George: I've been sitting on this guest post from Georgia for waaaay too long. This should be from way back in March or April, so mentally adjust any time references accordingly. Georgia, too, has been keeping up with reading, and should be doing some more guest blogs in the near future. This time, I promise to post them in a more timely fashion.
Hello again! Over the past couple of weeks I have read four books - The Strain Trilogy (Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan) and The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman). As serendipity would have it, these are connected by their reference to angels and the questioning of the existence of a Judaeo-Christian god. The trilogy weaves this into a combination of old-school vampire stories and 28 Days Later-style, virally-proliferated apocalypse - which sounds overly complicated but actually works quite well. I'm not sure that there was quite enough material to warrant the third book being as long as it was (not actually that long, to be fair) but, overall, this is a gripping story which goes well beyond the usual vampire story and proffers a compelling origin myth.
Hello again! Over the past couple of weeks I have read four books - The Strain Trilogy (Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan) and The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ (Philip Pullman). As serendipity would have it, these are connected by their reference to angels and the questioning of the existence of a Judaeo-Christian god. The trilogy weaves this into a combination of old-school vampire stories and 28 Days Later-style, virally-proliferated apocalypse - which sounds overly complicated but actually works quite well. I'm not sure that there was quite enough material to warrant the third book being as long as it was (not actually that long, to be fair) but, overall, this is a gripping story which goes well beyond the usual vampire story and proffers a compelling origin myth.
Similarly, I suppose, Pullman offers his own take on the origin story of the New Testament. A very quick read, I found this extra interesting as I read it the day before the first day of Passover, during which I also watched Giles Coren's BBC programme on a Seder where Jews from lots of different families, traditions and geographical origins were invited. Obviously, the climax of the Jesus story occurs at this time of year, so it seemed really appropriate to read the book at this point. The reason I mention the BBC programme is because both it and Pullman invite you to consider how very old stories are remembered and interpreted very differently by pretty much everyone - whether as history or parable or fiction. Speaking as someone raised by a secular, humanist mother and a practising Jew, turned C of E priest father, the book certainly prompted me to reconsider the messages within all those stories surrounding Jesus which I was taught in Primary school but never really discussed at home, and which I have not considered at all for at least a decade. Which was refreshing, but the book also resurrected frustrations about the virulent nature of proselytism - linking us neatly back to The Strain. (I'm aware that my last comment, with some extrapolation, could perhaps be interpreted as my likening what some people believe to be god incarnate to a vampire...so I'm going to say sorry and stop talking about it.)
I'm also trying to unlock some of George's proposed achievements (having already attained my own Three is a Magic Number - read a trilogy) so I'm aiming for the Internacional (foreign language book) by reading The Eclogues and Georgics in the original Latin (some 3000 lines of hexameters). This also completes what I'm going to call the Fields, Farming and Furor achievement (aka the Why Did You Bother achievement), namely reading everything Vergil ever wrote (I read the whole Aeneid for finals). It also allows George the opportunity to keep repeating a terrible Classicist joke, which, judging by the frequency with which he is making said joke, he is very much enjoying.
I don't know what to read next...hmmmm...
Literary Love xxx
Books completed in chronological order of reading:
Stabat Mater, Tiziano Scarpa (2011)
Facing Violence, Rory Miller (2011)
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville (2007)
Open Secrets, Alice Munro (1994)
The Dragon Queen, Alice Borchardt (2001)
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Walters (1998)
The lost books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason (2007)
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, (1937)
The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman, (1991)
The Hypnotist, Lars Kepler, (2012)
The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010), The Night Eternal (2011), Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman (2010)
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