I'm continuing my vacation from War and Peace, although I expect to pick that back up this weekend. In the meantime, I've been catching up on one of the many sub-weaknesses that make up my overall weakness of going crazy with the credit card at the book store. In this case, I'm talking about paperback horror novels -- I tend to pick them up at the end of my run through the store, just after I pick up some things at the new release tables and before I head over to browse the magazines. I've also been picking up a number of thrillers and serial-killer tales as well.
So over the weekend, I finished a British tale of a biblically-scaled flood that precedes a possible invasion of body snatchers, The Deluge, which was pretty much an exercise in eh -- reasonably well told, but without any particular point, growth or resolution. Since I've been watching the first season of Dexter through the magic of Netflix, I also read the first two novels that inspired the series (Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter) -- punchy, short and funny, but with badly rushed endings. And I'm about a third of the way into Dennis Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone, a thus-far gripping book that I really hope has a better ending than Lehane's Shutter Island (which has a horrible Shyamalan-esque twist).
Anyhoo, I'm actually clearing some of my paperback novels off the To Be Read pile, which fills me with a sense of accomplishment. Not that it stopped me from adding to the height of the pile by using the Barnes and Noble gift card I got for my birthday (thank you, Joe and Hoai).
Right now, at the top of the pile I have Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. I picked it up mostly because I enjoyed his anti-religion polemic (does Hitchens write anything other than polemics?) God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything -- also, while there are a lot of vituperative writers working in the political mud, Hitchens is one of the very few who manages to be vituperative, cogent and hilariously entertaining. Unless you're, like, a priest or something, in which case I suppose he comes across as a grating, drunken, gas bag. But I'm no priest.
Actually, buying each of these treatises against the divine gave me a little moment of fear and excitement. No matter how far away I get from my childhood church -- the Fredonia Valley Cumberland Presbyterian Church -- there's still a tiny part of me that warns from a deep corner of my brain that God's gonna send me to hell for reading that stuff. It's part of the reason I maintain a healthy agnosticism, rather than an aggressive atheism. I could be wrong to dismiss a higher power in such an infinitely large and ill-understood universe (although I doubt I am). It's not exactly a Pascal's Wager on my part -- even a third rate minor deity would see through that selfish ploy -- but I have a real habit of hedging my bets.
The other very interesting item I picked up is Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. Lomborg was hailed as a secular Satan for his previous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which, contrary to his detractors, didn't argue a case against global warming -- it argued a case against bad science in support of global warming. It's been a while since I've read it, and I haven't read Cool It yet, but basically, his point generally runs that A) while global warming is a real and growing problem, there may be better ways of addressing it, and B) science and human progress have been a net plus for humanity, not a net minus.
Andrew Sullivan was a huge booster of Lomborg and The Skeptical Environmentalist, but now that he's become a "conservative" advocate of enormous gas taxes and free public transportation, I'm curious to see if he'll pick up the torch for Cool It. I'm not betting on it.
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