Sunday Morning Book Thread - 12-15-2024 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

(HT: CBD)

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, deck those halls and jingle those bells, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

CBD sent me today's picture, which was taken at the Petit Palais museum in Paris, France. This is a lovely museum that houses approximately 43,000 items (not all are on display, of course).

It's also a reminder of what my TBR pile looks like these days. No matter how hard I try, how much I read, I just can't seem to whittle the number of TBR entries to a more manageable number. At some point I will have to stop buying books.

ARE FANTASY BOOKS LOSING THEIR IDENTITY?

Library of a Viking is asking a question about fantasy books, but I think it could apply across the board to other genres as well. Here, he's focusing only on the more recent books covers he's seen. I would tend to agree that there is a sameness to a lot of book covers, regardless of genre, because the design philosophy tends to be very similar in books these days. Almost like modern pop songs that tend to sound very similar to each other, even from different artists in different genres of music. Whenever I receive an email from Goodreads each month announcing new releases, I have noticed quite a bit of similarity in cover designs, independent of genre.

Now, I can also point to plenty of examples of modern books that I've purchased that definitely showcase the fantasy genre. Sanderson's recent release, Wind and Truth is very clearly from the fantasy genre, as is Larry Correia's Graveyard of Demons (the title alone is a strong indicator of either fantasy or horror).

It could simply be that a certain very popular genre (*cough* romantasy *cough*) is skewing which covers tend to show up on BookTubers' channels across the internet, hence the perception that fantasy (or any other genre) is losing its identity. So many books are being published at a prodigious rate that it's impossible to keep up with everything that's released every year. AI-generated book covers, publish-on-demand, and independent authors will most likely ensure that genre-fantasy doesn't lose it's exterior identity entirely, though traditional publishing may make it seem otherwise.

WHAT TOO MANY BOOKS AND TBR'S MIGHT BE DOING TO YOUR READING

"Journey before destination."

Brandon Sanderson, The Stormlight Archive

I think Tristan makes some excellent points in his video. He observes that BookTube culture has created a situation where there is intense pressure to read MORE instead of reading DEEPLY. I've even noticed among my own reading habits. I'm on track to read more books this year than I've ever read since I've been keeping track. Part of that, I think is *because* I keep track now, though I do want to read my books in my TBR pile. Tracking my reading has internalized my desire to read *more* while diminishing my desire to read simply for the sake of reading, to slow down and simply enjoy the journey.

Now that I know--more or less--what my maximum reading capacity is in a year, perhaps for 2025 I shall slow down and smell the roses. I do want to read a lot more short stories, since I have numerous anthologies and collections that I've meant to read for years, but simply haven't gotten around to reading for various reasons.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

An absolute delight is Winter Fire: Christmas With GK Chesterton by Ryan Whitaker Smith. Smith takes excerpts from Chesterton's many essays about Christmas and puts them in the form of a devotional to be read over Advent then adds Scripture and how he finds that Chesterton's century old observations are more relevant to today than they were when written, both for the event and Christian values generally.

BTW, the title comes from a Chesterton quote: "Christ is not merely a summer sun for the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate".

The second half of the book is a collection of his poems and essays as well as games, recipes, and carols relevant to Chesterton and his times. I especially enjoyed learning about the meaning of the lyrics to "Here We Go A'wasailing" which goes way back. (Don't hear that one so much anymore.)

I expect this to become a December tradition for me. It brings new interest to Advent, Christmas, and the Twelve Days.

Posted by: JTB at December 08, 2024 09:54 AM (yTvNw)

Comment: GK Chesterton is another one of those authors I *really* need to read. He has been highly recommended around these parts for years. I did enjoy watching the BBC's Father Brown series with Mark Williams in the titular role. I think he did a fine job.

Last week, our 'Ette "FenelonSpoke" asked for book recommendations for a young Catholic man "disaffected" from the Roman Catholic Church. She didn't give many details other than his parents are Vietnamese and very devout, and he is an EMT. Apparently he wants some books that focus on Biblical criticism.

I suspect that "Biblical criticism" is code for "We don't know what's REALLY in the Bible." I further suspect that this young man has been listening too much to atheists such as Bart Ehrman (his mission seems to be deluding Christians and leading them away from the faith). Perhaps the young man is disaffected due to the sexual scandals that came to light back in the 1990s. Given those assumptions, here are a few book recommendations.

