I've just finished reading Walter Moers's The City of Dreaming Books. I picked it up in the local library, as an 'I need one more book for this week' book. It's the first of his 'Zamonian' books that I've read and I thorougly enjoyed it. It is set in the fantasy world of Zamonia and tells the story of a young Lindworm who travels to the big city to hunt down the greatest ever author. When he naively shows the manuscript he possesses to several publishers and literary agents, he is poisoned and locked away in the city's catacombs deep under ground. Lost and alone, he battles his way past various supposedly mythical creatures on his journey towards knowledge. The drawings in the book are fantastic, and are used really cleverly in several places as narrative tools. I have to admit, I was a little sceptical of reading a novel whose main protagonist is a dinasaur (sorry, a Lindworm), but it was a very funny and very insightful story. I'll now try and get hold of his other works published in English (and perhaps even have a go at the German!).
As far as research goes, I'm now ploughing on with the next chapter. This is to be based around the themes of authority and interpretation in reading Scripture as part of the liturgy. Funnily enough, there's not a book to be had on this subject, so I've come home from the university library with a tonne of books that will probably all turn out to be totally irrelevant! I think I might like to include something about the book of Job as part of this chapter, so I picked up Jung's Answer to Job. This is a fascinating book - it feels incredibly dated, with its misogynistic assumptions about women (par exemple, "this symbol lays bare the whole mystery of the 'woman': she contains in her darkness the sun of 'masculine' consciousness") and its reliance on astrology to explain features of psychology. It reminds me of the fact that just such psychologists treated women in the early 20th century who presented with the symptoms of 'hysteria' - turns out the women in question had all experienced orgasm for the first time. There is something incredibly tragic about that! It makes you feel as though you need to constantly remember exactly why feminism needed to happen in the first place, if only as a tribute to the women who were harmed by the prevailing 'scientific' and 'intellectual' views. Anyway, this book feels as though it belongs to that particular period of 'enlightenment' - but a quick glance at the publisher's details shows it was first published in 1954. Not so long ago.... Despite this, Jung has some interesting (if theolgically dubious) things to say about what God has to learn from Job; what he can gain for himself by reading Job, as it were.
I've also just finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I've started it several times, and never managed to get all the way through. I think it's one of those novels where you need to be in exactly the right frame of mind to get through it. I was determined to manage it, though, as I love everything else he has written. I find the main character difficult to sympathise with, and I know next to nothing about the geography of America, but this time round I found it really fascinating. From the perspective of my ac
ademic background, some of the images towards the end of the novel were really very interesting and may well make it into my chapter on a theology of reading non-religious texts (taking a great deal of liberty, I imagine, with the author's own personal views on religious belief!). We have something of a Neil Gaiman household at the moment - my partner is whizzing through Neverwhere. He's not a great reader (of fiction, at any rate), but he enjoyed The Graveyard Book and I persuaded him to give Neverwhere a go. He absolutely loves it! Good Omens next, I think.
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