a wistful fantasy from his little head, but come on, something about Liz Phair would've been nice in here. A fictionalized cameo from the queen of 90's indie? Jeesh this is a bad book. Mad, bad, and nauseating to know. Makes me want to drive to Chicago and get my money back from whotheheckever Camden Joy is. As I see it the man owes me money and three wasted hours of my life, plus compensation for the headache I got sifting through his prose, looking for something redeeming. I mean this book is so utterly terrible it leaves something I'd only THOUGHT was horrid, something like Shelia Levine Is Dead And Living In New York, for instance, looking like Tolstoy. This book could put me off reading, and that's akin to food poisoning putting some 300-pound person off fried chicken: in other words, pretty danged tough to accomplish. What scares me now as I think about it is what if this Camden Joy dude writes again? It's bad enough the world of American fiction has had inflicted on it the blunt force trauma of The Last Rock Star, Or, Liz Phair, a Rant, but what if like Camden Joy launched a writing career that got Oprah's attention and she book clubbed him and then women and gay men the world over started reading his books just cause Oprah said for them to, and then universities offered seminars in The Late-Period Works of Camden Joy, and someday Camden Joy became writer laureate and represented the United States overseas and...and people all over the world thought he was the best our nation had to offer, so they laughed and sneered and no longer feared the bold audacity that has been the hallmark of American literature yea unto these four centuries? Oh, my gosh, what if, seriously, like, what if Camden Joy's novels became enshrined in the public consciousness, and in seventy years Easton Press released leather-bound gold leaf editions of his collected forty-nine novels?  Can't Camden Joy's next novel be stopped? Somehow? Um, non-violently? Can't the rightful place of our great nation be preserved against the harm this Chicagoan stands to do it? Ye gods, what if our grandchildren study the bovine scatology with which he assaults the pristine page? Just a little Liz Phair in the book would've done a bunch, I'll tell ya what, just, like, Guyville material or even her much-ballyhooed 2003 self-titled release, the one people got on her case over, saying she went mainstream and sold out to the world of pop. (Nobody ever gives U2 attitude when Bono and company do the same thing.) So anyway, not a very good book. Kinda like twisting your ankle in a mudpuddle and slipping onto broken glass. Funny to see as long as it's not you or someone you care about doing it, but dude, this is exactly like you being the one to suffer the fall. It's that bad.

[indianasmith]

Well, my last book was a very positive experience!!!

I just finished Lee Strobel's THE CASE FOR THE REAL JESUS.

It is tough to be a Christian when there is literally one book, TV special, or movie PER WEEK coming out with the basic premise that everything the New Testament tells us abou the life of Christ is a lie, a myth, propaganda, borrowed from Eastern mystery cults, or some sort of masculine plot to suppress the "Divine Feminine".  (Wow, Anne Hathaway was alive 2000 years ago!?!?! )

Anyway, Lee Strobel interviewed a dozen and more leading scholars and historians all over the world, bombarding them with the questions posed by discoveries like the Judas Gospel, the "Jesus Family Tomb", the Nag Hammadi library, as well as some of the more scholarly works (?) like MISQUOTING JESUS and all the other attacks on the faith that have emerged in the last 5 years.

Their unanimous verdict?

The New Testament remains, to this day, the earliest and most accurate account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  Even the accounts of His miracles and His resurrection pass the test of historical scrutiny.  The attacks that have emerged in recent years are all guilty of bad scholarship, academic bias, and inconsistent standards according to the ulterior motives of the authors.  (One of the Gnostic Gospels, "Secret Mark", has actually been exposed as a forgery perpetrated by a disgraced academic back in the 1950's, but the Jesus-bashing crew still cites it regularly as "proof" that Jesus was a homosexual).

I realize that many people here are not Christians and have little interest in Christian apologetics.  But if you were to read this book with an open mind, it might very well change your life!  Or at least, raise some very interesting questions.  At amy rate, it is well-written, informative, and has a ton of very credible scholarship to back it up.

[schmendrik]

Well, my last book was a very positive experience!!!

I just finished Lee Strobel's THE CASE FOR THE REAL JESUS.

It is tough to be a Christian when there is literally one book, TV special, or movie PER WEEK coming out with the basic premise that everything the New Testament tells us abou the life of Christ is a lie, a myth, propaganda, borrowed from Eastern mystery cults, or some sort of masculine plot to suppress the "Divine Feminine".  (Wow, Anne Hathaway was alive 2000 years ago!?!?! )

Anyway, Lee Strobel interviewed a dozen and more leading scholars and historians all over the world, bombarding them with the questions posed by discoveries like the Judas Gospel, the "Jesus Family Tomb", the Nag Hammadi library, as well as some of the more scholarly works (?) like MISQUOTING JESUS and all the other attacks on the faith that have emerged in the last 5 years.

