In line at the grocery store this afternoon, I spotted a book for sale among the magazines, crossword books, and horoscopes called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Faith.

Insert your own snarky remark here.

I've been reading bits of Stephen Colbert's book I Am America (And So Can You!) lately. I thought I'd share a few of my favorite sections thus far.

( Atheism, Gay Marriage, and Higher Education )

From Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration (1968):           This is your old friend Louie too (or, popularly, Louis the Likewise) with wonderful new news for all you sufferers from angst and angina, for the conscience-ridden and God-plagued, for the psychosomatic and the simply stigmatic. you can throw away that truss! Because, mon semblable, mon ( Read more... )

From Scarlett Thomas's novel The End of Mr. Y:Why is religion so disappointing? You expect it to tell you something you don't know, and all it ends up telling you is the stuff you've known for years, and that you long ago decided is wrong ( Read more... )

Since I spent much of this week in bed sick, I had plenty of time to read between fever-dreams and bouts of unconsciousness. One day this week I read Connie Willis's Passage. The premise is interesting. Dr. Joanna Lander, a psychologist, specializes in studying near-death experiences. She teams up with a neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright (which ( Read more... )

Robert Charles Wilson's Spin won the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Novel and deservedly so. It is most certainly science fiction in all the recognizable ways--it includes space/time travel, advanced technology, planetary exploration, even an alien (of sorts)--but it goes well beyond mere science fiction, interweaving explanation of the technology with ( Read more... )

My latest read is Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson, subtitled "A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century." It's an alternate history that does not stop at showing the differences between our familiar history and the alternate history that unfolds; it is also quite concerned with this alternate history's causes and repercussions ( Read more... )

Well, I finished Shinn's Samaria trilogy last night, the final book of which is called The Alleluia Files. I was quite disappointed ( Read more... )

Last night I finished the second of the trilogy by Sharon Shinn that I began a few days ago. The first book in the trilogy is Archangel, which, as I have already written about once, was somewhat disappointing. The second is Jovah's Angel, a much more interesting book in several ways ( Read more... )

Yesterday I read Archangel by Sharon Shinn. I was drawn to it because of its status as science fiction (of a sort--it reads more like a hybrid of romance and fantasy) that deals with religion. It is set in a world where angels and men live side by side, God speaking directly to the angels and the angels charged with being mediators between God ( Read more... )