“The academy has forsaken the stuffiness of the strictly educated and taken up the twee thoughtlets of the faux hip.”
Retitled Christian Books as Mini Reviews
You know the concept. What if publishers told us the raw truth in their book titles? Here’s a list of what could be written.
I Kissed Dating Goodbye: How To Not Talk To Girls Until You’re 25 Years Old
Heaven Is For Real: A Book About Heaven From The Perspective Of A Four Year Old Who Had A Near Death Experience And For Some Reason We Believe Him More Than The Bible
A Year Of Biblical Womanhood: One Woman’s Valiant Attempt To Create Straw-Man Arguments and Massively Misinterpret A Lot Of The Bible, All the While Saying, “You Go Girl!”
Radical: All You Rich, Fat, Lazy Christians Need To Stop Eating At McDonald’s And Become Missionaries To Africa
There’s more. (via Barnabas Piper, whose book is in the list)
Coming This Year: Books in 2015
The Millions offers this list of anticipated books for 2015.
The Globe and Mail is looking forward to these titles from the first half of this year.
The Historical Novel Society has a long list of books being published this year. Don’t talk to me about watching all the Oscar-nominated films for the year. This is the list you need to tackle (not that you actually have to read every page of every book–we have our limits).
Failure, Joss Whedon Style
“Joss Whedon’s career is a testament to failure,” said his biographer.
“Pascale shares some of the life lessons gleaned from her research that help explain how Whedon built his fanbase and got all these projects done without killing himself.”
Elsewhere, Whedon says stories of advanced technology and artificial intelligence are our new Frankenstein myth.
Looking for Inspiration on the Orient Express
Two mystery writers board an iconic train, looking for classic inspiration.
The Orient Express only goes as far as Istanbul and makes the trip only once a year. The next journey from Paris to Istanbul is slated for August 28, 2015. “Today, from London, travelers take a train and a bus before boarding the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express in Calais. Once one of the fastest ways to cross Europe, the Orient Express now requires two days to do the work of a two-hour flight from Heathrow. Leisure has replaced speed as the train’s ultimate luxury.”
They collected details about the train and the people who rode it, but would they find the inspiration they sought?
“Over cocktails, the train manager told us that there were too many repeat customers for him to even guess at their number. One woman, he informed us, took the train every month from London to Venice. “And she loathes Venice!” he added.”
What Documentaries to Watch This Month
Iceland’s Christmas Book Flood
NPR’s Jordan Teicher reports, “Historically, a majority of books in Iceland are sold from late September to early November. It’s a national tradition, and it has a name: Jolabokaflod, or the ‘Christmas Book Flood.’
“‘The culture of giving books as presents is very deeply rooted in how families perceive Christmas as a holiday,’ says Kristjan B. Jonasson, president of the Iceland Publishers Association. ‘Normally, we give the presents on the night of the 24th and people spend the night reading. In many ways, it’s the backbone of the publishing sector here in Iceland.'”
Don’t Know? Ask a Librarian, They Once Said.
What did people ask the New York Public Library before they could search the Internet for made-up answers? The librarians have opened their file to reveal all.
When a question couldn’t be answered immediately, they would be filed away, because that’s what librarians do–they file junk. “Some are amusing (‘Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home?’), while others are heartbreaking (‘Is it proper to go to Reno alone to get a divorce?’).”
Other questions include:
- Where can I rent a beagle for hunting (1963). We also had requests to rent a guillotine.
- Has the gun with which Oswald shot President Kennedy been returned to the family?
- Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?
I remember calling my local library to ask if they knew whether Sean Connery had died the day before. Someone in my workplace thought they had seen that, and we couldn’t get away with saying that it should be all over the news if it had happened, so since it isn’t, it didn’t. (via Prufrock)
Great Britain Is Eating Its Greatness
Where is British culture today? Here’s a depressing report from Hal G.P. Colebatch.
In August 2004, it was revealed that the National Lottery had raised £16 billion, enough to fund not merely the British but the US space program nearly twice over. The journalist Bruce Anderson commented that many liberals two hundred years ago believed that if mankind could only liberate itself from its worship of gods and its deference to kings, barbarism would inevitably give way to the reign of reason and virtue: “In one respect the liberals have had their way: gods and kings are not what they were. Instead, we have lottery tickets, astrology and pop music.”
Apparently Britons are more sports and pop-culture obsessed than you might imagine, and parts of the church aren’t helping.
After the 2008 Olympics, many British commentators wrote as if the fact that British athletes had won a relatively large number of medals was somehow a sign of national recovery and renewal. The preparation of these athletes had largely been paid for by National Lottery money, in other words by a decadent tax levied on the stupid and the desperate.
In 2008 the 1948 London Olympics were estimated to have cost about £20 million in 2008 terms; the 2012 London Olympics were estimated at the same time to be costing £10 billion, that is 500 times as much. This showed an official sense of priorities for which the only term was insanity.[8] Great intellectual or scientific achievers, or moral heroes, were by comparison so ignored that no comparison with the adulation heaped upon sports stars and entertainers was even possible.
…
In July, 1998, following England’s defeat by Argentina in the World Cup, the Bible Society, with the backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, called on the nation to forgive David Beckham for having been sent off during the match, as though some vast moral or spiritual issue was involved. Dr David Spriggs, the director of the Bible Society and a Baptist minister, said, in words from which, to quote Peter Simple, satire might slink away ashamed: “What is so important is that David has faced up to his mistake, and asked the forgiveness of his team-mates and the whole nation …” The BBC made a “Where-were-you-when-it-happened?” documentary about this match, as if it had been a great historical event.
New Year, whether we like it or not
Illustration by J. C. Leyendecker
The Walker Christmas was celebrated this past Saturday, at my palatial home of Blithering Heights. This was timely in meteorological terms, since the earth, though appropriately hard as iron (or at least hard as lead), was bare on Christmas day, but plentiful snow fell on Saturday morning, auguring well for our celebration. Even more than the fortune cookies at the Chinese restaurant where we adjourned for lunch, in traditional Norwegian fashion.
And now the New Year approaches, like the Avenger of Blood in the Pentateuch. I feel more at home with the New Year as I grow older, probably because I come more and more to resemble the New Year’s baby. My festivities are taking the form of a few days off from work, working instead on a translation project while I have a little time off from grad school. My new year’s resolution is to spend less time relaxing. Prospects appear good.
Ah, 2015. God willing, it will be the year I’ll complete all my course credits, leaving only the Comprehensive Tests to be gotten through — some time in early 2016, I suppose. But just finishing class work is enough to give me a future and a hope. All my friends are retiring, it’s true, but everyone knows you retire and you drop dead the next day. At this rate I’ll live forever.
Have a blessed calendar change.