Major Project

Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version by Anonymous
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I've been working on this for a few months - a little bit each night, absorbing it as I go. I remember being really annoyed at parts I read as a teen and a proto-feminist.  This time I started with the NewT and went back for the Old Testament.  I was delighted to find a typo in my edition, someone's son who became king at 49 when his father died at 42 or some such.  It was easy to check because the histories are duplicative (and I can't express what a pain it was to read the same info over and over).  The son was actually 29.  It doesn't ruin the whole book, but it does show I was paying attention.  My next project is to mark the sections by author.  I have a big box of highlighters.  The pages are so thin, though, and I'm afraid the highlighters will bleed through. Fortunately, I have two copies of this edition.  Dang, we have so many bibles in this house, most of them in German.
My advice to people: read it all the way through - don't just cherry-pick the good parts, and there are good parts.
My review: The Iliad is better.  I'm not saying the philosophy is better, it's just a better and more cohesive story.  Babies brains are dashed out in both, so I think it's a fair comparison.  They were both written a long time ago and as a window into their times they are very interesting - but I'm not going to live my life based on the philosophy of either of them.  All I need to know about life I learned from my mom: Forgive and forget; Never say never; You always worry about the wrong thing; Be nice; All men are creeps in one way or another, you just have to find the least creepy one; and Don't worry, we'll be dead soon and our ideas will go with us.  Wish she had been right about that last one - I get the uncomfortable feeling that our greed, pettiness, and hatred just get perpetuated generation after generation and books like this one add to the vitriol.


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A Psychological Demi-Semi-Hemi-Thriller

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a good read. Instead of figuring out whodunnit, we are taxed with whosolvzit. We have an omniscient view of the murder from soup to nuts. We see the situation forming, we see the murderer and the victim do their dance until they inevitably come together and the murderer spins away to get on with life. Then we wait while we wonder if the murderer will be discovered and we sort of hope not. Like most cozies, the victim seems to have deserved something, if not actual death. Rendell has manipulated our feelings and, in fact, one of the characters unwittingly discusses the the core at the center of the nub of the gist of this story: when is murder not murder? When is it not a sin? When does a murderer not deserve punishment? Is this even possible?
We also see how a murder investigation destroys the social fabric. Neighbors no longer trust each other. There's an amusing side-story of a closeted gay MP who tries to get himself a "beard" but the murder affects this as well. As in any good cozy, true tragedy is skirted, the gore is limited, and the world is righted in the end.

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