"I’m on a crusade to prove that entertainment has value in itself, not just as a dose of sugar to help audiences swallow more important themes. Entertainment allows us to temporarily shut down our brains and waken later with emotions refreshed." - Hannah Sternberg
Most Americans no longer have a close familiarity with the Bible and the stories of the Bible. Even many Christians only have a very cursory knowledge of it, basically what they get at Church every Sunday, or whenever they go. My knowledge of The Book is more than cursory, but it had been decades since I read it from cover to cover, and after all that time I’m sure I needed a refreshing on the narrative of God’s progressive revelation.
The young crime-fiction aficionado Patrick Ohl writes: I have a confession to make. I love action movies, especially all those movies from the 80s and 90s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, or any one of their rivals with the general exception of Steven Seagal. Dumb and derivative they may be, but I have plenty of fun watching the creative action, well-choreographed fights, and terrible acting. But above all, my guiltiest pleasures are watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.
I cannot explain this love of mine in any rational terms. Van Damme was at one point in his career considered Arnold Schwarzenegger without the price tag— like Arnold, he was consistently passed off as an American despite the heavily accented English, and his acting was almost always laughably bad. That being said, there are many minor gems in Van Damme’s career.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." — Mark Twain
"What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin." — Mark Twain
OK, that's a tongue-in-cheek suggestion. For one thing, he’s not a U.S. citizen. But attorney and legal and constitutional analyst Maureen Martin is convinced we need a presidential candidate with the “X Factor” Simon Cowell promotes and embodies.
“The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” - Malcolm X
Reginald Hill, author of the Peter Pascoe and Andy Dalziel mystery series, passed away recently at the age of 75. He was truly one of the greatest mystery writers of the past several decades.
Although Hill preferred to be called a “crime writer,” his roots in traditional mysteries are evident. Even so, his books are unique to the genre. While the protagonists are members of the Yorkshire police, their novels are not police procedurals. Like Christie, Hill could deftly place a clue where it would be seen, allowing the reader to continue without realizing its importance. . . .
Fantasist David Eddings said once an author taps into the mythic, he may as well be peddling dope, as the customers will line up for his product. If he's right, Joe R. Lansdale had best prepare to do more business than Eli Lilly, as his new novel, Edge of Dark Water, is a brilliant mixture of myth, rural noir, and adventure. It's a shuffling of the Odyssey, Huck Finn, and James Ross's lost noir classic They Don't Dance Much, a wild East Texas hybrid of the Southwestern Humor school of American literature and Jim Thompson's bitter satire. It is both a hand from the archetypal tarot deck of fiction and something uniquely its own . . . and it's also a heck of a good read.
Stephen Lawhead has never been a conventional Christian author, or even a conventional fantasy author. He writes by his own rules. Sometimes I like what he does, sometimes not so much. But all in all I was pleased with his novel The Skin Map, and look forward to the continuation of the series. The main character is a generally unremarkable young man, Kit Livingston, who lives in contemporary London. One day, on the way to his girlfriend’s apartment, he gets lost and wanders into an alley, where he meets a man who claims to be his great-grandfather, Cosimo Livingston. Cosimo claims that there are invisible paths and portals (“ley lines”) throughout the world, by which knowledgeable travelers may travel through time, space, and dimension. Kit tries to explain to his girlfriend Wilhelmina why he missed their date. To prove his story to her, he takes her back to that alley and successfully makes a jump to the historical past—17th Century London. But he gets separated from Wilhelmina, who finds herself (we learn later) in Bohemia at about the same time. (One of the pleasures of this book is the Wilhelmina subplot, in which an unhappy 21st Century feminist finds personal
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