Well, you can be interested in the historical questions without getting tangled up in the theological ones. As I'm sure you know, there was a contemporary Jewish historian who used the latin name Josephus, who mentions Jesus. Unfortunately, there are questions about the authenticity of some of what is attributed to him. There's pretty good evidence that some over-enthusiastic monk inserted some stuff into a translation that he didn't actually write. I find the historical questions fascinating. So far as I know, outside of Josephus we have no secular mentions of Jesus.

Equally fascinating, I've read the statement that there seems to be nothing in Egyptian writings that corresponds to the whole Moses story which is so basic to Jewish written and oral history, including the Jews being kept as slaves in Egypt. But a story so important to a culture's history surely has some basis in fact, doesn't it? Interesting stuff.

[ER]

Danny Danziger's 1215: The Year of Magna Carta is a nice overview of daily life for all levels of society in England in that famous year. I enjoyed this immensely.

[Zapranoth]

Just read _The Host_.

Damned good book.

[indianasmith]

Well, my last book was a very positive experience!!!

I just finished Lee Strobel's THE CASE FOR THE REAL JESUS.

It is tough to be a Christian when there is literally one book, TV special, or movie PER WEEK coming out with the basic premise that everything the New Testament tells us abou the life of Christ is a lie, a myth, propaganda, borrowed from Eastern mystery cults, or some sort of masculine plot to suppress the "Divine Feminine".  (Wow, Anne Hathaway was alive 2000 years ago!?!?! )

Anyway, Lee Strobel interviewed a dozen and more leading scholars and historians all over the world, bombarding them with the questions posed by discoveries like the Judas Gospel, the "Jesus Family Tomb", the Nag Hammadi library, as well as some of the more scholarly works (?) like MISQUOTING JESUS and all the other attacks on the faith that have emerged in the last 5 years.

Well, you can be interested in the historical questions without getting tangled up in the theological ones. As I'm sure you know, there was a contemporary Jewish historian who used the latin name Josephus, who mentions Jesus. Unfortunately, there are questions about the authenticity of some of what is attributed to him. There's pretty good evidence that some over-enthusiastic monk inserted some stuff into a translation that he didn't actually write. I find the historical questions fascinating. So far as I know, outside of Josephus we have no secular mentions of Jesus.

Equally fascinating, I've read the statement that there seems to be nothing in Egyptian writings that corresponds to the whole Moses story which is so basic to Jewish written and oral history, including the Jews being kept as slaves in Egypt. But a story so important to a culture's history surely has some basis in fact, doesn't it? Interesting stuff.

The passage in Josephus was almost certainly edited in later years by a Christian copyist, however, textual; critics have succeeded in pretty much restoring the original text with the aid of a couple of surviving, unaltered copies.  That  Josephus did mention "Jesus, called the Christ," is very evident, for in the next chapter, he mentions the martyrdom of James "the brother of Jesus called Christ" in a narrative that no critic has ever challenged.  There is actually a substantial discussion of this particular passage of Josephus in Strobel's other book, THE CASE FOR CHRIST.  Other non-Christian references to Jesus include an ancient letter from a Greek scholar to his son, written about 75 AD, in which he refers to the destruction of the Temple being a judgement on the Jews "for crucifying their wise king."  Also, Suetonius mentions Jesus briefly in his writings.  But one of the earliest references to Christ, albeit an indirect one, is an inscription of an Imperial decree found in the town of Nazareth.  The decree was issued by Claudius Caesar, who ruled from 41 - 54 AD.  It pronounced a death penalty on anyone who stole a body from a sealed tomb.  Why would Claudius issue such a decree, and why would he make sure a copy of it was posted in an obscure town like Nazareth, especially since no other copies of the decree have been found elsewhere?  The most obvious answer is that some garbled account of the Resurrection had reached Rome, and he decided to address the problem by posting this decree at its source, Jesus' home town.  (Interestingly enough, Suetonius mentions that the Jews had been expelled from Rome during the reign of Claudius because there had been much rioting "at the instigation of one Chrestus".  Chrestus is a Latin corruption of the Greek word "Christos", the title for Christ, and the reference probably refers to the feuding between Jews and Christians so vividly described in the Book of Acts.
   As far as the lack of reference to Moses in Egyptian records goes, it's hardly surprising.  The Egyptians were a fiercely proud and fairly xenophobic people, who were notorious for their selective recording of history.  Would you like to write down for posterity that you got your clock cleaned by a rag-tag gang  of slaves and their foreign god?  There is, however, some pretty interesting archeological data that certainly seems to conform to some details of the Exodus story.  I'll admit, Old Testament apologia is an area where I haven't read nearly as much as I have of the later stuff.

[Psycho Circus]

[InformationGeek]

Still reading The Red Badge of Courage for school, but we'll soon be moving onto Fahrenheit 451.  I'm also reading the comic series Case Closed and Naruto.