Book Haul-o-Ween

My husband and I were in Chicago on October 27th-29th. Before we left, I wanted to pay another visit to Selected Works, the used bookstore in The Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. You may remember Selected Works from this 2012 blog post:

That Time I Tried Out for Jeopardy!

In 2012, I lugged the ponderous tome The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy on the train, and was stuck carrying it for the rest of the trip. This time, I brought two books which, even taken together, were still smaller: Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, and The Last Days of Magic, the Doctor Strange graphic novel. And we shipped our dirty laundry et al, home in a U.P.S. box so we didn't have to schlep it everywhere.

Today I learned the bookstore cat's name. It is Hodge. This is Hodge examining one of the books I intended to purchase.

I said in 2012 that I thought he was a Russian blue, but now I don't think he is. I think he's just gray, like my dad's cat Bucky.

In 2012, I found a neat old paperback about the film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's short stories. I tried to find more Hemingway nonfiction, but I didn't see anything that interested me. Instead, I found these four things.

I'm already familiar with "The Wasp in a Wig" thanks to Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice books (I own two different editions). I still like to own as many Lewis Carroll volumes as possible.

(Also, I may have ordered myself a pair of Alice in Wonderland socks while I was buying my mother's birthday present from Out of Print Clothing today.)

As we learned from the Willie Lynch Speech incident, there are a good deal of quotes out there in circulation that were never actually uttered. Often, the authors contend, these false quotes have polemic purposes. Some of these false quotes drive the conspiracy culture of today. This book was published in 1989, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) many of these fake quotes are still being quoted today by people who have no idea they were wrongly attributed, taken far out of context, or made up of pure bullshittery. It's rather fascinating.

I apologize for the low-res picture. It's from Goodreads.

I may have caught Pericles: Prince of Tyre, The Tempest, and Richard III this year, but there is still Shakespeare out there for me to conquer. I'll never reach Jillian Keenan's level, but this should be a good basic reference book.

It may seem that I indulged myself quite a bit in the bookshop. I did. We did a lot of indulging when we weren't visiting the organ transplant team at Northwestern University hospital, though. We saw Blue Man Group and went to the AMC Dine-In Theatre, where we got to eat a full meal, including cocktails, while watching the film version of Dan Brown's Inferno. We didn't get to see the ending of Inferno, unfortunately, because of a very rude lady, but that will have to be a story for another day.

Thriller Book Review: 'The Payback Assignment' by Austin Camacho

The Payback Assignment by Austin S. Camacho

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you like the action/adventure type of thriller novel, you really can't go wrong with this one. It's as fast-paced and absorbing as a Dan Brown novel, but with more sensory details and less awkward phrasing. Hero Morgan Stark and heroine Felicity O'Brian are multi-dimension characters, and well-matched ones at that. True, they would make a good couple, but their bond is even more profound than that of lovers. They have an almost paranormal sense of when the other is in danger. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the other two books in the series.

Full disclosure: Although I do not know the author personally, he and I were social media friends for a few years on Gather.com. He did not ask me to review this book. I purchased it with my own funds at a discount bookstore and was not obligated in any way to review it. This review represents my own honest opinion.

Real Feelings About Ersatz History

Sometimes I like to get lost on Wikipedia. I got lost the other day in the "pseudohistory" category, and it was fascinating.

It started with the Ourang Medan. Well, it started on YouTube. I wasn't signed into my Google Account, so I was browsing the home page. A channel with a series of "top 5" lists came up - in fact, the channel is called Top5s.

This is the video I saw.

[If you want to read more about the strange death of Canadian student Elisa Lam in Los Angeles, you may do so at The Vigilant Citizen.]

The evening after I watched the video, I went to bed thinking about the Ourang Medan, the "ghost ship" whose crew was supposedly found dead, with expressions of abject terror on their faces, shortly before the ship exploded and sank. I wondered if the story was true.

I looked it up the next day. According to Wikipedia, there's no evidence that a ship called the Ourang Medan even existed. If it did, it should be listed in Lloyd's Shipping Register, but it isn't.

The categories at the bottom of the entry caught my eye; this is where I noticed the word "pseudohistory." What a fascinating word, I thought: not history that actually happened, but "history" that circulates in human consciousness without apparent basis in fact. I had to know what else belonged to this category.

For the record, I should mention that Wikipedia, as a peer-edited source, doesn't have the same standards for reliability and accuracy that a source with a "gatekeeper"/editor has. Although it has guidelines, it has so many users that it would be virtually impossible to ensure that all the articles adhere to its guidelines at all times. We have to take Wikipedia entries with a grain of salt, but that doesn't mean the categorization itself isn't of interest.

Pseudohistory, it turns out, contains a great many fascinating topics. Some of it has to do with "ancient astronaut theory," as exemplified by Erich von Däniken's 1968 nonfiction book Chariots of the Gods?. (The question mark is part of the title.)

Another large subcategory of pseudohistory is labelled as Priory of Sion Hoax. This has to do with much of the background story that went into Dan Brown's writing of The Da Vinci Code. Another subcategory is the "Shakespeare authorship question." (There's also a Molière authorship question, but hey, I care much less about French literature than English. Cultural bias - sorry.)

Much of the pseudohistory category has to do with religion, much of it to do specifically with Christianity. Take, for example, the brief Babylon Mystery Religion article. Babylon Mystery Religion is a book, now out of print, by Ralph Woodrow published in 1966. Referring to an earlier (1853) book called The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, Woodrow's book linked the Roman Catholic Church to ancient Babylonian rituals. Woodrow later recanted his anti-Catholic views in a second book.

Apparently there are quite a few factual errors in Hislop's book, stemming from misunderstandings about the historical Babylonian culture. Although scholars have subsequently pointed out these errors, the Catholicism=Whore of Babylon theme is still alive and well among some Evangelical Christians and Jehovah's Witnesses.

