BookBindings, Religion, and Anne Rice

    For years now my favorite type of book binding has been the larger paperback, the paperbacks that are about the size of a hard back but with a soft, flexible cover. Several years back I was in a book club, the Quality Paperback Book Club (QPB), and although you could get other bindings from them the big paperback was their specialty. Whenever I go to Goodwill or Got Books, I look for books of this type of binding first, and only at other types if the story looks intriguing. Some time last year I found a cache of Anne Rice books at Goodwill and decided to read them (I had been a fan of her Vampire series years before), they are a combination of trade paperback sized books and hard backs, no big paperbacks. The last three books I've read were of the small paperback kind, my least favorite book binding, the writing's inevitably smaller and the covers tend to break and tear; I also read a lot on my Kindle which has it's own pluses and minuses but will never replace an actually book. Two nights ago I started the third book in Rice's Mayfair Witch chronicles, Taltos, and it's a big, grand, hard back book. I don't believe I've read a hard back of this size since the Harry Potter books and I've got to say it's physical properties has created in me a bit of a thrill. The font is easy on the eyes, the spacing is nice, the feel of the book, the artwork of the dust jacket, it's great. Couple that with the fact that I've enjoyed the first two books in the series and this one picks up right where Lasher left off, with this family and this legend of which I've already gotten embroiled; you can see why I'm more than a little excited by this book.

    Now religion, Anne Rice has had some famous/infamous connections with Christianity and Catholicism in particular. One of the vampire books (I believe it was Memoch the Devil) includes the crucifixion of Christ, she's written some books about Jesus (I have one of them though I haven't gotten around to reading it yet), and she publicly went back to and then left the Church in recent years. In Lasher she writes of how his character had once been considered a Saint and how he went to live and study with the Franciscan monks. I enjoy reading about the lives of the Saints already and then with this story it made me wish I could be Catholic or Pagan, the story talks about the intertwining of the two traditions. I don't believe I could be a Catholic for the same reasons I couldn't continue as a Southern Baptist, I barely pass the mustard as a Methodist. The book also talked about the bloody and awful ways the Catholics and Protestants treated each other, killings, burnings, all out wars on occasion. It seems to me that modern Christians (at least in my experience) are either completely ignorant or are choosing to be blind to our own history. Whenever I read or hear someone talk about how they believe the Bible the way Christians have always believed, or how there is no debating the meanings of scripture, I wonder if they've ever looked at Christian history. I know some have had too, surely you can't get a doctorate in theology without studying these things; and once you've seen them how can you say your way is the only right way? IDK? I once overheard a young associate pastor from an independent Baptist church tell someone he thought the KJV was the only version of the bible worth reading, then he said, "If it was good enough for Paul, it's good enough for me." I didn't know him, so maybe he had a dead pan sense of humor, I hope that was the case.

   Anyway, I'm off to read some more of Taltos, it's started out very strong and I can't wait to see where the story is going to go from here.