Friday, May 21, 2010

 

Summer readin', some aren't

Yo, y'all. I've been decompressing from my first year of seminary.

The start of my voluminous summer reading list (fer fun, 'cause I am taking a break from school!), and some impressions:

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

Wide-ranging, covering major expressions of the church and the faith now either ignored or wrongly seen as minor diversions, nooks and crannies.


Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel.

Fun, feisty book by an eminent archeologist-anthropologist and former Christian who got my attention when early on he boxed Walter Brueggeman's ears for not taking archeology as seriously as he should. The author deftly and snarkily -- but with a smile -- summarizes, then outlines the accomplishments, and shortcomings of numerous books in what looks like a thorough historiography of the wider topic of folk religion in the ANE. ER seriously recommends this one to DrLoboJo.


The Book of Genesis Illustrated.

Oh, this is so cool: Genesis as graphic novel! Full frontal nudity! The spilling of blood! And there are: Lot's doin' the nasty with their old man in a cave at Zoar, after they escaped by the skin of their teeth, and without their suddenly salty mama! By a noted, if nor renowned, comic illustrator.


The Storyteller's Companion to the Bible Volume 9: Stories About Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels.

One of my professors is one of the editors. I'm consulting it for my own retelling of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.


SO NOW, what're you reading this summer?


--ER

Comments:
I usually celebrate summer by reading and digesting something new, or long unread, with the hope of seeing it with new eyes. This being a move-summer, however, the library is packed away and will be unavailable until after the first of July. With that in mind . . .

The Life of Pi

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney (with the Anglo-Saxon on the facing page!)

Grendel by John Gardner (you can't read Beowulf without reading Grendel!)

Not sure what else, really, at this point. Two novels and an epic poem might just fill the last two months of summer for me. Or, I might add something else.
 
LIFE OF PI RULES!

I am reading Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, Moral Man and Immoral Society, and Hafiz.

RAWK!
 
A thousand pages of Saint Louis by Jacques Le Goff...

The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie...

Aquinas...

and Derek Mahon, because my daughter listens to me read him (e.g., A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford).
 
Buckmasters, January 2010 edition.
'posed to be some good food-plot info in that there one.

Flatscreen TV installing booklet...Ms Dr Loney done been on me fer a while to get that friggin thang powered up to the sattylite dish.

And 'course I'sa read the fortune cookie scrolls when I takes the youngins to China Wok after Sunday preachin'
 
Now that I think about it, I's probly gonna read that book on pie that Geoffrey was gushin on, seein' as how the blackberries and huckleberries wont be long comin in. You aint got no good ones on cake too, do ya?
 
Is that book the basis for the movie, "Pi"?
 
Dr. Bill, now I 'spect you, of all peeps, to know that pi are round and cornbread are squar'.
 
Sooo, how do we get 3000 years of Christian history?
 
LOL. The author explains it more creatively than this, but he's taking in the last 1,000 years of pre-Christian but Judean history, as well as projecting another 1,000.
 
Your list makes me feel like the lightweight I am (lit wise, not tubby foo foo wise)

I'm reading some teen and kids lit for now. The Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Malone; Skin Deep by E.M. Crane; An oldie - The Mystery of the Red House by A.A. Milne and a freebie bodice ripper that I got when I signed up for the adult summer reading program at the library. Something called Duke Most Wanted. I'm sure it will give me all sorts of bad ideas.
 
Tubby foo foo?


Bodice ripper! I *love* the phrase. (I confess that I read quite a few freakin' Harlequins as a high school senior. Weird.)
 
Already read it and the article in "Archeology" and we have already had the conversation about canaanite wives and their separate religion.
 
Tubby foo foo = my lardbutt is not lightweight.
 
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