Whatcha reading?
I've slowed down hard, having run out of Popcorn Reading. I'm alternating currently between Beyond Order, the new Jordan Peterson book, and Cold Case Christianity. The latter is... one of the craziest takes on an atheist becoming a believer I've ever run into, which is "homicide detective with decades of experience treats the resurrection as a cold case homicide." If you are a writer (or you love mysteries), he has filled the book with details of his cases and what they taught him about evidence, eyewitness testimony, conspiracy theories, artifacts, etc, and it is fascinating. And then he explains how the methodology he learned as a detective makes it clear to him that the resurrection was real, which is... equally fascinating.
Beyond Order is, as usual, brain-breaking. There was an entire chapter on art that I will be thinking about for decades. I am only halfway through the book and I have 59 highlights already.
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"Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance. Unless you can make a connection to the transcendent, you will not have the strength to prevail when the challenges of life become daunting."
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"Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge. They make their voluntary foray out into the unknown, and they take a piece of it and transform it into an image."
Etc, 57+ more.
Oh wait, I did read a piece of fluff, which I have complicated feelings about, because it was poorly edited and the plot was unevenly handled but I enjoyed it anyway. It was about a girl from a noble family who ran away and disguised herself as a minstrel and ended up the king's friend, and the political intrigues that happened there, and all that is... not well sketched and yet the characters were charming and so I kept going.
When I say poorly edited, I mean there was literally stuff left from the editorial pass in the text:
"[...] Maids' Mistress, then started planning meals, and managing stores... I guess she mostly fills the role of seneschal (maybe give a brief definition of the word for your readers)."
"[...] and the chilblains. (slight definition?)"
"[...] ask.(What did she ask? About the chapel?)"
There but by the grace of excellent first readers go all of us. š
But it was a cute book, so if you want something cute and "don't need much brain" and can put up with the occasional "oops they would be mortified if they realized they left that in" mistakes, it's called Minstrel, by Bernadette Durbin.
Oh, and I started Tess of the D'Ubervilles as my 'classics I missed' book.
Your turn!