One of the modern-day adherents to some version of Hislop's ideas is Michael Hoggard, an American (Missouri) pastor with a relatively large following for his radio/YouTube show. The show has more than 20,000 fans on Facebook. He also curates the website http://666alert.net/, which collects uses of images linked to the number 666 as they appear in popular culture.

Hoggard is a Southern Baptist. A related pseudohistorical concept is Baptist successionism, which argues that the Baptist denomination is most direct line between the Christianity of Jesus and the Apostles and modern churches. The work most often associated with this view is The Trail of Blood (1931) by J.M. Carroll. It is not historically accurate, but it remained influential among Southern Baptists well into the late 20th century.

But for me, maybe the most interesting article in all of pseudohistory is the Witch-Cult Hypothesis. Remember when I got my ass handed to me for over-relying on Barbara J. Walker as a source? (If not, you can always read about it here.) Well, Walker is probably an adherent of this theory. It states, essentially, that through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Era, ancient Pagan religions survived in such a way that worshipers of The Horned God of Paganism were mistaken by Christians for worshipers of the Christian devil and subsequently persecuted as witches. This theory came about in the 19th century and was perpetuated into the 20th century, even including the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica for many years.

(Encyclopedias are them things we used to read before we had Google.)

According to the Wikipedia entry, the Witch-Cult Hypothesis found a champion in British historian/Egyptologist Margaret Murray*, who wrote The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. It is not historically accurate.

Despite its unreliability as history, Murray's book is said, in the Wikipedia entry, to have been influential in the development of the Wiccan religion. Murray's subsequent book, The God of the Witches, introduced the term The Horned God for the male deity worshiped by the alleged witch cult on Western Europe. (She acknowledged that the witch cult also worshiped a goddess, but in her opinion the witches regarded their male deity as the more important of the two.) Gerald Gardner, who was also English and is now considered the founder of modern Wicca (referred to as Gardnerian Wicca), claimed to have found a surviving coven of the kind of witches Murray described, and he started his own coven based on them, in the interest of keeping the religion alive.

But mind you, Wicca, modern witchcraft, and NeoPaganism are 20th century religions. While they revive certain aspects of ancient belief and worship, the rituals and beliefs of modern witches were created in the 20th century. And there's nothing wrong with that. People take what they need from their religions, and a religion doesn't have to be old to meet the needs of its practitioners.

The Wikipedia article on The Horned God states that Gardner, consciously influenced by Murray, borrowed his conception of Wiccan practice from Freemasonry, from the Theosophy movement, from other unnamed occult sources, and from Aleister Crowley's Gnostic Mass. (In 1913, Crowley wrote a mass for the Gnostic church, borrowing from the rituals of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian churches, but replacing Christian concepts with his own Thelema, his "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.")

By the way, Margaret Murray is also in part responsible for the association of Glastonbury, England, with King Arthur and the Holy Grail. I used this legend in Midsummer Night.

https://www.createspace.com/4657847

So dig in to pseudohistory if you like. If you're interested in history - and in the history of ideas - you may find it as fascinating as I did.

*That Madeleine L'Engle's fictional protagonist in The Time Quintet is named Margaret "Meg" Murry is coincidence, I think.

'The Unauthorized Dan Brown Companion' on 'Deception Point'

Having just finished audio-reading Deception Point by Dan Brown, I decided to pick up The Unauthorized Dan Brown Companion, edited by John Helfers, off my bookshelf. You may recall from my review of Breaking the Da Vinci Code that I enjoy reading nonfiction books about Dan Brown's fiction. I love books about books in general.

Skimming through the first chapter, "Dan Brown: The Man and His Fiction," I realized I didn't know anything about Dan Brown as a person. I discovered that:

- He was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, which is also the birthplace of the American novelist John Irving (The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp).

- He attended his hometown's prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school, where his father was a mathematics teacher.

- His mother was a performer and teacher of sacred music.

- He then went to Amherst College in Massachusetts. Amherst is the home of the Emily Dickinson Museum, and it possesses about half of Dickinson's manuscripts. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy, the secondary school that was the predecessor of Amherst College. Amherst College was all-male until 1960.

- He also studied art history in Sevilla, Spain. The book doesn't say whether or not he earned a degree.

- His first career choice was musician, but he was shy and awkward when performing in front of people.

- After abandoning his musical career, Brown taught English and creative writing at Phillips Exeter.

- The first book he wrote was a book of limericks.

- Brown and his wife Blythe Newlon - a painter and art historian - co-wrote a humorous dating guide called 187 Men to Avoid under the pen name "Danielle Brown."

- His first novel, Digital Fortress, was inspired in part when one of his students was visited by the Secret Service after joking about killing President Clinton in an e-mail. He set part of that novel in Sevilla.

The next interesting chapter is the fifth, "From Indiana Jones to Robert Langdon: Great Academic Heroes in Fact and in Fiction." The list is as follows:

Indiana Jones
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)
Dr. Benton Quest (Jonny Quest)
Fox Mulder
Sherlock Holmes
Buckaroo Banzai

On Indiana Jones, I have most definitely had a crush. I mean, Harrison Ford, right? I think I watched Temple of Doom about a thousand times when I was kid. Indy was smooth, suave. He knew what to do in every situation. Best of all, he was an archaeologist! That's what I wanted to be when I was a kid. I was constantly checking Egyptology, archaeology, and anthropology books out of the library. My childhood fascination with Indiana Jones was, no doubt, a key moment in the development of my sapiosexuality.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is one classic I never read. Perhaps I should; according to Helfers' book, "Sir Percy ends up married to the most beautiful, most intelligent woman in the known world..." If he can appreciate the world's most intelligent woman, he sounds like a keeper. Also, it is said that with this novel, the Baroness invented the superhero genre.

