My whole life just flashed before my eyes! I gotta get me a life!

Xander ,'Dirty Girls'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


brenda m - Feb 24, 2006 10:08:48 am PST #6 of 27912
If you're going through hell/keep on going/don't slow down/keep your fear from showing/you might be gone/'fore the devil even knows you're there

Back in business, I see! I'll try to make more of an appearance in this thread than the last.


Kathy A - Feb 24, 2006 10:40:42 am PST #7 of 27912
We're very stretchy. - Connie Neil

I'll try and turn off the TV and read more books than I have recently.


sumi - Feb 24, 2006 10:51:51 am PST #8 of 27912
Art Crawl!!!

I have a giant stack of library books that I am reading. Two of them are for bookclub.

Meanwhile, in literary related news, I read in the Blood Horse that Winning Colors just gave birth to a filly by Orientate. This was her first foal since 1999. So I went over to the pedigree query and looked up her progeny. She has a daughter named Golden Colors who is in Japan and has had 4 foals (listed) one of them named Asfaloth and the other Elessar. This led me to look up Elessar (he is the 3rd of that name in the database.) He is the only colt of three thoroughbreds named Elessar listed. One of the other Elessars is a filly whose sire's name is Sindarin. (I distinctly remember another Tolkien-related horse name in a race sometime last year.)


JohnSweden - Feb 24, 2006 1:13:07 pm PST #9 of 27912
I can't even.

Shiny new thread we got here. Nice!


Emily - Feb 24, 2006 2:02:33 pm PST #10 of 27912
"In the equation E = mc⬧, c⬧ is a pretty big honking number." - Scola

So, Raq, did you like House of Leaves? I got it for Christmas, but it's daunting.


brenda m - Feb 24, 2006 2:07:44 pm PST #11 of 27912
If you're going through hell/keep on going/don't slow down/keep your fear from showing/you might be gone/'fore the devil even knows you're there

Oh, someone loaned that to me recently but I haven't gotten to it yet. I'll be intrigued to hear what people think.


Jessica - Feb 24, 2006 2:08:15 pm PST #12 of 27912
If I want to become a cloud of bats, does each bat need a separate vaccination?

Not Raq, but I loved that book. At some point I need to go back and read just the footnotes, which I ended up kind of skimming the first time around.


Connie Neil - Feb 24, 2006 4:40:26 pm PST #13 of 27912
brillig

I'm reading a book called "Misquoing Jesus" (too lazy to look up author). It's about how the manuscripts for the New Testament have changed over the years and how the modern Bible is different from earlier editions. He's going into detail about how textual criticism is done, especially in the Biblical areas. The author's a hoot, too. In describing a scholar, he described the man as having great respect "among the people who cared about such things." He also describes a flaming war conducted by pamphlets beween two disagreeing scholars. "Ah, those were the days," he writes.

I'm going to have to get his other books on early Christianity and Scriptural variance. I had no idea had conceive such a vivid interest in such arcana.


Kathy A - Feb 24, 2006 6:53:56 pm PST #14 of 27912
We're very stretchy. - Connie Neil

Early Christianity, and the development of the Christian Bible, is really fascinating stuff. If you're interested in the Gnostic stuff that didn't end up in the Bible, there's a great book by Elaine Pagels about the Gospel of Thomas called Beyond Belief.

For the history part of early Christianity, there's a great Frontline documentary called From Jesus to Christ that usually is rerun at Easter and Christmas. One of my favorite talking heads on that documentary is Father John Dominic Crossan, a little Irish priest from Chicago who reminds me of Barry Fitzgerald with a PhD and a wicked sense of humor. He has a book called The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus that I've been meaning to pick up.


Connie Neil - Feb 24, 2006 7:01:27 pm PST #15 of 27912
brillig

I'm going to have to track down my book on the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary (by Antonia Fraser?) and read it again. I love history, but the ongoing portrayal of major things (attitudes towards the Virgin, what books are considered Scriptures, "The Commisar Vanishes", et al.) are like scholarly CSI episodes. Deducing entire events from scraps of clues.