Friday, November 20, 2009

What I'm Reading: God Is Not Great, John Lennon, etc.

When I was young I read constantly, but in recent years the amount of books I read has dropped off dramatically. However, recently I've started getting back into reading and I'm rediscovering why I enjoyed it so much back then. Nowadays, though, I'm starting to get into reading more non-fiction, as I would read mostly science fiction when I was younger. Here's what I've been reading recently.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.
I bought this book on a whim because I had $10 in Borders points, and Cristina was interested in reading it. I'm about a third of the way through now, and it really is a fascinating book about the kind of damage that religion does to humanity, both on an intellectual level (keeping people from learning the truth about the way the world works) and on a physical level (torturing and killing nonbelievers, genital mutilation [and I'm counting circumcision in this], the Vatican opposing safe sex, etc.). However, the title of the book kind of turns me off and is a big reason why I haven't read it up to this point. Despite being an out-of-the-closet atheist for close to twenty years, I don't consider myself anti-religion and don't consider religion to be inherently bad. It's the nutjobs that give it a bad name for everybody else; the anti-intellectuals that try to keep evolution out of school classes, the bigots that try to exclude gays from participating in marriage, the fundamentalists that fly planes into buildings... the list goes on and on. But this is not most believers, and I would never advocate taking away anyone's right to believe whatever they want to believe, no matter how much I disagree with them or how wrong they are. I just feel that religion should not get a free pass. When a priest molests a boy, he should go to jail. When a rabbi removes an infant's foreskin with his teeth and gives him genital herpes in the process, he needs to go to jail. When a Christian Scientist denies medicine to her child because she believes that prayer is the only thing you need to get better, she needs to go to jail. Religious freedom does not apply when you're actively harming children in the process.

John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman
I haven't gotten too far in this book yet... I was reading it before I got "God is Not Great" but I started reading GiNG one day because I didn't have the John Lennon book with me and I became so fascinated with GiNG that the John Lennon book got pushed aside. But John Lennon: The Life is a massive 800-page biography of the rock legend that covers his entire life, from birth to death. So far I've gotten up to his pre-adolescence, but I'm sure I'll enjoy the book immensely once I get into the Beatles era. I also heard that a Paul McCartney biography was just published, so I might pick that one up next. Just don't ask me to read a Ringo Starr biography.

Death From the Skies!: The Science Behind the End of the World by Philip Plait, PhD
Phil Plait (aka The Bad Astronomer) is one of my favorite science bloggers, who writes mainly about astronomy but in such a way that laypeople like myself can understand, and really comes across as being excited and inspired by the cosmos. I share a bit of that excitement about outer space, so I love reading his stuff. Last year he came out with a book called Death From the Skies, which is a book about all the nasty stuff out there in space that can kill us on Earth. Stuff like asteroids and meteors, black holes, solar flares, gamma ray bursts, and even the death of the sun and the end of the universe show up in the book, and Plait explains them clearly and effectively for laypeople to understand (although I'm still trying to wrap my head around black holes and quantum mechanics). He also talks about what it would be like for people on Earth to experience, say, an asteroid collision or a supernova, or what it would be like to fall into a black hole. Forget disaster porn like "2012," this book actually has real science in it.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
This is the best book on the subject of evolution I've ever read (although admittedly I haven't read many). It's mind-boggling that a century and a half after Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, there are still people that don't believe it's true, or believe that it's "just a theory," despite 150 years of solid evidence that has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution happened, is happening, and will continue to happen until the end of life on Earth. The Greatest Show on Earth displays all the evidence for how we know evolution is a fact, and Dawkins writes for laypeople in this book. For instance, I never understood how carbon dating worked, but now I do thanks to this book. He goes into the fossil record, DNA analysis, continental drift, selective breeding, and all the other undeniable ways we have of knowing that evolution is a fact. Despite Dawkins' reputation as a militant atheist, this book is not about religion, and he only touches on the subject a handful of times. Richard Dawkins is first and foremost an evolutionary biologist, and this book is about evolution. If you don't understand the theory, or don't understand how we know it's real, or even don't believe in evolution at all, READ THIS BOOK.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane - SPOILER FREE
I was interested in reading this book ever since watching the trailer for the upcoming Martin Scorsese adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The story involves two FBI agents (DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) who come to an island housing a mental institution to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, an inmate who apparently "evaporated right through the walls." We soon learn DiCaprio's character Teddy Daniels had ulterior motives for being there, as he's looking for the arsonist who set his apartment building on fire years earlier, killing Teddy's wife in the process. He has reason to believe the arsonist is being kept on the island, although the officials deny it. The first three-quarters of the book are fantastic, as I devoured the book over the course of a couple days. The mystery is set up in a way that I had to keep turning the pages to find out what was going on, but it unfortunately ends in an extremely cliched and predictable way. It's so predictable, in fact, that when I saw the trailer with my fiancee Cristina, she guessed the ending before the trailer was even over. I hoped while reading the book that this was not actually the ending, but alas.

No comments:

Post a Comment