I'm pretty sure I read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park only after seeing the movie, and I'm also pretty sure I had a crush on Dr. Malcolm as played by Jeff Goldblum.

I vaguely remember watching Jonny Quest as a small child - I watched many Hanna-Barbera cartoons - but I cannot specifically remember Benton Quest. "Buckaroo Banzai" is a name that only sounds vaguely familiar - maybe from an '80s movie I was too young to watch.

Now, Fox Mulder - I had quite the crush on him for a while. It's a bit weird to me, though, that the list is exclusively male. If anyone should be on this list, it's Dana Scully. She was the scientist. If I remember correctly, she was a physician. Mulder was more of conspiracy theorist than an academic. In fact, I'm pretty sure Indiana Jones is the only college professor on this list.

Of course I love Sherlock Holmes - in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, on Elementary, and in the Guy Ritchie films. (I watched the initial episode of the BBC Sherlock, "A Study in Pink," but it failed to arouse my interest.) Holmes isn't, strictly speaking, an academic, but he was inspired by a real-life one, a professor of medicine.

Indeed, the fictional men of this list are attractive to me. It seems that some female fictional characters who are known for both their intelligence and their adventurous side could have been added. What about Lara Croft, tomb raider? Like Indiana Jones, she's an archaeologist. (Okay, so she's from a video game and a movie, not from a book.)

Michael Tolland can certainly be added to the list of sexy action-scientists.

The largest portion of this book is the concordance, consisting of alphabetical entries of people, places, and things found in Dan Brown's novels up to The Da Vinci Code. The most interesting entries are from the first two Robert Langdon novels, because they have all that great art and architecture in them. I didn't really learn much more about the science of Deception Point, but some of the more interesting entries include:

The Lincoln Bedroom: "Though President Lincoln never used it himself, his son Willie died in the bed of typhoid fever at age 11, in 1962. Ever since, numerous sightings of Lincoln's ghost in the room have been reported by White House guests." In the novel, Michael Tolland tries to amuse Rachel Sexton with a terrible impression of Lincoln's ghost. This is shortly before he tries to seduce her with his knowledge of jellyfish mating rituals.

Olivine: "A material silicate that crystallizes from magma rich in nesium and iron but low in silica. Also called chrysolite, olivine's characteristic yellow-green to olive-green color gives the mineral its name. Transparent olivine can be cut into gemstones known as peridot. It is one of the most common minerals on Earth by volume and has been discovered in meteorites, on Mars, and on the moon."

Red Room: "The Red Room in the White House originally served as the president's antechamber for the Cabinet Room or the President's Library...It remained yellow until 1845, when First Lady Sarah Polk furnished the room in crimson and ruby and it became known as the Red Room," So really, it has nothing to do with Fifty Shades of Gray.

Seahorse mating: "Seahorses are the only known species on the planet in which the male gets pregnant. Seahorses mate for life, and they will even mate across different seahorse species. The female packs the male's breeding bag with nutrients, then snuggles up close to deposit orange-colored eggs inside for the male to fertilize. When mating they link their tails together and do a kind of dance.

"Gestation is only three weeks, resulting in the live birth of between fifteen and one thousand five hundred baby seahorses!...Amazingly, seahorses can get pregnant again almost immediately."

Skyquakes: "Skyquakes are earth-shaking booming sounds, often described as sounding like cannon fire. Louder than thunder or the sonic booms created by aircraft, they often occur on bright, sunny days and are unaffected by weather.

"Skyquakes have been witnessed all over the world and throughout history, including by the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1808. Though scientists postulate that some skyquakes are caused by the testing of secret aircraft or meteors disintegrating in the atmosphere, there is still no definitive answer as to what they are."

Sphyrna mokarran: "Sphyrna mokarran is the scientific name for hammerhead sharks...There are nine different species of hammerhead sharks, ranging from three feet in length to twenty. Found in warm water near the coastlines, they are the only species of sharks to travel in schools."

I like sharks. Top predators are good for their environments, and the ocean needs its sharks. They are beautiful fish. They may occasionally eat a person, but not out of maliciousness. They're simply a hungry animal trying to survive.

I like science and history. That's some of what I enjoy when I read Dan Brown's books.

I Fantasy-Cast Dan Brown's 'Deception Point'

The latest book I listened to on CD was Deception Point by Dan Brown. From the pre-Robert Langdon era, it was Brown's second published novel (after Digital Fortress).

Frankly, Deception Point isn't as interesting as the Langdon novels. It lacks the world art, architecture, and history references that help make the Harvard "symbologist's" adventures so entertaining. Deception Point is still entertaining as a fast-paced thriller, though.

The other day I shared some of my "casting" choices for my mental "movie" of Deception Point. For the main protagonist, Rachel Sexton, I like Kristen Stewart. Rachel is young, intelligent, capable, ballsy when she needs to be, and a bit vulnerable at times. She's the prototypical Dan Brown heroine, a Sophie Neveu in the making (minus the divine bloodline).

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021090341757/

Rachel Sexton's love interest is the oceanographer Michael Tolland. I can't imagine anyone else but George Clooney as Tolland. Michael Tolland is supposed to be a good-looking, photogenic guy with brown eyes. Maybe he's not right-now George Clooney - age 53 - but The Perfect Storm-era George Clooney certainly would work.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021093404462/

Are they too mismatched in age to be a couple? Stewart is only 24, a whole 12 years younger than the newly-minted Mrs. Clooney, the brilliant, gorgeous humanitarian lawyer Amal Ramzi formerly-Alamuddin-now-emphatically-Clooney. (Guys, I love her.) This is supposed to be Mike's second-chance romance. He lost his wife to cancer right before he threw himself wholeheartedly into a career of bringing science education about the world's oceans to the public through documentary filmmaking, like a Jacques Cousteau for the 2000s.

