Read any good books lately? Rate them here

[Shai Hulud]

Case for Christ (a friend convinced me we should read it together; possibly the only book I've literally thrown against a wall).  0.5 out of 5 stars.  As a friend is fond of saying "Lying for Jesus is still lying."

You're Catholic and you didn't like a book about Jesus?

Not when it's a one sided pile of filth.   On another board I posted notes per chapter that totaled over 15,000 words probably.  Strobel... *tries to think of a good descriptor* This book contains many leaps of logic, much mental gymnastics, and several extremely dubious claims.  He has a habit that's almost like a verbal tic, were he speaking instead of writing, where after every softball he lobs at his experts, he describes them like a champion prize fighter or something else, about to beat down the evil skeptical argument. 

He also makes a rather glaring lie of omission in the book.  He presents this quite heavily as the interviews that lead to his conversion, during his investigation in 1980 and 1981, and the last interview takes place in the 1990s, with a guy talking about his wife dying of cancer in 1995. He never mentions, until the post-book interview segment in my version, that he wasn't an atheist at that time, he'd accepted Christ more than a decade before the conversation.  Even then he fails to mention that he was a "teaching pastor" at Willow Creek, a megachurch in Chicago, at the time of that interview.

He's also very bad about not presenting both sides of the argument.  He bashes The Jesus Seminar repeatedly, but we just have to take his word and that of his "experts" on why it's not good.  He bashes Karen Armstrong's History of God in a similar manner, but he never presents the other side of the coin, only the anti-position.  He tries to downplay the Q Document Hypothesis (of the synoptic Gospels sharing a document they all draw from but is now lost) as something believed only by the fringe, instead of the majority of Biblical scholars.  In the first third of the book he tries to establish why we should believe the Bible is historically accurate, and during Parts Two and Three, he never questions it again...and those two sections more or less strictly use the Bible as evidence. All in all, he failed to convince me of a proposition in which I already believed.

Edit:
The Valkyrie
I've recently read the Succubus series by Richelle Mead.

While I generally don't like books written ion the first person, just a personal dislike of mine, these are quite fun, well written, and hard to put down. 8.5 out of 10 on my Giveafuckometer.


That series is amazingly good. Who doesn't love bookstore working succubi, reclusive authors, and archangels that hang out with archdemons to drink through Seattle's bars together? Her Gameboard of the Gods has some promise, but wasn't a fan of her series with fairies.