My friend Jo and I both love to read. So do many of my other friends. We talk about books all the time, and thought it might be fun to (semi-)formalize this into a book club. Jo and I both feel left behind in the classics – there’s just too many of them, and only so much time to read, and we haven’t read all the same things. So, we decided on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for our first book club pick.

The meeting was held in August, and as September’s meeting will be tomorrow, I’m rushing to capture my notes on the book here before they’re lost.

Neither of us had read Wuthering Heights before nor seen any of the various film adaptations,⁽¹⁾ and we were looking forward to it. I found myself disappointed. Continue reading »

Popularity: 14% [?]

Footnotes:

1. Though I had the misfortune of being sent a link to the Kate Bush video shortly after our book club pick was announced. Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Kara. [↩]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Quirk Classics 978-1-59474-344-4, 319 pp. (incl. Reader’s Discussion guide), 2009

Jane Austen’s works have recently come out of copyright, allowing anyone to republish the texts. Some have been a little more innovative. There’s a new film, Pride and Predator, expected to come out in 2010, and, of course, the mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s original classic interspersed with martial arts and zombie mayhem by Seth Grahame-Smith.

While I’ve read some Jane Austen before, I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice.⁽¹⁾ I corrected this, then proceeded to read one of the silliest books I’ve ever read. Continue reading »

Popularity: 19% [?]

Footnotes:

1. Or seen the film(s?), for that matter. [↩]

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris

W. W. Norton, 978-0-393-32765-6, 348 pp. (incl. notes, bibliography and index), 2004

I picked up Sam Harris’ The End of Faith after watching The Four Horsemen, a two hour atheist roundtable he appeared in with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. I found many of Harris’ comments on spirituality intriguing, though I found myself repulsed by bigoted comments regarding Islam.

The End of Faith deals with several themes surrounding religion and why it’s no good (to put it mildly). Harris rightly states that “most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors”.⁽¹⁾ Worse, religions tend to decry critical examination of any kind.

The bulk of  Harris’s criticism of religion is is focused on Christianity and vitriol towards Islam. While the underlying sentiment is sound – that religion induces people who might otherwise make good friends and neighbours to kill and maim one another at the behest of grotesquely cruel imaginary beings – the conclusions Harris draws regarding what is to be done about these irrationally harmful beliefs is disquieting, to say the least. Continue reading »

Popularity: 7% [?]

Footnotes:

1. p. 31 [↩]

How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, by Umberto Eco
Harcourt, 0-15-600235-X, 248 pp., 1992, 1994

I always feel behind in my reading: many of the classics, certain authors, certain works by certain authors. No matter often I remind myself that there’s only so much time to read in any given day, or that I’m relatively young and will have time to catch up, this feeling of being behind persists.

Thus, when I think of Umberto Eco, it’s usually as a novelist. In this capacity he is probably best known as the author of The Name of the Rose (1980, made into a film in 1986), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and, more recently, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2006).⁽¹⁾ But he’s written far more non- than fiction; on philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, and the present selection of delightful parodies. And I had no idea he could be so funny.

As Eco explains Continue reading »

Popularity: 25% [?]

Footnotes:

1. All great books. Especially the first two. Especially Foucault’s Pendulum. And In the Name of the Rose.  Okok, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was pretty good, too. But not as good as the first two. [↩]