Eh, maybe it's a bit of a male fantasy--the much-younger woman--but I'm going to let it slide. It's pretty much par for the course in a Dan Brown novel.

For Dr. Corky Marlinson, the astronomer and expert on meteor composition, I favor Jeffrey Wright. He's brilliant as Beetee in the Hunger Games series; is it bad to typecast him as "smart guy?"

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021093404618/

Thank you, Dan Brown, for not killing Corky. I was pretty worried for a moment, especially when Corky's leg was bleeding and he didn't put a tourniquet on it.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021093404966/

He's a fairly minor character, but Dr. Weilee Ming could be played by Ken Leung. To be honest, though, Dr. Ming is much less of a troublemaker than the typical Ken Leung character.

While we're on the subject of actors from Lost and Person of Interest, I could see William Pickering as Michael Emerson.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021093405045/

It's a given from the text that Gabrielle Ashe looks like Halle Berry.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021093405082/

But who should play her boss - and Rachel's estranged father - Senator Thomas Sedgwick Sexton? I can only think of Richard Gere.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/46936021093405097/

I borrowed this audiobook from my local library and was not obligated in any way to review it. Now that I've finished it, I've begun listening to The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, read by the author himself. It'll be the first Neil Gaiman book I've read.

If you're a Simpsons fan like me, you remember Neil Gaiman from "The Book Job." It's my second-favorite episode, after the classic "Lisa's Rival."

Stream-of-Consciousness Sunday: Currently Reading and Erin's Dream Diary

Now that I've finished Gone Girl, my current reads are:

I'm about 70 pages into Great by Sara Benincasa. It's a contemporary YA retelling of The Great Gatsby with some of the characters' genders reversed; Nick and Jay are now Naomi and Jacinta. The writing style isn't super-literary, and in spots it borders on the ridiculous, but I'm still interested in how the tale proceeds. I started reading this at my cousin's birthday party for her kids the other night, when my husband and the other men were engaged in watching an incredibly stupid MTV show in the bar. (The party took place at a bowling alley my cousin had rented for the occasion.)

This is a book I got free from Amazon Vine. Another Vine pick I'm about a third of the way through:

So it's a silly PNR about a weretiger princess who finds herself attracted to a warrior vampire. So what? It's fun, and I love big cat shapeshifter stories. In my mind I'm picturing Russell, the vampire, as Christian Bale. Russell is supposed to be an American - well, Christian Bale is now a naturalized American. I think they kicked him out of the U.K. because he was born without a British Charm Unit.

In the car on my hour-long commute to the Corporate Marketing Day Job, I'm 11 of 15 discs through Dan Brown's Deception Point. I borrowed it from the library. I've begun mentally casting the movie:

Michael Tolland - George Clooney
Corky Marlinson - Jeffrey Wright (my beloved Beetee from the Hunger Games film series)
Wailee Ming - Ken Leung

I don't have strong feelings about who should play Rachel Sexton. Any Generic White Girl will do. I can't stop thinking of Gabrielle as Halle Berry because it's written right into the text that she resembles the actress.

The book I sometimes read on my lunch hour at work is Cover Him With Darkness by Janine Ashbless. I got the paperback from Cleis Press in exchange for an honest review.

It encompasses one of my current obsessions - angel sex, although of the hetero variety in this case - and one of my deep-seated, ongoing obsessions - That Yugoslavia! Thing. It takes place in Montenegro, partially. Also, the writing is fantastically good.

You may remember Yugoslavia! from previous installments of Erin's Dream Diary:

A Wonderful Vampire Dream
The Adam Levine Dream
The Beltane Fertility Dream
The Boy
The Inspirational Zombie Dream
Wall Street
Window Into the Mind of an Erotica Author
Yugoslavia!

Because my uterus refuses to play nice, like my other bodily organs do, I awoke to pain and blood. Despite, or perhaps because of, the hormonal flux going on beneath my skin, I vividly remember what I'd been dreaming before my internal Nagini decided to shed her skin:

My dad's dad was still alive. He and my Irish Granny owned a restaurant, where my parents and I both worked. I was 19 years old. My project of the morning was making a pot of soup, the base of which included the concentrated juice of pomegranates.

http://thatwritererinoriordan.tumblr.com/post/109060935600/beautiful-bibliophile-day-17-biggest-plot#notes

This lovely photo, which I found on Tumblr during an idle moment yesterday, may have been responsible for my dreaming of pomegranates.

Here I must mention that in my dream, the Earth was under the control of the Empire - the Darth Vader empire from the Star Wars series. We all know that the events of Star Wars happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But maybe I was dreaming about Star Wars because I am a nerd drove through fog the other day, and when I drive through fog, I like to pretend I'm in Cloud City. Yeah, I grew up in the '80s.

The time of year is late April/early May - the time of Beltane - in my dream. I kept thinking I wanted to ride my bike into the woods to make my prayers and sacrifices to the God and Goddess. But I had to wait to go to the temple of the woods, because a storm trooper came into the restaurant.

Eve Rinaldi via Wikimedia Commons

FYI, the reference to Beltane might have come about because I've reblogged a few Howl's Moving Castle posts on Tumblr in the past few days. I love Howl and Sophie as a couple, and as you may recall, they met on Beltane/May Day. It's their anniversary. Yesterday was my maternal grandparents' wedding anniversary, although both are deceased, and they had gotten married on the same day as my grandfather's parents.

My mother's father's parents on their wedding day, circa 1915. That day was a January 24th.
 

But I digress. The storm trooper came in, and I felt very threatened and intimidated by his presence. I considered the fact that he might kill me and my family. But he took off his helmet, and he was a regular guy. He looked just like Ben Affleck.

