It's 1918. The imminent end of the war is expected to bring changes. Blacks will likely lose their manufacturing jobs to returning soldiers. The promises made to the Boston police to make up for the wage freeze necessitated by the war will come due. The Given Day is centered on two men, one a black armaments worker from Ohio and the other an Irish cop in Boston. They serve as the narrative focal point for Lehane's description of the political situation of workers in America as they seek adequate wages and working conditions.

Things I liked:

• the physical settings that ground the story (and having visited Boston last year, I had fun with "Yeah, I remember that, I walked along there"

  the description of how people reacted to events of the year, including the influenza pandemic, terrorist attacks, the Great Molasses Flood, the world series

  the complexity of issues that the characters deal with. One example -- while working to establish a police union, the cop is assigned to break strikes by other unions

  the dense historical setting, including the hit-and-run characterizations of historical figures like Eugene O'Neill, Calvin Coolidge, the young "John" Hoover; organizations like the NAACP and AF of L

  the clear parallels being drawn between the hysteria of the ruling class in 1918-19 and today

Things I liked less:

• I found the individual psychology and character development weak, subservient to the sweeping epic action

  weaknesses in the plot, which tends towards the melodramatic and where the protagonists' enemies have the powers of supervillains

I like good historical fiction, especially to be reminded that the meanness and idiocy of the present day is not new. The ruling class is doing what it's always done.

Totally unserious, I know, but I like the LA setting (just as Boston, it's fun to recognize the landmarks).

And PD James An Unsuitable Job for a Woman -- She's really more interesting that Dalgleish.

by Bart Ehrman

I'm very interested in the history of religions. How stories, myths, and legends get propagated and/or perverted is something I find fascinating and is as applicable today as ever. But I find history in itself very entertaining, particularly those surrounding specific historical characters. When I noticed Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene at the library, I picked it up.

It always amazes me how drastically different theologies and interpretations can develop from what is supposed to be the same historical basis. Early Christianity is one that I find particularly intriguing, since much of what we know about the fighting going on in the early days of Christianity comes from the writings of "anti-heretic" crusaders. At the same time they were destroying the writings of the "heretics", they were quoting from them extensively as they tried to show how absurd the teachings were.

Before I get carried away, I'll mention one of Ehrman's primary theses: our historical understanding comes largely from people who want to preserve their understandings and inclinations from events of the day. The stories of the three characters of this book are excellent examples of this. Some early Christians believed that Christ was divine and of a virgin birth, but many believed that he was neither born divine or of a virgin birth. Yet both sides, and those in between, frequently use supposed writings of this book's main characters to justify their beliefs. How is that not interesting? This isn't something particularly specific to religion either. How can The Clenis gets people on the left and right join together in their distaste? How can Obama be a scary socialist and a right-wing Republican?

I won't go into more details--its a quick read (~270 pages) if you're interested--but I'll quote something that struck me as epitomizing what Ehrman is saying and seems somewhat relevant to me today:

With Mary we are dealing not only with how an important woman was remembered in the years and centureis after her death but also with how she was remembered by men

I don't know if Gregory's account can be taken as completely representative of this collective act of memory, but it is striking that Mary's body is seen as a threat, something that can be used to seduce men and lead them away. The only redeming feature of her body is when it turns from its dangerous acts (dangerous, that is, to the men concerned) and falls to the feet of the man Jesus in repentance and sorrow. It is the sorrowful penitent who is acceptable; that is the kind of woman these text seek. One can't help but think that the men who relish this recollection of Mary the penitent sinner are those who are trying to inform their own world with their own vision of what sexual and genered relationships ought to be, with women not enticing men with the dangers of sex but falling at their feet in humble submission and penitence.

Anyone else interested in the history of religion? Anyone got recommendations, particularly to books or authors on eastern religions?

troubles of life."

--Victor Hugo

I'm sure ol' Victor was thinking of more elevated reading than mine, but the feeling is the same; I've been making my way through Charmaine Harris' oevre. Harris penned the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which have been made into an HBO series, True Blood. Sookie lives in a small rural-ish Southern town in a world where vampires have just recently come out of the closet. The books are fun, some serious drama mixed with a lot of fairly silly situations, and the political analogies (vamps are agitating for the Vampire Right Act) are obvious. They let me escape for a little while from the world where the Democratic POTUS is advocating taxing employee health benefits. Sookie can read minds of people near her, which is drastically isolating and burdensome.

I'd already done the run of Sookie books when I found out that Harris has 3 other series, with leads that are all somewhat like Sookie and somewhat not. The most interesting, and most dark, are the Harper Connelly books. Harper was made psychic, in a way, when she was struck by lightning as a child. She can sense how people died, if she's close enough to the remains. She can't talk to the dead, or otherwise read minds, or do anything else. She makes her living traveling 'round the country working with bereaved family and variously sceptical police departments, finding out how people died. Harris' other two series' heroines don't have any supernatural abilities. The two that do are interesting because instead of being used as some sort of superpower to make the leads into heroes, their abilities cut them off from others in large part.

For the nerds, I have been reading Daniel Abraham's new fantasy series "The Long Price Quartet". I've finished the first two books so far ("A Shadow in Summer" and "A Betrayal in Winter"). For high fantasy, very original and clever. It's in the same genre as George RR Martin's stuff, except not set in a medieval European setting (more of a Persian/Turkic/India setting with names like "Cehmai" and "Vaunyogi"). It is also less hopelessly bleak than the Martin stuff, while maintaining some realism. (Martin sometimes gets very difficult to read when he randomly kills off half a family or something.)

The magical system is also very clever, with sorcerers being known as "poets" who compose paradoxical spells to embody abstract concepts, who then have special powers related to the concept they represent. The embodied concepts (e.g. "Removing-the-Part-that-Continues") view their very embodied existence as a form of slavery and attempt to exploit the paradox to destroy the poets who entrap them. Very original.