What does this to do with Swedish author Henning Mankell or his crime mystery Faceless Killers? This is a book response, not a parental rant against the strange world of technology. Kurt Wallander, Mankell's frumpy, grumpy Swedish crime investigator and I have something in common. We are both in danger of becoming culturally irrelevant, maybe extinct; both of us fear this looming prospect.
After the first hour of reading Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe in Atheists, my animus toward the and very popular "fundamentalist" atheists was sated. Like Chris, I have as much disdain for these pompous ignoramuses as I do for narrow religious fundamentalists. Any wrongheaded and stubborn opinion rooted in ignorance ought to repulse us.
MY SON, SEAN, says he is suspicious of fictional accounts of the life of Christ. I agree with him. There are considerable emotional and philosophical agendas shadowing the Jesus of film, art or literature. That's true of popular treatments like Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar; literary reconstructions like King Jesus by Robert Graves, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kanzanzakis, and The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer, but also, the so-called assure results of scholarship like Crossan's Jesus the Revolutionary. Treatments of Jesus leave me wondering whose Jesus the writer is talking about?
FAR MORE IMPORTANT than the literary awards it has won, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time's ability to rock our conception of what is normal or dysfunctional, clear-headed or soft-hearted, significant or insignificant, symbolic or real, speaks powerfully to our “PC” culture. Christopher Boone, Mark Haddon's protagonist, is a benevolent monstrosity. This sounds negative but Chris has just the right blend of what philosopher of horror literature, Noel Carroll, calls ontic ambiguity. Like Frankenstein's monster before him, Christopher lacks a tell-tale human quality – genuine emotional empathy. His limitations, even his inability to understand nuanced feelings and
Lovers of books often complain that we read too slowly and wonder if we will ever take the time and effort to master the The Art of Speed Reading. My difficulty is that sometimes, strike that - often, that I need to acquire the Art of Reading Slowly to integrate what I read. I don't do that nearly enough. My habitual approach is to read a book with my mind and my hand outstretched to the read. I read distractedly often merely to get the basic gist, get through to book, and then add another book to my growing list
Lisa Miller's 'Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife' gives us readers an extremely entertaining, educative and vulnerable exploration into the plethora of views regarding heaven. She is a Reformed Jew and editor of sweek's religion section. Miller isn't committed to a firm belief in heaven but definitely manages to elicit our hopes for a meaningful life... and perhaps more.
LITERARY SCHOLARS HAVE called Jack Maggs a post-colonial re-telling of Dickens' Great Expectations. As I read it, Jack Maggs, by the witty Australian author Peter Carey, is a deconstruction of Charles Dickens himself. The message tears apart the pretensions and presuppositions of the great man, turning the original message of Great Expectations on its head and giving us a more satisfactory resolution than the original.
Despite their difficulties the children are creative and imaginative. Together in their basement they invent a cardboard reconstruction of their town. Through a strange combination of mathematics and intuition, Mary, who may be borderline autistic or schizophrenic, directs the structure of the town with its clay characters who represent real-life people. Mary's two brothers discover an uncanny correspondence between the positioning of Mary's figures in her play construction and the precise geographical location of the townspeople as they go about their business. Much of the threesome's fun involves spying on the townsfolk using Mary's vision
There is a distinction between the actual story of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and the interpretation of the story, the Carol "canon" (from the word measurement). The story is there for us unchanged, to be read year after year, but the fit, the measurement of the Carol's meaning, is constantly changing. Joe Cusumano provides a creative and inspiring measurement for Dickens' famous tale, as well as placing the original story in the appendix. While acknowledging the traditional meanings of the story and providing an excellent historical background, Cusumano filters A Christmas Carol through the novel lens of spiritual
The four major types of psalms (community hymns, thanksgiving hymns of individuals, laments of both individual and community), four minor types (royal, creation, wisdom, and enthronement), and poetic idioms (Hebrew acrostic and parallelism) are clearly introduced through representative passages. Helpful as this introduction is, it is the flow and history of an ever-changing relationship to God that rivets the reader to the book. Getting a taste of how traditions unfolded in the original storytelling sessions and how later retellings move beyond the original intentions of the writers toward the needs of