I told you I would get attached to Nick Dunne.

So the storm trooper, whose name I must have known in the dream but cannot now remember - we'll just call him Ben - flirted with me. I let him come upstairs to my bedroom, to the family living quarters above the restaurant. Somehow I managed to sneak him past my parents and grandparents, even though all four of them were there.

We kissed. I took my clothes off. He took off his uniform. We had sex. For me, it was the first time.

Currently obsessed with the song "First Time" by Ghost Beach, an indie rock band named after a Goosebumps book

Several weeks later, when I realized my period was late, I knew I was pregnant. I surreptitiously bought a pregnancy test and sneaked off to the woods, to the very place where I would have made my obeisance to the God and Goddess on Beltane, to take the test. My family found out shortly after that. I don't know how - I didn't volunteer that information. Soon I found myself hauled in to the Empire's nearest outpost. The Empire had some kind of interest in children who had been conceived on Beltane, and they considered my offspring to be their property. I would be held as a prisoner until I gave birth to my daughter, then released back to my family. I was never to expect to see my daughter again. It was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. Ben was allowed to visit me and bring me things. On his home planet, he was also a witch. He showed me a book of the Craft from his home world that told him which roots to dig up and give me for morning sickness. Fortunately, they also grew on Earth, but he could only dig them up by the light of the full moon, and he had to chew them up for me. (This is oddly sweet - the father having to chew up the roots that will benefit his child in utero.) In actuality, the time I had to live without seeing my daughter was only a few months, because the Empire was defeated and the troops got to go home. I know I got my child back, but I don't know whether Ben stayed on Earth, if I decided to take the baby to his home planet, or if we parted ways. That is how my hormone-addled subconscious mind works.

Book Review: 'The Anonymous Girl' by Holy Ghost Writer

The Anonymous Girl by Holy Ghost Writer (HGW) is the sequel to That Girl Started Her Own Country (review here). The first novel in this series is The Sultan of Monte Cristo, a contemporary follow-up to Alexandre Dumas' 19th-century masterpiece. Sultan followed the further adventures of Edmond Dantes, Mercedes, and Haydee; That Girl switched the scenery to the 21st century, following the adventures of a descendant of Dantes and his mistress Raymee.

At least one other volume of the series - The Sovereign of Monte Cristo, which I have read - takes place in the 19th century on an American plantation. Quite frankly, I'm not entirely sure what order the entire series is meant to be read in, but Sultan definitely comes first.

The protagonist of The Anonymous Girl is Zaydee, and she's still in the process of starting her own country. She doesn't know she's a descendant of Edmond Dantes and Raymee, but she seems to be edging closer to the truth about her heritage. She's also connected somehow to a secret society called the Sovereign Order of Monte Cristo. Like the previous book, this one hints at conspiracy theories, but very little is revealed. I keep hoping the next installation will tie things together in a neat package.

Within this fictional world, Zaydee may be the true identity of the fictional character Lisbeth Salander. Steig Larsson, in this fictional world, is a pen name of U.S. journalist named Steve Larson, and Steve is a former lover of Zaydee's. This volume introduces a new wrinkle to the story, though: Zaydee has an identical twin sister named Liz. Steve didn't realize they were two different people even though he had relationships with both of them - so, chances are, Lisbeth Salander is based on some characteristics of both sisters.

This time around, Liz is extremely concerned for Steve's safety, but Zaydee seems convinced he's safe but has been taken into some kind of custody for his own protection. This is the first time the sisters have spoken in several years.

Speaking of custody, Zaydee is still residing in a federal prison in Florida. She's getting increasingly fed up with the criminal justice system, and she uses her superior hacking skills to get some sweet revenge on a couple of FBI bozos. These scenes are typical of the wicked humor throughout these stories, some of what makes them so fun and enjoyable.

Zaydee has really grown on me as a character, partly because she's so smart and competent, and partly because in some ways she resembles her famous ancestor The Count. She plays fast and loose with the American legal system, but you can't help but root for her dream of starting her own micro-nation with mostly women in all the important positions of state.

A new character in this volume is Remey, the heir of a biotech company whose father is working on a transhumanist project involving manipulating the human genetic code and furthering evolution at a greatly sped-up rate. Zaydee throws a spanner in the company's works, much to the chagrin of Remey's father. Remey takes Zaydee's side, turning his back on his family and his connections to a second secret society, Skull and Bones. Remey's character is well-written because when he comes into Zaydee's life on one of her excursions outside prison walls, it's unclear whether he's going to be an asset or a liability to her. By the end of the novel he seems to be trustworthy, but there's a bit of mystery to his character.

This fast-paced series continues to draw me in, and I look forward to reaching the end and having some answers to the questions raised by the secret societies and the exact nature of the link between the present day and the Count of Monte Cristo's time. I tended to take the series a little too seriously at first. You have to have fun with it. It's like a fun, breezy Dan Brown thriller.

"Holy Ghost Writer" is the pen name of an undisclosed author. The person who discovers his or her true identity has the opportunity to win a $1,000 prize. To enter, one has to e-mail a guess to prize AT sultanofmontecristo DOT com.

I purchased this book with my own funds from Barnes and Noble.

This is an affiliate link:

Erinyes by George Saoulidis. $4.99 from Smashwords.com
When a sheltered teenager starts noticing a hazy face following her in her photographs, she begins to investigate an urban legend. But will she uncover the truth when she gets in trouble with a technology corporation, when an enigmatic hacker starts telling her conspiracy theories and when the hazy face becomes all too real and starts chasing her non-stop?

Book Review: Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

I am brimming with literary excitement at the news that J.K. Rowling's post-The Cuckoo's Nest project is a screenplay based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It won't just be one film, but a new series. Never has there been a more appropriate time for a Potterhead "Squee!"

