it's not the same moon in the sky

Unusually, two posts in one day. This is something I've also posted on Tumblr, but I wonder if it won't get more discussion here...

( 'Her hair - what a wealth of it there was - was blue-black, finer than such hair usually is, and with a sheen on it like unto a raven's wing.' Of course it was. )

We found an old copy on a free bookshelf in town, and within minutes we were in raptures (sorry) over the writing, which at times resembles Ebony Dark'Ness Dementia Raven Way on acid, if Ebony Dark'Ness Etc. were inhabiting the body of a fusty early 20th century man determined to stop women... well, doing anything, really. Sydney Watson’s 1915 novel, The Mark of the Beast, is basically the granddaddy of novels about the Rapture. Without this book and its ilk, no Left Behind series.

It’s an odd mix of preposterousness, bigotry (mainly of the patronising anti-Semitism and vintage misogyny varieties), eugenics and incredibly purple prose. When he rails against modern books encouraging women to feel they belong to themselves, and free love, and all the rest of it, he’s bitching about the likes of H.G. Wells, who wrote socially progressive novels at the time.

It’s also a book so bad that even a Rapture-believing Christian complains in a particularly satisfying Goodreads review that, were they not reading it digitally, they’d feel the urge to fling it across the room… in fact, if you want to find out more about this stuff, you really need to look at Christian sources, where there is much eloquent eye-rolling over this book and its contemporaries...

 We're having some pretty bad nights, so are zombies this evening, keeping awake until bedtime with tea and Battle: Los Angeles. It's not as bad as expected - a lot of films like this would've set everything at night or gone teal-and-orange, and the fact this commits neither sin makes it a lot more convincing in the aliens-really-are-invading-this-real-city stakes. 

Meanwhile, I finally saw (a version of) Les Miserables - the one with Liam Neeson. I got all het up about ethics and present-day resonances and hating Javert (I'm sure he was acting from some self-hatred re: his background, but so destructive). I'm embarrassed to say that I hadn't realised the original novel was by Victor Hugo - R has been wanting me to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame for years, and after watching the Charles Laughton film recently, I've decided to do it soon. French authors are among my massive cultural gaps that need filling. 

Today I managed to get new shoes (half-price at Clarks AND fulfilling all my needs re: helping-me-stay-on-my-feet) and about twelve pairs of socks, both badly needed. It's satisfying when a clothes-shopping expedition goes well - mostly in my experience, I either get everything I need really quickly, or it's a fruitless nightmare; there's very little in between. 

You are what you read, study suggests
http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/13/11665205-you-are-what-you-read-study-suggests

"Researchers have found that when you lose yourself in a work of fiction, your behavior and thoughts can metamorphose to match those of your favorite character, according to the study published early online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology."

Um... yes? Obviously? Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted to have it proved, but I hadn't thought of it as something that would elicit the kind of dismissal and skepticism in the comments. Let's read some highlights:

"Reading the Vampire Chronicles might romanticize vampires, but everyone that reads it doesn't go around biting peoples necks."

Points for thinking of the same books that immediately sprung to my mind (and come to think of it, I got the link to the article from Anne Rice's Facebook), but it's obviously about more subtle changes than that...

"As for books influencing people's minds, I doubt there's much chance of that as most of us don't read anymore."

Translation: "I don't read and I'm surrounded by people who don't read." How isolated do you have to be to never see people reading and have no inkling that books are a powerful cultural force? Every time I get on a bus or train it's full of people with paperbacks and Kindles! And even if you don't commute, surely the logic of Amazon's dominance and the fact supermarkets sell novels by the boatload and the continued existence of national book chains... gah. This is just another version of that smug-about-own-narrow-mindedness tone that pervades Yahoo UK article comments.

"This is interesting (my wife is a PhD research psychologist) but it doesn't say anything about those of us who prefer non-fiction or heavily-researched historical fiction (such as Michner.)"

I won't snark this since the same person does a wonderfully polite, understated take-down of the commenter above, but I do wonder what difference the fiction/non-fiction barrier really makes. I've read biographies that described their subjects intimately enough that they felt like fictional characters whose thoughts and feelings are knowable to the reader. And with heavily-researched historical fiction, well... it is still fiction, perhaps all the more immersive and emotionally convincing because the settling is so authentic. 

"I've been known to read 2 to 3 books at a time all of different subjects. How would they define that."

And this glorious example of missing the point by a mile was the moment when I realised I had to stop reading the article, because I was in danger of gesticulating impotently at the screen, as if attempting to reason with the commenter in person. What possible difference could simultaneous reading of multiple books make?!

Conclusion: it winds me up enormously sometimes, but THANK GOD FOR FANDOM, where you might get a vast swathe of opinion on a story like this, but at least it'd be possible to achieve consensus on what the article-writer actually said and meant...