MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

I heart books!

• Posted by Beth on November 1st, 2005 filed in General    

I NEED to get off the computer because I keep FINDING things I “need” to buy from reading other blogs! Eh, screw it, it’s another present to myself.

My latest purchases, as of two minutes ago:

Michelle Malkin’s latest book, described here. This should be fun reading!

From Amazon’s description:

In Unhinged: Liberals Gone Wild, Michelle Malkin plays conservative Margaret Mead to the alien political creatures of the American Left. With uproarious detail and rollicking reportage, Malkin chronicles the bizarre world of leftists gone mad in their natural habitats: the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, and Washington.

Unhinged unmasks liberals who’ve completely abandoned rationality and reality. They’re taking chainsaws and bayonets to campaign signs. Running down political opponents with their cars. Setting fire to political opponents in effigy. Defacing war memorials. Swiping yellow ribbons off cars. And supporting the fragging of American troops.

Margaret Mead, huh? Heh. There’s an appropriate analogy…crap-flinging monkeys… *

Next, a new direction for someone I used to read voraciously, Anne Rice. She’s returned to her Catholic roots, and has rededicated her writing to Christ:

In her latest book, Christ the Lord, novelist Anne Rice turns away from the doomed souls of her best-selling tales about vampires and witches in favor of a first-person account of Jesus at age 7.

“I was sitting in church talking to [God] about it, and I finally realized there was no holding back anymore,” says Rice, 64, who returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 after a 30-year absence.

“I just said, ‘From now on it’s all going to be for you.’ And the book I felt I had to write was the life of Christ. . . . When my faith was given back to me by God, redemption became a part of the world in which I lived. And I wasn’t going to write any more books where that wasn’t the case. You do not have to be transgressive in order to achieve great art.”

Those who have read her other work actually won’t find this to be a huge departure for her; her previous characters weren’t the hate-filled devilish creatures that some might expect in books about witches and vampires, and they were based on extensive historical research. From Amazon’s editorial reviews:

Rice departs from her usual subject matter to pen this curious portrait of a seven-year-old Jesus, who departs Egypt with his family to return home to Nazareth. Rice’s painstaking historical research is obvious throughout, whether she’s showing the differences among first-century Jewish groups (Pharisees, Essenes and Sadducees all play a part), imagining a Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem or depicting the regular but violent rebellions by Jews chafing under Roman rule. The book succeeds in capturing Jesus’ profound Jewishness, with some of the best scenes reflecting his Torah education and immersion in the oral traditions of the Hebrew Bible. As fiction, though, the book’s first half is slow going. Since it is told from Jesus’ perspective, the childlike language can be simplistic, though as readers persevere they will discover the riches of the sparse prose Rice adopts. The emotional heart of the story—Jesus’ gradual discovery of the miraculous birth his parents have never discussed with him—picks up steam as well, as he begins to understand why he can heal the sick and raise the dead. Rice provides a moving afterword, in which she describes her recent return to the Catholic faith and evaluates, often in an amusingly strident fashion, the state of biblical studies today.

OK, your turn: recommend a book to me! I’m on a book binge!

* (UPDATE) Shi’ite. OK, I’m having a really bad day. I was thinking of Dian Fossey. Still, Margaret Mead…it’s still funny. Primitive tribal culture, moonbats, same same, whatever. F–kit.