What I Thought of Dan Brown's Book

But more news on that as it develops. Right now, let's talk about Dan Brown's 2013 release, Inferno. I got this book at the library and was not compensated for this review in any way; it represents my own honest opinion.

When I read a Dan Brown novel, I have certain expectations:

*Robert Langdon will be man's fantasy hero, a frumpy middle-aged professor who attracts a hot, brilliant, much-younger love interest - check. (It's okay. Middle-aged men are allowed to have their fantasies, too.) In this volume, her name is Dr. Sienna Brown. The plot involves Langdon having amnesia, which is entirely appropriate, because at the beginning of each new book he has completely forgotten about the heroine of the previous novel. Vittoria who? Sophie what? Katherine hmm? In Dan Brown's imagination, female characters have very short shelf lives.

One billion bonus points to whoever writes a spin-off series in which Vittoria Vetra, Sophie Neveu, Katherine Solomon and Sienna Brown team up and solve a mystery on their own. Maybe with one brief consultation with Langdon.

Incidentally, I want to know Vayentha's whole back story, starting with what her name means.

*Historically- and culturally-rich locations? Check. In this volume, we spend most of our time in exotic Florence, the birthplace of Dante Alighieri, then travel to that hotbed of Italian intrigue, Venice, then to Istanbul. This is probably the most fun part of any Dan Brown novel - the vicarious travel.

*Horrifying vandalism of a priceless world heritage artifact? Check. This time, it would be Dante's death mask.

*Tantalizing hints of a conspiracy theory, without suggesting that any living person, government or corporation is guilty of anything we should concern ourselves with? Check.

Because I got exactly what I expected out of this book, I wasn't disappointed. My favorite will probably always be The Da Vinci Code, because as one inclined toward worship of a deity in feminine form, I never related to Robert Langdon quite so much as when he reverently knelt at the grave of Mary Magdalene. Goddess worship in mainstream fiction? More, please!

I quite enjoyed Angels and Demons as well, which I thought was pleasantly suspenseful, and that's probably still my second favorite, but I liked Inferno better than The Lost Symbol, if for no other reason than that Istanbul is more fun to explore than Washington, D.C.

The ending's a little weird. Without spoiling too much, I think I can say that the bad guy kinda wins, and there's really nothing anybody can do about it. The characters in the novel are kinda okay with it, too. What happens is an extreme solution to the world's supposed population crisis, and if this were to happen in real life, it would be absolutely heartbreaking. It's not really a happy ending at all. I wonder where Dan Brown will go next.

Issues Raised By This Book

Let it be said that in real life, while the population crisis that Brown addresses does involve some serious environmental concerns that I believe are fact-based, there's something that's never addressed: much of the human misery that's allegedly caused by "overpopulation" isn't really due to overpopulation, it's due to unequal distribution of resources. For example, we currently have enough food to feed everyone in the world - that's not why people go hungry. People go hungry because governments don't have the political will and/or the infrastructure to get food to the people who need it the most.

Also, we're not doing everything we could be doing to make our limited resources last longer. If more of us were vegetarians or semi-vegetarians (meat once a week, maybe), we could take the land we use for raising animals and the land that grows animal feed, eliminate the middleman (middle being, in this case) and feed that grain directly to ourselves instead of animals raised for slaughter. As the food-animal population gradually dwindled, we could turn grazing lands and feed lots into more land for growing grains and/or more housing for human beings. People in industrialized nations can live much-simplified lives to help people all around the world have access to more resources, if we had the collective will to do it.

It is pretty shameful that about half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned, though. I've read that statistic elsewhere besides in this novel. I'm childless by choice, but you know, it was never that hard for me and my husband to avoid parenthood. Is it lack of sexual education that prevents other couples from enjoying the same freedom? That's sad. Sexual education for everyone before they reach the age of 14, please. Parenthood only by free, conscious choice, and all babies wanted babies - let's make that happen! "Accidentally pregnant" should not be the default setting for a human woman in the 21st century.

So as you can see, this book raises interesting issues far beyond the needs of mere fictional storytelling.

Inferno

I read Inferno in novel class, which was a class I took the first semester of my senior year of high school - that would have been 1994. It's been quite a while. We had an Italian exchange student that year, Gabriel Violi. (My friend Sarah played viola, and every time I said "viola" he thought I was calling his name.) He read us some of the pages in Dante's original Italian, but he made sure we knew it was very strange, old-fashioned Italian. Also, he didn't speak Italian much in his day-to-day life, preferring to use his regional dialect (I forget which one) at home.

Speaking of the storytelling, though, there were a few moments that took me out of the story. One was the mention of the devil's three mouths in Dante's Inferno. Langdon was supposed to have not only read and studied The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) but also lectured on its symbols at Harvard. He gives some explanation for why the devil, in the lowest circle of hell, has three mouths in Dante's depiction, and later there's a mention of Judas Iscariot, but the other two traitors depicted as being in the lowest circle of hell, Brutus and Cassius (the murderers of Julius Caesar) are never mentioned. Why didn't he just say that the devil has one mouth for each of the three traitors, to take bites out of them?

That was a very minor issue I had. I bristled a little more when Langdon said, "They're called chthonics because they reside in the underworld and are associated with hell." (That weird word "chthonics," with a silent "ch," just means "subterranean.") No, Robert Langdon, "the underworld" and "hell" are concepts from two different cultures that shouldn't be confused, and you would know that better than anyone. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in an underworld in which exceptional individuals might be slightly rewarded (in Elysium), but in general, dead human beings were not punished. They simply existed as memoryless shades. "Hell" is an underworld specifically for punishment of evil human beings who have died, and it's a concept from Zoroastrianism first and, later, Christianity. There wasn't a culture that thought the Greco-Roman underworld was hell, or that hell was the Greco-Roman underworld.

