Eat, Pray -- Well, Maybe Not Pray

I'm embarrassed to say that "Eat, Pray, Love" is currently in my stack of 15-35 books-in-progress. It makes me feel a little bit whinier, a little bit gooier, and a little bit like a reader who's dropped her standards pants. I kind of imagine that everyone who's read it is a woman who asks somebody or an audience of cats every day if her butt looks fat in something. And of course it does. The butt looks fat. Fat fat fat. Quit asking. I find the book a bit taxing on the part of my brain that has its feet on the pub floor, but because of a Radiolab bit I heard in which Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the muse (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/me-myself-and-muse/), I think I'll continue to read, let my bookmark look fat in that book.

Another book in that tottering stack is "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, which reads a little like if Elizabeth Gilbert got run over by a freight train. It's a little...if-there-were-a-god-it-wouldn't-let-you-wear-those-godawful-yoga-pants-in-public ish. And, not surprisingly, he mentions THE BIBLE every now and then. Dawkins doesn't really make fun of it, he just finds it strange that people would take dead seriously a book that for example has been copied and pasted over the course of many generations using one of those first century word processors (you know, the ones old enough that the Oregon Trail characters come down with leprosy instead of cholera, and in place squirrel-hunting, they shoot at Samaritans from their covered wagons). I just finished a bit reminding the reader that lots and lots of people glean their morals from THE BIBLE, and how that's weird because in THE BIBLE God asks so-and-so to kill his son before he goes to what's-that-nation to wipe out what's-that-civilization, but only after whatshisname thoughtfully offers his virgin daughters in place of a couple of visiting angels to a mob of drunken Super Bowl fans who gang rape them in a kiddie pool full of seven layer bean dip, and so on. And Richard Dawkins would ask you to kindly hold on to the "but that's only in the old testament" argument for many reasons. I would ask you to hold on to it because the new testament belongs to Jesus, Jesus was a Jew, and Jews don't eat bacon.