I have been reading a crapton of books but I haven't been able to muster enough interest in writing even the briefest of opinions about them. Maybe I'll just list them off and see what happens.

9. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
This one was a recommendation by jesamin, and it was pretty damn good. I thought the strongest part was the story of Joshua's (Jesus's) "missing" years--he goes off with Biff to find the three magi, and they mostly turn out to be Eastern philosophers and mystics, who help to shape Josh's beliefs about compassion and so on. The book got weaker when it moved to the events described in the Bible; I sort of felt like things were being shoehorned in, and they didn't always make a tidy logical progression because Moore couldn't just make stuff up, he was trying to correspond with the official gospels. But this portion of the book did contain what I thought was the best part--Joshua agrees to his crucifixion because he hopes it will finally satisfy God's lust for blood sacrifices. By far the most interesting (and plausible) interpretation of the crucifixion, in my opinion. I find that one of the more difficult things to swallow about Christianity--the idea that Jesus's death redeems everyone else's sins. Among other things, it seems like such an abandonment of responsibility for your own actions. Anyway, I sat through two Easter services at a Covenant (evangelical Lutheran) church this year and thought a lot about this book during them, like how the resurrection seems sort of like having your cake and eating it too (Jesus died to save us, but we don't have to grapple with the concept of an immortal god dying because he conveniently gets resurrected three days later).

10-13. Waterloo, Sharpe's Eagle, Sharpe's Gold, Sharpe's Company by Bernard Cornwall
Because you can't ever read enough about the Napoleonic Wars. Cornwall is really good at explaining battles, and why commanders make the decisions that they do. For example, Waterloo was far superior to Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army when it came to explaining how Wellington managed to win the day. In Heyer, the French Imperial Guard just sort of mysteriously crumbles and you don't really understand why, but Cornwall explains exactly why the British line was able to defeat the French column attack.

But these aren't nearly as good as the Aubrey/Maturin books. For one thing, Richard Sharpe just isn't that likable. Love the battles (which is saying something, since normally I glaze over battle scenes--just tell me who won), like the minor characters, not interested in the protagonist. It's been a month or two since my last Sharpe book, and I'm not sure if I'll pick them up again.

The BBC made a TV series out of these books, starring Sean Bean (aka Boromir). Someone on Ravelry described the series as battles punctuated by Sean Bean prancing around in tight pants. Hey, I'm all for that.

14-15. Beat to Quarters and The Gun by C.S. Forester
I wasn't kidding about the Napoleonic Wars thing. Again, Horatio Hornblower isn't as interesting as Aubrey/Maturin. And The Gun, while set in the Iberian peninsula during the wars, is just too depressing because the POV characters inevitably die. What's the point of identifying with a character when you know they're just going to die gruesomely sometime in the next five pages?

16-17. Farthing and Ha'penny by Jo Walton
Recommendation from kcobweb. All I have to say is, it's a damned good thing the last book of the trilogy is coming out this fall, because I want more. Alternate history, where the Brits make peace with Nazi Germany, the Third Reich systematically swallows up Europe, and Britain falls into fascism. The books strike a really interesting balance between that stifled panic as you watch civil liberties erode, and glimmers of hope that somehow the steady decline can be averted.

18. 2008 Baseball Prospectus
I actually stayed up till 3 a.m. reading this. It's an analysis of each MLB team and their players. Surprisingly, caustically witty. Haven't finished it yet, but I probably will before the end of the season.

Tags: books, religion