This and that

I haven't been blogging here very much lately, at least compared to years gone by. My classes have been over for a few months but now it's summertime and it's finally beautiful outside. And my reading is more diverse these days.

I am still fascinated by religion & spirituality & myth in science fiction and fantasy, no doubt about that. So there'll be a steady drip-drip-drip of little posts coming through. I get the sense that my regulars have me on their RSS feed lists (or whatever it's called). No problems there. If you're like me and prefer to check the actual sites, just check in every two weeks or so.

SF Gospel has been blogging up a (very interesting) storm lately. I imagine most of my readers are also his readers and if you're not, you should be. Sci-fi Catholic was blogging heavily in the first half of June though he's taking a bit of a break. And don't forget all the other interesting people linked to under "SF/F/F Sites" over on the right.

A few tidbits:

I read Anne Rice's new Christ the Lord: The Road to Canada. Err, I meant, The Road to Cana. (It's hard not to add that final 'da,' just like I can hardly type "Wolf" without making it "Wolfe.") It's well written and had some insights that are going to stay with me, but I didn't feel it had the same power as her Out of Egypt. It has a lot to do with family/clan/small town dynamics that I didn't quite grasp at first. It's concerned partly with Jesus' life before his baptism, and partly with events that we hear about in the Gospels. I think there was more room for Rice's historically-grounded creativity in the (relatively) blank spaces, than when she's writing between the lines of the already-received story. I don't think it was a failure; it just didn't move me like the first one did. But check out some other reviews.

I started to read Dreamers of the Day, by Mary Doria Russell. I got a little bogged down and put it aside for the time being. The narrative style seemed different than in her previous books, and I felt that Russell was drawing my attention a little too insistently to the parallels between the era of the Great War and our own time. I think the parallels exist and are indeed relevant, just that they came across too obviously. That might just be because I'd already been reading about contemporary foreign affairs & politics.

I bought a copy of Queen City Jazz, by Katherine Ann Goonan a few weeks ago and browsed through it. This is a book I read in my teenage years and which I reminisced about here. Apparently I forgot that the protagonist was a girl, not a boy. At the beginning she lives with a community of New Shakers, in an America that has been radically transfigured. Goonan makes good use of older American folkways (like snatches of old hymns) and locales to communicate a pre-industrial world which exists alongside a very high-tech one.

I have been (re)-reading other relevant books in these (somewhat) lazy days of summer, but just bits here and there, just enjoying them. The Man in the High Castle, Peace, Pirate Freedom, Exodus from the Long Sun, Neuromancer, Speaker for the Dead, etc.