Andrew
Grace Lin is going to end up one of my favorite fantasy authors (not even sure if she would consider herself a fantasy author). This and Where the Mountain Meets the Moon are just splendid children's books, and, I think, must-reads for anyone who enjoys fantastic stories based on folktales and myth.
Easily my least favorite of the Witcher books, even if it has some terrific Witcher moments in it. There are a lot of monsters, plenty of magic, and enough Geralt-Dandelion banter for any Witcher fan. Unfortunately, I felt that the narrative was a huge mess, lacked forward momentum, and felt almost wholly aimless and random. Also, the last 25% of the book just WOULDN'T END and I ended up skimming some of it.
I read 90% of the first chapter (“Fiction”) and the Appendix. I did not read the remaining sections (“Personal Essay and Memoir,” “Magazine Writing,” “Poetry,” and “Playwriting”). Overall, I think this is a good reference work, but it drones on far longer than it needs to. But I definitely learned some stuff!
DNF'd
UGH. I was hopeful. I really wanted to read a book set in Ravenloft/Barovia, which is my favorite D&D setting, but when this started in Waterdeep/Forgotten Realms, I knew I was in trouble. I hate generic fantasy, and the Forgotten Realms is as generic as it comes: it lacks personality and “feel” because it takes the “kitchen sink” approach to content. On top of this, the book is just poorly written. Maybe I was expecting too much from 90s tie-in fiction, but I had my hopes. Unfortunately, at every turn this thing was cringe inducing or took the approach of tell-don't-show. But the WORST part (this is a very, very mild spoiler) is how the main character is a vampire who is more experienced as a vampire than Strahd himself.
Strahd is meant to be a dark force to be reckoned with, a Dracula-like, super-genius monster in human form, but in this book the author takes every opportunity to undermine Strahd's presence and character. It's utterly bizarre since “I am the land” is a major theme of Strahd's character. It's just a terrible book and I'll admit that I didn't finish it, but I read 1/3rd of it, which, I think, is giving more than its fair shot. Also, if you're at all familiar with the Ravenloft setting or Strahd, the twist will be visible from a thousand miles away. I'd avoid this one. One of the worst books I've ever picked up.
Lewis could be devilishly clever when he wanted, and that may be apparent no more clearly than in this book. I marathon-read this book in two days, but I'd recommend taking it a bit slower than I did. Unfortunately, Mr Screwtape's tongue drips with honey and the way Mr Lewis writes him is joyous to read; but it is all the same exhausting to read, and, apparently, exhausting to write, if CSL's words on the matter are taken seriously. I did not read the “short story” which follows, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” although I did start it; I was simply too tired of Mr Screwtape to continue. His wickedness had worn me thin.
C.S. Lewis's writing and wit, however, shall never wear thin. At least, not for me.
This is not a book review, it is the ramblings of a disgruntled, annoyed, and tired Christian who is a political liberal-moderate and happens to live in America. Also, I guess there are spoilers? Can you spoil a book like this? Either way, this book is good.
When did abortion become a top-tier issue for American Christianity and the Republican party? Roe v. Wade was ruled upon in 1973, but it was ‘78-‘79 before abortion became a voter issue. This was on the heels of conservative Christians coming out in force to oppose the IRS's battle with the evangelical Bob Jones University over integration: BJU was proud it had no black students, so the IRS took away the school's tax exempted status. This was the first time conservative Christians came out in numbers as a voting bloc. This group had largely relegated itself as an isolationist group, uninterested in the politics of the world. The movement to vote came because Christians in conservative circles saw the IRS's threat of tax exemption over not integrating as a violation of their isolationism.
The Christian right, which was hardly even a thing yet, was fine to leave alone and be left alone. Until they were told by the state that their organizations could not exclude blacks, anyway.
It is telling that early in the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution acknowledging that abortion was necessary:
under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother
“Whatever Happened to the Human Race?”
We were calling for civil disobedience, the takeover of the Republican Party, and even hinting at overthrowing our ‘unjust pro-abortion government.'
is
checks notes
We were calling for civil disobedience, the takeover of the Republican Party, and even hinting at overthrowing our ‘unjust pro-abortion government.'
Somehow, when I first read The Witcher, I ended up skipping this book. This time around, I grabbed it and read it from front to back. It's a great book, even if it's not as good as The Last Wish. But the ending is...oh man! So good, so compelling. Geralt of Rivia is one of my favorite fantasy characters ever.
This is a tough book to rate because of what it is: a work-in-progress from the late 1800s when there were only the first signs and findings of non-Judaic ancient near eastern cultures. Smith thought he had really knocked it out of the park, though: Genesis was a plagiarism, a monotheized rendition of other Mesopotamian myths. The scholarship on this hypothesis largely fell into suspicion by 1910 (Thorkild Jacobsen) and is now largely dismissed (David Tsumura). Instead, it's now clear that these ancient near eastern myths and stories (this includes the Bible) were all operating within a shared set of genres, themes, styles, and oral traditions that predated any of the cultures we know about and even significantly predated written language.
There's also this BS idea someone keeps bringing me that the Biblical character of Nimrod is based on the Babylonian Gilgamesh (or vise-versa). Thankfully, I now know that this idea originates (it seems) with this book and maybe I can finally put this idiotic idea to rest and get this person to leave me alone about Nimrod.
