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chuckroScrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick - I kinda wish I could have dinner with Anna Kendrick, but like, random pizza at a mutual friend's house low-stakes dinner. Because she seriously seems like such a fun person. And I realize that she's got an editor and was being diplomatic, but it's impressive she can be so grateful to the Twilight series for paying her rent while she got the rest of her career of the ground. And what she says about Stewart and Pattinson cements my theory that they were a great cast of people who were trapped in hell together. Though I think my favorite of her stories was about attending an awards show stoned off her face. I really enjoyed this book; it was a fast, enjoyable read and really funny.
I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence! by Richard Roberts - A side-story to the Supervillian series, my initial impulse was that I didn't like the mostly-immortal Team Tiny as much as our usual middle-school protagonists; and that didn’t change much. Honestly, Irene isn't a terribly likeable character. She's taken it upon herself to be shallow and immature in her advanced age, and it's irritating. The story overall is uneven, and the ending is a bit of a whimper, as we don't even get to see the big fight between the truce-enforcers and the killers, not to mention the actual takedown of the Bad Doctor. And a bunch of bits either don't make sense or you have no idea why they're important unless you're up to date on the rest of the Supervillian series. I thought this was the weakest of this author's books that I've read.
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel - Fascinating and blasphemous deep-dive into how the Hebrew bible has been interpreted, how we currently think it was constructed, and how much historical validity we can trace to the events therein. This is a very long and very dense book, and about a third of it is footnotes. (It probably could have used another editing pass--there are a bunch of repetitive bits in different chapters, and the “ancient interpretation / modern interpretation” formula breaks down in places, and the Kindle version screws up a number of the footnotes.) I was familiar with a bunch of the concepts, like the documentary hypothesis (JEPD etc. as different authors) but this gets into significant details of the history of that theory and its evolution. Also, I didn't realize how many of the Genesis characters directly related to later historical nations and people. (Cain and the Kennites was the one that really caught me off guard. But also the sons of Israel's tribulations and their relation to the historical fortunes of the corresponding tribes.) There’s a lot of material here—it does cover the entire Hebrew bible, after all—but if this author did a corresponding book on the Christian bible, I’d totally read that too.
I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence! by Richard Roberts - A side-story to the Supervillian series, my initial impulse was that I didn't like the mostly-immortal Team Tiny as much as our usual middle-school protagonists; and that didn’t change much. Honestly, Irene isn't a terribly likeable character. She's taken it upon herself to be shallow and immature in her advanced age, and it's irritating. The story overall is uneven, and the ending is a bit of a whimper, as we don't even get to see the big fight between the truce-enforcers and the killers, not to mention the actual takedown of the Bad Doctor. And a bunch of bits either don't make sense or you have no idea why they're important unless you're up to date on the rest of the Supervillian series. I thought this was the weakest of this author's books that I've read.
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel - Fascinating and blasphemous deep-dive into how the Hebrew bible has been interpreted, how we currently think it was constructed, and how much historical validity we can trace to the events therein. This is a very long and very dense book, and about a third of it is footnotes. (It probably could have used another editing pass--there are a bunch of repetitive bits in different chapters, and the “ancient interpretation / modern interpretation” formula breaks down in places, and the Kindle version screws up a number of the footnotes.) I was familiar with a bunch of the concepts, like the documentary hypothesis (JEPD etc. as different authors) but this gets into significant details of the history of that theory and its evolution. Also, I didn't realize how many of the Genesis characters directly related to later historical nations and people. (Cain and the Kennites was the one that really caught me off guard. But also the sons of Israel's tribulations and their relation to the historical fortunes of the corresponding tribes.) There’s a lot of material here—it does cover the entire Hebrew bible, after all—but if this author did a corresponding book on the Christian bible, I’d totally read that too.
