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Books to Avoid
May. 11th, 2010 11:57 amI thought, reading this book, that calling it "Bill Moyer's show" was a simple misprint, but then the error was repeated. The sentence is so typical of everything I hate about the book, and at the same time so unintentionally funny, that I thought it worth repeating here:
"Moyer was one of the handful of people whom Mack would love to meet; a brilliant and outspoken man, able to express intense compassion for both people and truth with unusual clarity."
*blink*
This isn't even the most incoherent part of the book. In the next line, the author seems to think it's possible to have visions of gravity. Which I suppose it is, in a quantum physics sort of way, but that's not how he meant it.
The book is The Shack, and please don't read it if you want to keep any of your brain cells or faith in God. Madeleine L'Engle once said that God finds bad art painful, just as we do, and that bad religious art is sacrilegious, and I agree. This book is sentimental to the point of being maudlin, ungrammatical, fulsome, and entirely lacking in humanity or complexity. It tries so hard to be a great spiritual tale that it practically hits you over the head with it. In short, this is the worst book since The Notebook, which I consider the worst book I ever read. (I didn't have much choice but to read The Notebook all the way through; I was young and needed the money. In other words, I was in Africa with very few English-language books available to me.)
I am thinking of burning this book instead of giving it to The Book Thing of Baltimore. I can't bear to think that other people may be polluted by it through my fault.
"Moyer was one of the handful of people whom Mack would love to meet; a brilliant and outspoken man, able to express intense compassion for both people and truth with unusual clarity."
*blink*
This isn't even the most incoherent part of the book. In the next line, the author seems to think it's possible to have visions of gravity. Which I suppose it is, in a quantum physics sort of way, but that's not how he meant it.
The book is The Shack, and please don't read it if you want to keep any of your brain cells or faith in God. Madeleine L'Engle once said that God finds bad art painful, just as we do, and that bad religious art is sacrilegious, and I agree. This book is sentimental to the point of being maudlin, ungrammatical, fulsome, and entirely lacking in humanity or complexity. It tries so hard to be a great spiritual tale that it practically hits you over the head with it. In short, this is the worst book since The Notebook, which I consider the worst book I ever read. (I didn't have much choice but to read The Notebook all the way through; I was young and needed the money. In other words, I was in Africa with very few English-language books available to me.)
I am thinking of burning this book instead of giving it to The Book Thing of Baltimore. I can't bear to think that other people may be polluted by it through my fault.