I skimmed this book, but I'll be coming back to it (unfortunately).
This book has long been a favorite of mine. I've read it twice in print, listened to it once as an audiobook, and just finished it again, this time on my Kindle. This is a book that I've continued to come back to because the world is super interesting and the characters are wonderful. Has some of the content become a bit dated? Definitely. But the storytelling brilliance contained between the front and back covers of this book is mesmerizing.
Is this thing difficult? Yes. Is it fragmen[tary? Yes]. But is it rewarding? If you can get on its wavelength and find the rhythm of the poetry, then it's incredibly rewarding. But this isn't entry-level mythology by any means, or even intermediate. This is advanced, if only because the texts are so fragmentary. But the poems here reward patience.
This is such a frustrating book. On the one hand, Boyd does an excellent job of laying out how violent events in the Old Testament often have other, underlying, implicit things going on which are not at first obvious. On the other hand, Boyd delves into some straight universalism and white-washing of the Old Testament portrayals of God. That said, his chapters where he interprets stores like the Red Sea Crossing and Elisha summoning bears to kill a bunch of kids are top-tier in their approach to the scripture from a culturally-contextual point of view. The simple fact of the matter is that the Old Testament was written in the context of other Ancient Near-Eastern myths and religions, and it often interacts with those myths and religions in interesting and non-obvious ways. Today we have so sanitized and westernized the Bible that we miss half of the cultural subtext and therefore grossly misrepresent what it says.
Any book, when separated from its cultural context, may be made to say whatever you want. Furthermore, any book, when properly place into its cultural context, may not always say what you expect or think it should.
Boyd attempts to put the Bible in its context, but then chooses his own feelings over the more obvious answers. And for a book which aims to interpret all Biblical violence in light of Christ on the cross, it is very odd and annoying to me that Boyd never deals with Jesus cleansing the temple or the prophecies of his return where he slaughters armies. It's a case-in-point example of cherry picking and hoping the audience doesn't think about those stories because they're inconvenient to deal with.
Was Jesus pacifistic? Yes. Would Christians today do well to be more pacifistic and like Jesus? Absolutely. Does Boyd make a good argument for God's preference for pacifism? I think so. But when the pacifistic character of the sacrificial Christ is our interpretive lens (and it's a good one, to be sure) for all scripture which seems to contradict this character, what do we when the sacrificial Christ himself acts in violence? Reading this book will not answer this question because Boyd never deals with it.
Also, Boyd is so wishy-washy on whether or not scripture is inspired as to cause eye-rolling. How can the scripture be both inspired and (in places) inaccurate? But Boyd is certain this is the case, since anytime violence is attributed to God it is the mistake of the author (based on their worldview). So was the author inspired or mistaken? Can they be both? How does that work? If the author was wrong about this (pretty fundamental) understanding of God's character, then what else might they be wrong about? Boyd never addresses this (and, to be fair, such is outside the scope of his book), but it leaves a gaping hole in his book that is otherwise well researched, sourced, and (at times) even well reasoned.
As an apologetic text, this book is somewhat successful (only somewhat). It also opens the gate to a better cultural understanding of the Bible, which is highly helpful, even if a significant portion of what Boyd writes is only half-baked or entirely unbaked altogether. But it is so fundamentally uneven and annoying that I can in no way recommend it as anything except a bibliography of better books and papers on the same subject matter.
Last year, I read most of the Hebrew Bible in Robert Alter's fantastic translation, including Song of Songs. Alter's rendering of this poem is more effective, even if the KJV obviously has beauty to it; Alter simply understands the culture and poetical forms better than the KJV translators and is able to do more with the text.
As I think back on the books I read this year, this one stands out most clearly in my mind. Alter's premise is simple: English translations of the Bible are bad, not because they are inaccurate, but because they owe too much to various theological traditions (Protestant? But what kind? Methodist? Baptist? But what kind of baptist?); furthermore, while the King James Bible might be the peak of English literature, and while it might be the best we have it's nevertheless an abysmal translation of the bible. So what's the solution? We have to change gears and start seeing the Bible for what it is: a literary text with styles, genres, motifs, and wordplay. We have to move beyond our theological ideas and accept the text; if you're religious and a more accurate (see: literary) translation of the Bible butchers your theology, then your theology wasn't in the Bible to begin with.
Now, Alter is writing primarily from the standpoint of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), but everything he says is largely true of parts of the New Testament as well (namely the Gospels-Acts, and Revelation). When a piece of the Bible is being translated, the translator would do well to think about how it sounds in the original language and to try and replicate that as best they can in English. This means (1) don't try to clarify an unclear text, (2) when the grammar doesn't make sense, let it not make sense, (3) rhyme and sound and rhythm are more important than meaning, (4) stop interpreting for the reader and just start translating.
That last point is really the kicker: our Bibles do the heavy lifting for the reader, trying to tell them what a text means by the way they translate it. It's bad. And it's also (to an extent) unavoidable. But it's something to be aware of and to push back against.
Finally, Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible (a separate volume from this one) is absolutely stunning and should be checked out. His translations of Genesis, Job, and Esther are incredible works.