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Post by Maggie on Dec 30, 2013 21:43:41 GMT -6
Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks because I have gotten thoroughly engrossed in an online serial in a genre that has never held much interest for me. I guess it is fantastic literature rather than sci-fi (I am not very well versed in these modern genres). In any case it is called Worm for reasons that elude me and it has been running for a couple of years. Basically, it is set in a town that is beset by parahumans, some of which are heroes and some of which are villians. They all have weird powers with which to do battle with the forces of good and evil (depending on their hero or villain status). The protagonist is a 16 year old girl and as unpromising as this all seems, I was engrossed from the first chapter. Since it has run for 2 years, the battle scenes have gotten old but the lives of the various characters have become more and more interesting. In any case, I recommend giving it a try. You might like it. |
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Post by skunkbutt on Dec 31, 2013 16:32:13 GMT -6
I read mostly action, suspense and mystery books. Tom Clancy, Iris Johanson and Nora Rroberts are among the better ones to read.
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Post by Maggie on Dec 31, 2013 16:35:39 GMT -6
Clancy is a classic. I don't think I know the other two. I like mystery fiction but I am fond of the oldies-Dorothy Sayers and that crowd.
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Post by Maggie on Jan 12, 2014 21:05:31 GMT -6
I am all excited because a writer I like has a new book out. David Bentley Hart, a theologian who writes lots of books but also publishes in popular and academic journals, has published The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. I have bought it from Amazon and cannot wait to have it. I came across a book review in The Week from which I will share this snippet: Without meaning to downplay the very real differences among and within the world’s religions, Hart nonetheless maintains that underlying those differences is a commonly shared cluster of claims about God that can be found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and various forms of ancient paganism. (He also finds continuities with a number of Buddhist concepts, though he doesn’t press the case.) ...
Scientists are heroically proficient at detecting the laws that govern the natural world. They interrogate phenomena, trace effects back to their contingent causes, and then those causes back to even prior causes, developing and testing theories that seek to explain the temporal sequence. In the case of cosmology, that sequence extends all the way back to origins of the universe — to the first contingent cause of every subsequent cause over the past 13.82 billion years or so.
God concerns something else entirely. He is certainly not one of the many contingent causes within the natural world. But neither is he the first contingent cause, setting off the Big Bang from some blast-resistant fallout shelter lodged, somehow, outside of and prior to the universe as we know it.
On the contrary, according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God "exists" in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.
This can be a difficult concept to grasp, but Hart does an exceptionally good job of explaining it — as he does the way this classical idea of God makes sense of the experience and unity of consciousness, as well as the ecstatic longing for the good and the beautiful that lies at the heart of moral experience. God, the ground of all being, is a concept nearly as hard to grasp as the nature of the Trinity. If anyone can explain it, Hart can. I am looking forward to seeing how he does it. |
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Post by Maggie on Jan 12, 2014 21:09:57 GMT -6
OK. Skunk and I can't be the only readers here. Who will 'fess up to liking some author or genre?
Have you got a favorite book or author? How about sharing? I wouldn't mind discovering someone new (to me) to enjoy.
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Post by Woodrow LI on Jan 27, 2014 11:22:16 GMT -6
A very short one, that I have read many times before. "Johnathan Livingston Seagull" for some reason I always find something in it that I didn't pick up on before. But overall I like to read it periodically just to remind me "the gull that flies the highest, sees the furthest."
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Post by Maggie on Jan 27, 2014 14:43:05 GMT -6
Oh I read that when it first came out umpteen decades ago. I don't remember it at all. I will have to read it again. It sounds like you feel about it the way I feel about Pride and Prejudice. I reread it frequently and always find some nugget-- a particularly apt turn of phrase or a joke that I didn't see before. It rewards every rereading.
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Post by Woodrow LI on Jan 27, 2014 20:54:10 GMT -6
There are several books I like rereading every few years. Besides Text books and Religious books.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Fahrenheit 451
Merchant of Venice
Little Britches
Moby Dick
Samual Pepy's Diary
I, Robot (The Isaac Asimov Classic, not the 2004 piece of junk)
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Post by Maggie on Jan 28, 2014 6:52:03 GMT -6
That is an interesting list. Very interesting. My list includes Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. It is the funniest novel in the English language. I haven't read them all but I know that LJ is the funniest! Other favorites that I reread fairly often include:
Diary of a Country Priest
Gaudy Night
Chronicles of Narnia
Beyond the Bedroom Wall
(All of Jane Austen)
Silas Marner (Yes, I know we were forced to read it in school and didn't appreciate it for the most part. But what a great novel!)
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Post by Woodrow LI on Jan 28, 2014 8:47:00 GMT -6
I almost think it was a shame the schools forced kids to read Silas Marner. It is actually a very good story and a fantastic bit of writing. But the forced caused many to never find the real story of Eppie in it. George Eliot did a really amazing bit of writing in what looks drab on the surface, but has more twists than a hound dog's left hind leg.
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Post by Maggie on Jan 28, 2014 9:56:36 GMT -6
I know exactly what you mean. But in retrospect, our teachers still did the right thing. It took me years to realize that they were exposing us to good literature in order to shape our tastes while teaching us to appreciate fine writing--not to mention increasing our vocabularies nearly painlessly. The books we read for fun when I was in high school included Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Stranger and Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf Can you imagine a 15 year old today reading them for pleasure? Kids can't write today because they do not, and have never, read. These "grade appropriate" made up garbage texts they get today make me shudder. That is the major reason I rejoiced at the popularity of Harry Potter. For the first time in 20 or more years I was seeing children excited about reading, really excited. A kid who has learned that books can be magic and take him off to another world is a child who is likely to become a life-long reader.
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