rating: 4 of 5 stars
I won Tongue in LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers giveaway, and so I review it:
Tongue is the story of K, a fine-dining chef, learning to live alone after finding her husband, architect Han Seok-jo, cheating on her with her cooking-class student and former model Se-yeon. It is full of the pain that such a betrayal can bring. K’s loneliness is palpable, expressed mainly in the loss of her sense of taste–the first sense to go in those who have lost the will to live, she points out, and a dangerous condition for a professional chef. It is difficult to watch her long for Seok-jo (who is completely in love with Se-yeon, to the point that he builds her his dream house and helps her start a cooking class of her own), to cling to him through their dog (which Se-yeon wouldn’t let him bring into their home), to dream about how to bring him back to her.
There are many books and movies whose cover blurbs and promos tout a surprising twist ending. Few of these deliver; often the surprise is not all that surprising. In Tongue, the surprise smacks you in the face and leaves you gasping. Kyung-Ran Jo’s writing has been compared to that of Haruki Murakami, and I can see that, but the calm gruesomeness of the twist ending is more like Yukio Mishima.
All in all, it is an excellent novel that will resonate with anyone who has been betrayed by a loved one and dreamed of both redemption and revenge.
Plotz does in this book exactly what the title says: he read the whole Bible (something that most Christians and Jews report never having done) and records his thoughts about each chapter. With caveats: The Bible he reads is the Jewish Bible, which ends at 2 Chronicles. He says he’ll leave the New Testament to a non-Jew, but I would love to see a sequel or a revised edition that includes his impressions of the NT.
Plotz finds and is comforted by the moments of beauty in the Bible, but he is horrified at God’s punishment of the people who are most faithful to him, the encouraged murder of innocents, and the surprise endings to the most famous Bible stories–where most of the stories end and the indiscriminate killing begins. He seems to gloss over some of it–there are some horrid verses in Deuteronomy 22 about punishing rape victims that he does not address–but he touches on some of the big stories, like the rapes of Dinah and Tamar, and the mauling of the children by the bears.
This is a great book for Christians and Jews who do not understand how people can be offended by the very substance of their religions, or how one could possibly leave the faith if they “truly knew” God. The way most people read the Bible is not the way they would read any other book; they open the Bible to a particular chapter or to a random page and read until they feel better. When one reads it as they would read anything else, from cover to cover, one learns a lot, and is often disappointed and even “brokenhearted,” as Plotz is, at the brutality and fickleness of God and his people.
rating: 4 of 5 stars
FASCINATING. Don’t Sleep just about successfully bridges the gap between professional ethnography and popular autobiography.
Everett was a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an evangelical organization which sends linguist-missionaries to learn the languages of various cultures so that they may translate the New Testament for them and thereby save their souls. He went to the Pirahã with this goal in mind, accompanied by his wife and three children.
Interspersed with his stories of learning to live with this radically different culture is extensive information on their unique language and a hilarious (to me, a linguistics dork) intellectual sparring with Chomsky’s theories of universal grammar.
Don’t Sleep is being pimped around the atheist blogosphere as a book about a missionary who is deconverted by his subjects. And yes, that happens, but it is contained in the epilogue, and the book is by no means about that experience. That part is a little infuriating to read, though–Everett went through hell on earth trying to get help for his wife and one of his daughters when they were very ill with malaria, yet when he came clean about no longer believing in a god, she left him. (Kiiiiinda wanna scratch her face for that, lol.) Seems to me that dragging a feverish and delusional person all over Brazil for a week trying to save her LIFE would be proof enough of a morality that doesn’t necessarily come from religion, but whatever. The point is, not much is made in the book proper of the deconversion. More important is the clash of Everett’s Western, Christian culture and the Pirahã culture–he cannot convert them to a belief in a god they cannot see, as they generally aren’t concerned about anything not in their direct experience. In fact, we do not know of a single Pirahã conversion. They just can’t be arsed.
So: if you’re interested in language, the cultures of the Amazon basin, religion and irreligion, or the lives of ethnographers, this is a good one.
Very interesting book about the Gnostic gospel of Judas. I was a bit disappointed that Ehrman wrote about the text, but didn’t reproduce any of it. But I learned a lot about the myriad ways Judas is viewed by many gospel authors, and about Gnostic Christianity.