And Robert Langdon would definitely know that. He's far too academic to let something like that slide. But again, that's a pretty minor point.

Chthonics

One more thing about chthonic beings: late in the novel, Sienna and Langdon are talking about them, and Sienna says, "Medusa and the entire class of chthonic deities live underground because they're associated directly with Mother Earth. In allegory, chthonics are always symbols of--" And Langdon finishes her thought with, "Fertility." Human fertility was what the antagonist of the novel feared the most; hence his extreme solution. But what Dan Brown isn't really an explanation of why underworld deities and beings are associated with fertility, and there's another thing he isn't quite saying about the red underworld cistern of Langdon's visions (which turns out to be a place in Istanbul).

So I'll tell you, with the help of my trusty The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker. Red, underground water? That's the womb of the goddess, filled with her wise blood. Mother Earth is our mother because we came out of her womb - a dark, hidden, earthy space that encloses us fully - her underground caves. Robert Langdon is looking for the Holy Grail yet again - the Goddess's vessel or cauldron, her womb. Life starts there, and when we die, we go back into the earth, buried yet again in the Goddess's womb - from whence we could be reborn. That's the Pagan circle of life: birth, death, burial, rebirth.

Under cauldron, Walker writes, "Among the Celts of Gaul and Britain, the Cauldron of Regeneration was the central religious mystery: reincarnation within the womb of the Goddess" and "Each Celtic temple had its sacred cauldron."

To put it plainly, underworld or subterranean mythological creatures, like Medusa and Hecate, are associated with fertility because they live directly in earthen caves and in the underworld - they live directly inside the Goddess's womb.

Stars

Finally, the last word of this book is "stars." If you know The Divine Comedy, then you'll know why the last word in the book had to be "stars."

'Breaking the Da Vinci Code' by Darrell L. Bock and the Gnostic "Gospel"

On Saturday I went to the discount bookstore, as I may have mentioned. I picked up three books in Nalini Singh's Psy Changeling series, as well as a stack of magazines (they sell them for $1 each) and, for only $1.40, Breaking the Da Vinci Code by Darrell L. Bock, Ph.D.

This last one is a 2004 book about Dan Brown's book that was first published in 2001. I know this is a subject that was popular 100 years ago in pop culture time, but if you've been reading this blog very long, you know I love to read about books I've read. This isn't the first time I've read a book that supplements The Da Vinci Code. I already own Da Vinci Code Decoded by Martin Lunn (which I've read) and The Unauthorized Dan Brown Companion edited by John Helfers (2006 - I have skimmed it, but not read it the whole way through).

Now I've read Breaking the Da Vinci Code. I very much enjoyed it. Bock is a Protestant Biblical scholar, and his book looks at various ancient texts mentioned in Dan Brown's book to show systematically, using the original source material, that 1) the books of the Bible are as authentic a historical source as any other ancient text, and probably much more so, and 2) the ancient texts show very clearly that the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene was understood by witnesses of their time to be teacher/student, not sexual or a marriage relationship.

One of the sources that Bock addresses is Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses in Latin), a second-century work by Irenaeus, considered one of the "church fathers" and a Catholic saint. Irenaeus, a bishop of what is now Lyons, France, but which was then part of the Roman Empire, wrote in part to combat the Gnostic writings of Valentinus, which were popular in Lyons at the time. Valentinus was a Hellenic Egyptian; he or his followers wrote The Gospel of Truth, which was rediscovered in modern times at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

Bock quotes Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Eastern Orthodox Biblical scholar, in her magazine article "What Heresy?" (Books and Culture, November-December 2003). Mathewes-Green wrote:

"The version attributed to Valentinus, the best-known Gnostic, is typical. Valentinus supposedly taught a hierarchy of spiritual beings called 'aeons.' One of the lowest aeons, Sophia, fell and gave birth to the Demiurge, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. This evil Demiurge created the visible world, which was a bad thing, because now we pure spirits are all tangled up in fleshy bodies. Christ was an aeon who took possession of the body of the human Jesus, and came to free us from the prison of materiality.

"'Us,' by the way, didn't mean everybody. Not all people have a divine spark within, just intellectuals; 'gnosis,' by definition, concerns what you know. Some few who are able to grasp these insights could be initiated into deeper mysteries. Ordinary Christians, who lacked sufficient brainpower, could only obtain the Demiurge's middle realm. Everyone else was doomed. Under Gnosticism, there was no hope of salvation for most of the human race."

Bock explains that "demiurge" is simple a Greek word that means "maker" or "builder," referring to the making of the material world.

If the story of the cosmic spirit-being Sophia giving birth to evil sounds vaguely familiar, it may be that you, like me, are a fan of Lady Gaga. It's the bones of what Lady Gaga wrote in "The Manifesto of Mother Monster" in the full-length "Born This Way" video.

This is the text of the manifesto:

This is the manifesto of Mother Monster: On G.O.A.T, a Government Owned Alien Territory in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place. But the birth was not finite; it was infinite. As the wombs numbered, and the mitosis of the future began, it was perceived that this infamous moment in life is not temporal; it is eternal. And thus began the beginning of the new race: a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom. But on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil. And as she herself split into two, rotating in agony between two ultimate forces, the pendulum of choice began its dance. It seems easy, you imagine, to gravitate instantly and unwaveringly towards good. But she wondered, “How can I protect something so perfect without evil?”

