2 posts tagged “lois mcmaster bujold”
It's been over a month since I last posted, thus totally destroying my streak of posting the previous month's reading in something resembling a timely matter. I thought about waiting until this month breathed its last and doing a double post with July and August, but the add-a-book-from-Amazon dealie is broken, so it hasn't been convenient for me to keep track of my books lately. August's post will likely be a boring list with no shiny book cover thumbnails, so enjoy July's fanciness while you can.
These are in no particular order; I usually try to list them in the order I read them, but it's been too long and I can't remember. All rereads this go 'round: lots of Pratchett (including the mysteriously generic thumbnail for Men at Arms), a little Neil Gaiman, and a delightfully thought-provoking examination of midrash surrounding key biblical figures from Elie Wiesel. Summer's good for reading when there isn't too much going on.
Aside from the fifth book in Naomi Novik's "Napoleonic Wars, plus Dragons!" series, my reading in June had a distinct theological bent. Karen Armstrong's A History of God is as good as I remembered it for following the development of concepts of deity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The two Lois McMaster Bujold novels on my list deal with a thoroughly fictional world with a richly developed religious life in which five gods are worshipped by the orthodox Quintarians: the Mother of Summer, the Father of Winter, the Daughter of Spring, the Son of Autumn, and the Bastard, god of all things out of season. Finally, Many Waters finds twins Sandy and Dennys (minor characters at best in the previous books of the series begun with A Wrinkle in Time) thrown into the middle of the pre-Flood society from whence Noah sprang. It was a much stranger read than I remember it being when I was a kid, probably because I now have the religious studies background to scratch my head at some of the veiled allusions.
