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Let’s see. Like seemingly everybody else in this thread, I just polished off Anansi Boys, which was... slight. Enjoyable enough while I was reading it, but I was always aware even while reading it that this was a minor work. Now that I’m done, it’s gone—lighter than air, leaving behind only a few scattered impressions: that “believe in yourself” isn’t a sturdy enough theme to support any work more substantial than a Disney movie; that when grafting together two unrelated stories of radically different tones to try to make a novel one should take more care to blend them so the seams aren’t so obvious; that from the way he writes about the place you’d never guess that Neil Gaiman actually lives in America; that maybe Spike Lee had a point when he argued that no white director could make a decent Malcolm X movie; and that the Tori Amos cameo in the last chapter—as a mermaid, yet—is perhaps the most grotesque and idiotic bit of hat-tipping suck-uppery I’ve ever seen.
David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim was a bracing tonic after that. Nothing sentimental or misty here—just the usual riotously funny, scabrously profane personal essays we’ve come to expect. If Sedaris’s shtick has grown familiar, there is a new, evolving empathy displayed in this collection—an interior conflict between Sedaris’s need to tell the stories of the people he loves, and his desire to protect them—that enriches the work. He’s always made me laugh, but with this collection I was actually moved. Dry-eyed, unflinching, but (and this is new for Sedaris) never cruel.
Just finished The Sins Of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, by John Shelby Spong, which left me with distinctly mixed feelings. Spong’s a brilliant Biblical scholar, a fearless thinker, a passionate progressive: he is, without a doubt, one of the good guys, and here he presents a devastating takedown of the Biblical verses used to justify homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and the like.
But there’s a bit of overreach, I think. In discarding the superstition, prejudice, and ignorance of Christianity, he’s a little too quick, I think, to let go of things like wonder and mystery. There’s no room in Spong’s worldview for mysticism, for revelation, for a personal deity, for miracles, for the idea that in God all things are possible—his is a Christianity stripped of all supernatural elements whatever. His religious rationalism is extremely attractive, but it seems like a bit of a dead end, to me. (I also bristled at the tone of some of his conclusions—“Religion must change or die: there is no other way,” “We can have no doubt that the apostle Paul was a repressed homosexual,” and the like—not because I necessarily think he’s wrong, but because his presentation seems glib and facile and tinged with a contempt that is not always particularly well-concealed.)
Still, there’s plenty to chew on, and the last section is the best potted exegesis of Scripture I’ve ever seen—briskly written, placing everything in a clear sociopolitical context. There’s an archive of his articles and opinions at Beliefnet, BTW.
Just started: Jeffrey Sachs’s The End Of Poverty. Next up: Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. |
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