I've been busy with non-reading stuff, mostly work and playing Blue Prince with A (but also I went to Scintillation!) But I do have some books to catch up on.
Nathan the Wise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by William Taylor. Looking at the Goodreads reviews, it looks like everyone in Germany has to read this for school, while it's much less well-known in the US -- I only learned who Lessing was because of his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn. I knew this was Lessing's plea for toleration between the three Abrahamic religions, but a post on tumblr made me decide to actually read it. Looking at the dramatis personae and seeing that one of the characters was the adopted daughter of a Jew made me concerned about the problematic ways that plot point could go, so I went and spoiled the ending for myself to make sure it would be okay -- the final plot twists take things in a much more interesting direction than I'd been worried about from the setup. The titular character is a bit too much the voice of wisdom (as one would expect from the title) to be the most interesting, but the supporting cast is fascinating.
The Falling Tower, Meg Moseman. A theological thriller about a group of college freshmen, written by a friend of mine from college -- she conveys the college atmosphere both recognizably and warmly, and the story is very page-turn-y. It is modern feminist take on Charles Williams, the lesser-known friend of Lewis and Tolkien, whose work I have not read (The Place of the Lion, about Platonic archetypes showing up in the real world, sounds intriguing, but I also hear it is not as good as its premise), and I'm not sure if I'm more likely to now. It is doing a lot of cool and ambitious worldbuilding stuff, and lets its characters have different relationships to Christianity; the spiritual aspects of the worldbuilding certainly are compatible with Christianity without it being message-y -- this is a story in which growing up in the way that college freshman grow up is more important than finding religion. I hope more people read it so that I can discuss it!
Nathan the Wise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by William Taylor. Looking at the Goodreads reviews, it looks like everyone in Germany has to read this for school, while it's much less well-known in the US -- I only learned who Lessing was because of his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn. I knew this was Lessing's plea for toleration between the three Abrahamic religions, but a post on tumblr made me decide to actually read it. Looking at the dramatis personae and seeing that one of the characters was the adopted daughter of a Jew made me concerned about the problematic ways that plot point could go, so I went and spoiled the ending for myself to make sure it would be okay -- the final plot twists take things in a much more interesting direction than I'd been worried about from the setup. The titular character is a bit too much the voice of wisdom (as one would expect from the title) to be the most interesting, but the supporting cast is fascinating.
The Falling Tower, Meg Moseman. A theological thriller about a group of college freshmen, written by a friend of mine from college -- she conveys the college atmosphere both recognizably and warmly, and the story is very page-turn-y. It is modern feminist take on Charles Williams, the lesser-known friend of Lewis and Tolkien, whose work I have not read (The Place of the Lion, about Platonic archetypes showing up in the real world, sounds intriguing, but I also hear it is not as good as its premise), and I'm not sure if I'm more likely to now. It is doing a lot of cool and ambitious worldbuilding stuff, and lets its characters have different relationships to Christianity; the spiritual aspects of the worldbuilding certainly are compatible with Christianity without it being message-y -- this is a story in which growing up in the way that college freshman grow up is more important than finding religion. I hope more people read it so that I can discuss it!