I love the NYTimes Book Review. I used to read it online every Friday afternoon and think about all the books I would read if I had time. After getting an e-reader for Christmas, however, I developed the scary habit of reading the reviews and going immediately to the e-store and buying an appealing book right then and there, with one click.
Such instant gratification feels sinful and I have indeed sinned gloriously since December 25 by buying the George R.R. Martin Song of Ice and Fire series--violent medieval-esque fantasy--one after the other and chain-reading them every evening after dinner. Blame my son. He got me started.
Yesterday’s choice was more NYTimes-y. (My brother has accused me of being cerebral and alas he is right.) The review that caught my fancy was of James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadow. “A biblical scholar uses his encounter with death to investigate the state of mind in which one intuits something on the order of God.”
Death and God. Nothing more exciting than that, eh?
Click, I bought it.
“Let me confess,” writes reviewer Judith Shulevitz, “that when I finally understood what Kugel was up to in this somewhat rambling memoir-meditation, I gave a little adolescent fist-pump. I was glad to see him point out that the recent debates about religion — is it a force for good or for evil, intrinsically violent or intrinsically peaceful? — have on the whole been a bit ‘narrow.’ Too many pundits, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists fail to imagine their way into the rich, elusive mental condition called ‘believing in God’ or ‘being religious.’ They dismiss it as a neurosis, a superstition or a mistake. “
I can’t wait to find out what Kugel has to say about that "rich, elusive mental condition." I, too, am interested in what makes people think there is God. I mean, really think so, not just take someone else’s word for it.
But first I have to finish A Storm of Swords.
No comments:
Post a Comment