mostly harmless books

I’m always on the lookout for English books I can borrow, so when my friend and I ended up in the Peace Corps volunteer lounge in Kyiv, Ukraine, I took advantage. One of the books that caught my eyes was Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. I love post-apocalyptic fiction, so I regularly look for more books on the subject, and this one was on several lists. But it’s not a typical end-of-the-world novel: it’s got a Christian message.

How does that work? Well, the basic plotline is that the Rapture comes. Real Christians get taken to Heaven, the rest stay on Earth. It starts up good: among those taken are airplane pilots, car drivers, administration and law people, so things get out of control in an appropriate apocalyptic fashion. We’ve got a couple of pretty interesting characters (an airplane pilot and his daugther, a journalist, a flight attendant) who are mostly skeptic about this whole Rapture business, since they are not believers.

And then… it starts to get preachy. (more…)

My trip to Ukraine was awesome (saw a very good friend again, made new friends, saw cool places), but I didn’t spend all the time socializing. Long train journey + lots of downtime meant I also got to read a lot, four books to be exact:

• John Joseph Adams (ed.) - Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
• Charles de Lint - The Ivory and the Horn
• Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins - Left Behind
• Charles de Lint - Memory and Dream

Three of them were mine, the other borrowed from the lovely Peace Corps lounge. I was this close to also reading Richard Adams’ Shardik (solely for the Dark Tower connection, I admit), but then I saw that the “small” book I had borrowed also had really tiny fonts, so it was impossible to read in a couple of days.

Anyway, thoughts on the books forthcoming.