The gospel of Judas is a gospel written about, not by, Judas, and portrays him as the only disciple that really “gets it”–in order to regain his heavenly home, Jesus must shed his mortal skin. He tells Judas that he will be the greatest of all disciples because he will help Jesus discard “the man that clothes him”. By “betraying” Jesus, then, Judas is just doing what he’s supposed to.
I don’t really get why Judas has gotten so much heat. If God planned to send his son to die, why beat Judas up for doing what was in the plan? (Not to mention, why make him an archetype for eeeeevil Jews?) Scapegoats are fun, I guess. It seems to be a common theme among so many Christians that they don’t trust their God to know his own business and make his own judgments.
Anyhoo, interesting stuff here for students of religions and especially Christianity of course. As for me, I always love a good retelling of an old story.
rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book really should have been two books. For half the book Taibbi is investigating how Congress really works (a topic that he reports on quite well and makes understandable, but that really could fill hundreds of pages on its own). For most of the rest of it, he’s in deep cover at John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church, exposing the craziness of the people who appear to have taken over government and public discourse. I would have loved to have seen more of this as well, and maybe he could supplement it with undercover stints at Saddleback or New Life. I enjoyed his style and his passion, but I think the squashed-togetherness of this book might have deranged me a little. 
Even a two-part series would have worked better.
rating: 4 of 5 stars
An excellent anthology of end-of-the-world stories. I was happy that it included my favorite Stephen King short story, “The End of the Whole Mess.” All kinds of apocalypse scenarios are included–deadly virus, technological meltdown, global warming, nuclear winter, even the Christian Rapture. (There’s a really interesting story about a group of researchers who were offworld when the Rapture came and didn’t get taken…One guy goes crazy and starts trying to attract God’s attention in obnoxious ways.) Cory Doctorow’s touching and nerdy story “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” is in here.
I didn’t give it 5 stars because I wished it were longer. Apocalypse stories are probably going to boom, what with our continued asinine behavior toward each other and the planet, so a second edition would be much appreciated. Also it would have been nice to see a story where everyone tried to band together and help each other out rather than so many where people turned on each other and let their basest instincts show (although that is probably the more realistic scenario).
rating: 5 of 5 stars
I will let the book speak for itself:
“The world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes–like blasphemy–and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us.
“The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal improprieties of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.” (p. 224-225)
“Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call ’spiritual.’ No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.” (p. 227)
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Another great book that will be passed over by the very people who need to read it. Jacoby outlines the history of America’s willful ignorance and how it manifests today. She gives no suggestions on how to fix the situation; indeed, she doesn’t think it can be fixed, the way things are going. Americans just enjoy being stupid too much.
I disagree with her on two major points. First: I don’t think the Internet is necessarily killing intellectual discourse. In fact, I think that for those of us who are too shy to hold such conversations in person–or for those of us who are surrounded with the type of person Jacoby reviles–the Internet can be a great facilitator. I have been part of many good, intellectual conversations in blog comment threads. Jacoby seems to think that only ignorant non-sequiturs get posted to these threads, and that the other commenters don’t police them. This could not be further from the truth. Check out blogs like Shakesville; the commentariat there is ruthless in the driving out of trolls.
Second: Jacoby does not seem to take into consideration that many Americans work a LOT. When you’re working twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, you don’t have a lot of mental energy left to read something educational or engage in stirring discourse about the failings of Plato. It’s easy to see how people could extrapolate from their own experiences that people who do these things obviously don’t work grueling, mind-numbing jobs, and are therefore somehow less. Maybe if the economic situation were better and people didn’t have to work so hard, they’d be more accepting of intellectuals…But then, it is their disdain of intellectuals that helped lead America to elect The Big Dumb twice, and possibly to elect The Even Bigger Dumb in 2012. So, I don’t know.
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mr. Hitchens illustrates in examples from his own life and career, as well as in views from historical religious, philosophical, and political figures, exactly why religious beliefs are not worthy of respect by default. Particular examples: why religious people should not be prima facie considered more moral or ethical than non-religious people; why claims such as “God outlawed the eating of ham because it made the ancients ill” are specious; why religious people’s need to prove their faith based on reality actually undermines their case; and why even Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama cannot be seen as stellar examples of goodness simply on the basis of their faith.
As with Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, the people who need to read it won’t. But it’ll keep a place on my bookshelf.
I’ll hopefully pick it back up later…I won’t renew it this time, as my brain is about fried on the serious books…once I finish The End Of Faith I’m retreating into some Terry Pratchett. 