Month: September 2013

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yeah, I saw the Fox interview, etc etc.

Lots of controversy around this book, lots of jibber-jabbing. And if that sounds irreverent, that’s just how this subject is always treated, this Jesus person; so entrenched is Western civilization in the Christian myth, any book would be controversial and by many measures irreverent. We’ve reached a point where you’re either offended that a person would question the truth of Christ’s sacrifice or you’re offended that a person would pay any heed to such poppy-cock.

Enter Reza Aslan. No matter what he says in the book, he’s wrong. Right? Like a pop star who’s entertainment value is her off-stage antics moreso than her songs, more words will be written about Dr. Aslan than he wrote in the book itself. Questions about his authority, his motivations, his sources, the over-all impact his book will have. Well, here it is. This is his impact.

This is the impact religion has, anymore, on anyone. We’re no longer a nation of believers, skipped right past being a nation of questioners; we’re nothing but a nation of commentators. This internet age, this media age, is an age of viewing, judging, passing on.

And who am I to do otherwise? I was more interested to learn that Aslan has a degree in creative writing. If his scholarship adds nothing all that new to the historical Jesus story, his writing ability certainly does. Aslan weaves a compelling history, and doesn’t damn with faint praise—while he may brush up against irreverence, that’s only in the eye of the beholder, and in my opinion his treatment of the life and times of Jesus is more respectful than anything else.

It’s a book worth reading, not because it will be a good weapon against those froth-mouthed Christers, and not because it buoys allegiance to scripture, but because it’s a helluva story, written well. Enough said.

View all my reviews

End Zone by Don DeLillo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another DeLillo novel, another book I probably didn’t get. What do you call someone who reads a lot of the same thing—an aficionado, an expert, a scholar? I want to get the right word; you see, I know this guy’s who’s read a lot of DeLillo, and he’s already a scholar, as he’s a professor, but I don’t think he teaches DeLillo specifically. But this guy I know, he’s really really smart. And so I read these book and I don’t get it and I must be such a disappointment.

Actually, I’m sure he doesn’t care. And look, I am not taking pride in this ignorance of mine, but then I’m not really ashamed, either. Pages of details on a table-top war-game scenario. Long paragraphs of self-indulgent psychophilosophizing. Is this hypermodern writing, is that what this is? And all I wanted was the football scenes.

Which were pretty good. So let me do this, let me rail against the back-cover copy of the edition I read, which says “Among some of the players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war—the language of end zones—become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course.” Bullshit!

I know some folks like to point out how football and war have the same vocabulary. But that’s a convenience, barely worth writing a whole book about, and certainly an insult to soldiers and players alike. And in as much as I claim I didn’t “get it,” I can assure you, the terminologies of football and nuclear war do NOT become interchangeable, and the title has nothing to do with either.

Read Don DeLillo, if you like Don DeLillo. Read End Zone if you like that aspect of football, the grit and the silliness, the earnestness of its most dedicated losers. But don’t give me any crap, whether you do or don’t get it, like me, about its language. Words are just words.

View all my reviews

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not sure how many times I’ve read The Westing Game now. Half a dozen or so. Probably read it a half-dozen times or more again, eventually. This time around I was reminded of it by a TV show. My wife was watching the summer-running reality show “Whodunnit.” I was reluctant to join in, but was eventually hooked. It’s cheesy, over produced, over edited, and not quality television at all. But it was fun, and it reminded me of the excellent novel by Raskin, so I’m not going to knock it too much.

The great thing about The Westing Game is, of course, it’s re-readability, which is really saying something for a mystery novel based on a very specific sort of puzzle. It’s the minor characters I always forget about. Like Doctor Deere, who turns out to be a decent guy. And Mrs Hoo, supplying the necessary red-herring moments.

This is a novel to give to someone who you like a lot, a young person from whom you expect great things. Someone curious. Not just a reader—a re-reader. Someone with whom you want to share the joys of mystery and discovery. Me, as soon as I got hooked on “Whodunnit,” I knew I wanted my wife to read this book. I’ll let you know what she thinks.

View all my reviews

Fludd by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I, like other reviewers, read Mantel’s Booker-prize winning novels, and was awed by their genius. When browsing my local library, espying a thin tome by Mantel, plucking it up was done automatically. And I was not in the least disappointed. That same mastery of language. That same reverence, disguised as irreverence. Deeply serious, but funny, the way only deeply serious things can be.

As to Fludd himself, the character, well. There’s overt references to angels in the novel, and so I guess we’re supposed to make out that he’s some sort of super natural creature. You know, a very human kind of super natural creature. But I kept seeing demon, not angel. That’s hard to justify, given the way events in the novel play out. So I’ll try to do so in this way: religion is man-made, is a folly of fear, and so, angels and demons are not real. A demon, then, isn’t necessarily the evil being that a religion would have us believe.

Neither would an angel be. But in so far as a religion is not real, it nevertheless is structured by very real emotions in our hearts (and spleens). Angels are messengers, demons are seducers. And there it is, Fludd the seducer, the facilitator of emancipation from the outright silliness of religion.

Specifically, Catholicism. Every time I read a book with Catholics in it, it’s either reverential, and has almost no information, or it’s caustically critical, and rife with absurdity. I find it hard to believe that intelligent human beings actually believe this stuff. But they do, and they let it rule their souls, and mire them in misery, and any angel sent to free someone from such misery must, by the rules of the structures of that fake religion, come formed as a demon.

So that’s what I got from Fludd. But you can probably tell I’m anti-church as it is. Fludd preaching to the choir, then.

View all my reviews