1) The Case for Jesus by Brant Pitre. This book demolishes the shoddy scholarship of Bart Ehrman, and lays-out the case that we have a very good chain-of-evidence for the New Testament since the time of the Apostles to the present day. An outstanding book that is a quick read.

2) Wheat and Tares by Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. This book discusses the sexual scandal and how we can take solace in the Passion of Christ. Father Pacwa shows that the Catholic Church is not invalid because it has always had sinners.

3) Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett. This book shows what the early Church Fathers believed, in their own words.

4) Ignatius Press Study Bible (New Testament currently available, Combined Old and New Testaments coming soon). This Study Bible has been an ongoing project for some 30 years under the editorship of Scott Hahn (a convert to Catholicism). This Bible uses the Revised Standard Version 2nd Catholic Edition translation.

5) If this young man is really serious about exploring the Bible, than I would recommend the Loreto Publications edition of the Haydock Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible. This has all of Rev. Haydock's commentary. This is a facsimile of an 1850s edition. In some ways I prefer the Douay-Rheims translation since it is the English translation of St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate Bible. This one is not for the faint of heart because it has all of Rev. Haydock's commentary, keeps the old names of several of the books within the Bible, and has the 19th Century type-setting. There's a lot of treasure here, but the archaic wording takes a bit of effort to decipher. There are apparently some versions out there that use modern type-setting but have expurgated some of the commentary.

This barely scratches the surface of good, devout Catholic books. I haven't even recommended anything by Archbishop Fulton Sheen and he wrote something like 90 books. The Catechism of he Catholic Church, 2nd ed. is invaluable for getting a good reference to Catholic dogma and teaching.

Yours in Christ,
Retired Buckeye Cop

Comment: Retired Buckeye Cop's suggestions are very timely, since we are celebrating the birth of Christ right now. I've noticed a lot more interventions from God in my life in recent years. This is one of them, for sure.

More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (1000+ Moron-recommended books!)

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

I enjoyed The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom, so I went ahead and ordered the rest of the books in the series:

• Destination: Void -- The "prequel" that leads to the situation dominating the rest of the series
• The Lazarus Effect
• The Ascension Factor

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.

The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz

This is part of Dean Koontz's Jane Hawk series of books. Although I have not read the previous entries in the series, Koontz does a pretty good job of bringing the reader up to speed on prior events. Jane is a former FBI agent who discovered that many people in government were not entirely themselves. When she found out the reasons behind these changes, she was framed for the murder of her husband and forced to go on the run to escape their clutches. Now she seeks to find a way to reclaim her son, who is hidden by an ally, but who is also surrounded by fake government agents scouring the valley in search of Jane's son. If they can find Travis, they believe that killing him will finally break Jane's will to resist their evil plans for world domination.

Seize the Night by Dean Koontz

Written in 1999, you can see shades of Odd Thomas in the main character, who is a young man afflicted with a peculiar genetic disorder (xeroderma pigmentosum--XP for short) that makes him extremely susceptible to ultraviolet radiation. Thus, he can only move around freely at night. Midnight Cove, the town where he lives, is near an old Army base that was the site of strange experiments and otherworldly experiences. He's on a quest to save the young son of a dear friend who was kidnapped by one of the remnants of those old experiments. The Army base is a very strange place, as reality twists and turns and is bent into a pretzel in some of the more secret locations.

Planescape: Torment

This was a video game that came out in the late 1990s. Although there is a novelization of the game, it bears little to no resemblance to the actual story *in* the game. Instead, I prefer to read the story as it plays out within the game. It's a story-driven game that has keep me engrossed for hours on end, multiple times. As the Nameless One, you awaken on a slab in the Mortuary in Sigil, the city that's at the center of the multiverse. You have no memory of who you are or why you can't die. Your quest is to regain your lost journal, which may hold the clues to your seeming immortality and explain just how you came to be in defiance of the known laws of the planes. Along the way, you will encounter former companions and gain new companions, all of whom hold clues to who you really are. In the end, you must answer one question: "What can change the nature of a man?"

This is hands down my favorite video game of all time.

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Tips, suggestions, recommendations, etc., can all be directed to perfessor -dot- squirrel -at- gmail -dot- com.

Disclaimer: No Morons were physically harmed in the making of this Sunday Morning Book Thread. "What can change the nature of a squirrel?"

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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