That the text represents Gnosticism is not my idea, but rather something I read at MKCulture (which you may remember from last year's conspiracy theory post), an inactive blog that is, as of this writing, still able to be accessed. The blogger doesn't elaborate much in the blog post "Descendants of Sophia," but writes, "In my last post I explored the ever-present theme of the Goddess archetype within the context of pop culture. That inquiry ended with 'Born This Way,' the latest [as of April 2011] music video from pop star Lady Gaga. In the video Lady Gaga embodies Gnostic Goddess Sophia." The rest of the post veers off into Kate Bush's album, Elliot* Page's career, and then goddesses associated with the owl and the peacock.

The blogger has a YouTube account as well, on which this video can be found. It explains the Gaga-as-Sophia concept in a little bit of detail. 

If you want the full "Illuminati" explanation of this same video, visit Vigilant Citizen's "Born This Way" post. I'm not much for Illuminati conspiracy theories. I don't doubt that a small group of people has far more power than it should in this world, and that they probably have some screwed-up ideas about how the world should run, but I also believe pop culture is run more by a quest for increased profit than by some sort of ideological (Masonic/Luciferian/Satanic - depends on who you ask) cabal. But it's there to read, if you want it. Madonna may be the Material Girl, but Lady Gaga-as-Sophia gave birth to the creator of the material world. Maybe that's why "Born This Way" subtly samples Madonna's "Express Yourself," according to some listeners. My trusty Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has more than two pages on Sophia, under the heading "Saint Sophia."

Barbara J. Walker describes Sophia (the name literally means "wisdom" in Greek) as "God's mother" but also the shakti, or female soul/power source, of God. Her symbol was the dove, as some of her incarnations include Aphrodite, Isis/Hathor, and "The Holy Ghost." She writes: "Some said Jesus became Sophia's spouse and his glory depended on this sacred marriage; for he was only one of the Aeons, a minor spirit, the 'common fruit' of the Pleroma [the Gnostic "one true God," a transcendent being]. "Some said Sophia was also Jesus's mother, for she was the Virgin of Light whose spirit entered into the body of Mary to conceive him...Some said Sophia was to God as Metis was to Zeus, his 'mind.'" Walker goes on to report that when the Church of Hagia Sophia was constructed in Constantinople in the 6th century, it was a shrine to Sophia the Goddess, but to cover up the appearance of goddess worship, Christians made up the "virgin martyr" Saint Sophia. Walker cites the 8th and 9th chapters of the Biblical book of Proverbs as having an ambivalent attitude toward Sophia, or wisdom.

In one passage, following Wisdom is to be praised, but in another, "she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city [her temple]," calling to passersby to turn toward her, but if anyone turns into her temple "he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell." Walker sees this as two factions - one in favor of worshiping the Goddess Sophia and another that worships only the male God - having a debate. If Sophia is thought of as the mother/spouse of Jesus, and she's associated with the "high places of the city" (the temple or watchtower, magdala in Hebrew), it's possibly Sophia is also associated with Mary Magdalene.

Perhaps this is another reason why Lady Gaga appears as a Mary Magdalene figure in her "Judas" video, which came out after "Born This Way." (However, after having watched a little video about Kenneth Anger and Hollywood Babylon the other day, I learned about Anger's experimental film Scorpio Rising. In it, Anger intercut clips of a Biblical drama featuring Jesus with footage of a leather-clad biker, set to 1950s rock 'n roll. The "Judas" video may be an homage to Scorpio Rising. Now, Kenneth Anger - he was openly a Satanist, and would proudly have told you he followed the teachings of Aleister Crowley.)

Neo-Gnosticism is a favorite topic of a blogger I mentioned yesterday, Christopher Loring Knowles. He seems to genuinely believe there is a world of spiritual or energy beings, hidden from us most of the time in the material world, but which seems to break through at times and communicates with us in a language of symbols and coincidences (synchronicities). VISUP will occasionally mention Gnosticism as well. In one post, VISUP mentions that some Gnostics referred to the Demiurge as Samael, which VISUP says means "blind idiot." Where have I read that name before? In Devil's In the Details, where Samael is the name of Satan's fiance. Synchronicity? Maybe. Dog days of summer weirdness? It's a little early for that, but perhaps.

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/

 *Updated from "Ellen" to "Elliot" in 2023.

#WaitingOnWednesday / #OhHowPinteresting - Must-Have New Books of 2013

I'm not a usual Waiting on Wednesday blogger, but since it's still early in 2013, I wanted to get down a list of books I'm looking forward to this year. Just yesterday I found out that Dan Brown is releasing a new novel in the Robert Langdon series, to be titled Inferno, on May 14. Yay!



My mom told me if I started The Da Vinci Code I wouldn't be able to put it down, and she was right. I still love that book, Angels and Demons, and (to some extent) The Lost Symbol, and I don't care if you like them or not.

I'm also utterly addicted to J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series - that's my mom's fault, too. I eagerly await Lover at Last, set to come out on March 27. 



It will be bittersweet when this series ends, but I've got to read Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris. Amazon says the release date will be May 7th. I wonder if it's too early to put my name on the library waiting list? I never buy the hardcovers in this series - the first ones went straight to the genre paperbacks shelf, and I still contend it was kind of rude (and money-grubbing) of Harris' publisher to start putting them out in the much-more-expensive hardcover first.



...and my mom also got me hooked on Sookie Stackhouse. It was my introduction to paranormal romance, actually.

P.S. How fantastic are the Japanese covers for the Sookie Stackhouse series?!



P.P.S. Doesn't this one look like it might be about Bella Swan and Rosalie Hale?



I love vintage book covers. Now, some pins that are just cool. This is Jack Kerouac in 1944. Kinda sexy (even though he appears to be in some kind of trouble). Is anybody else looking forward to the On the Road movie with Kristen Stewart?



Anybody looking forward to Catching Fire?



This, I feel, is pretty cute. Lewis Carroll's birthday is coming up (January 27th), so I think a full Alice's Adventures in Wonderland post will be called for soon.



What are you looking forward to in 2013?