Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Shocked by the Bible

My husband recently ordered the book, Shocked By the Bible by Joe Kovacs. He read about a chapter or so one night, and then I stole the book, and read it front to back.

Interestingly enough, there are many things in the book that I knew about-- the pagen ritual ties to Christmas-- Noah's drunkenness-- Jesus wasn't the only one to walk on water. There were, however, some things that were not necessarily in the front of my mind, but rather a memory of going over these things in my past. The "God demands divorce" chapter and the "Satan asking permission of God to do evil" bits-- honestly, I do need to give my Sunday School teachers some credit, in that many of these things were not so shocking, but rather "oh, yeah! I remember that! Isn't it crazy how that happened?"

The chapter on unclean animals, was a bit of a shocker, though. Taking the Bible at its word, rather than our passed-down interpretation of it, well...let's say there's some thinking to do.




Now that I've finished up with that book, I've moved on to something I've found rather disturbing in the past-- moving from children's literature to adult literature. This in and of itself is not so bad--although I tend to read more kid's lit than anything.

My "experiment" (if you will)
I take a well-liked children's author (in the eyes of the kid's lit readers in my house) and read his or her adult literature work.
Not too scary, you might think. Well, the last time I did this was with Daniel Handler. His name might now be too familiar to you, but he wrote the abso-smurfly wonderful A Series of Unfortunate Events under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket. This series of stories is wonderfully rich and full of...well...unfortunate (and twisted) events. If you've not read the books (all 13), please do so (unless, of course, you prefer stories about happy little elves).
Well, as I said, the last time I decided to read the adult "stuff" of a beloved children's author, Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler was "it".
I picked up Adverbs.
Then The Basic Eight.
Then Watch Your Mouth.

I tried them all, yet never could I find that extraordinary voice I was looking for. Perhaps it is Lemony Snicket's writing I prefer to Daniel Handler's.

This experience has made me wary in attempting the experiment again. But I've decided to move past it and go on. Now it's Rick Riordan's turn.

Dear Mr. Riordan. I shared some comments from his blog a post or so ago. I enjoy his Percy Jackson series oh-so-much, as do both of my sons. So, why not try his adult stories? Why let Mr. Handler skew my view and upset my enjoyment of a good book? So, I decided to go for it, and picked up Big Red Tequila at the library yesterday.

I must say, "So far, so good." The only thing that I've found utterly revolting is that the title is not a specific brand of tequila, but is rather the "drink of our younger days" for the main character and his love interest (so far, that is)-- Big Red soda AND tequila.

EW.

HOWEVER-- it's not enough to keep me away from the book. Like I said-- "So far, so good". Mr. Riordan definitely has his own style, but with a bit of a trace (no pun intended*) of Elmore Leonard**. MAYBE. I'll have to finish the book and let you know about that one.

But for now, I'm off to write a bit of my own story. It's been a long time swimming around in my head-- time to get some more of it out.


* You'll have to read a bit to get it
**This is a compliment. I'm a fan of Mr. Leonard's work.

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