Like your favorite song coming on the radio back-to-back on separate stations, the Wheel of Time has turned ’round to Teaser Tuesday.
Just in case you don’t know, Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, and anyone can play along! All you have to do is grab the book you’re currently reading, open to a random page and share a few sentences from that page. But make sure you don’t share any spoilers!
Apparently I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading over the last week, finishing March strong with John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, third in the Old Man’s War series.
True to form, showers signaled the start of April, and I used the time driven indoors to devour Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire – which is perhaps the best of his books I’ve read. The start of a new series, there’s an ending, albeit not a tidy one. Looking forward to the next installment – in 2019.
In the mornings I’ve been reading The Book Thieves by Anders Rydell. It’s gotten a bit of attention, namely since it shares a similar title with Zuzak’s The Book Thief, though apart from taking place in Nazi Germany, the two share little in common. The book is good enough so far; I’d suggest pairing it with When Books Went to War to juxtapose the competing ideas.
Finally, I’m working through my tenth Lenten reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve worked through Inferno and Purgatorio, and I’m now in Paradiso. Ten years ago Dante changed – perhaps even saved – my life during an existential crisis. This year, I find a sort of much-needed solace in dealing with Mr. Tom’s passing.
But what about an actual teaser? Hmm. How about one from the next book on my TBR: How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World by Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson.
The Goodreads Blurb
The world is going to hell. So begins this book, pointing to the prevalence of apocalypse — cataclysmic destruction and nightmarish end-of-the-world scenarios — in contemporary entertainment.
In How to Survive the Apocalypse Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson examine a number of popular stories — from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to the purging of innocence in Game of Thrones to the hordes of zombies in The Walking Dead — and argue that such apocalyptic stories reveal a lot about us here and now, about how we conceive of our life together, including some of our deepest tensions and anxieties.
Besides analyzing the dsytopian shift in popular culture, Joustra and Wilkinson also suggest how Christians can live faithfully and with integrity in such a cultural context.
The Truly Random Number Generator sends us to page 14:
And each story gives the distinct impression that its protagonist will come to a bad end. Breaking Bad concludes with its nod to fate. Its difficult to imagine a great reversal of fortune for Don Draper, perhaps because the opening credits of the show have shown a silhouette of a man falling off a tall building since the pilot. . . As for Frank Underwood, well: the title of the show, along with various symbolic clues dropped throughout its seasons, can hardly be insignificant.
What are you reading today?
Running In My Head 
What if it’s möbius and we really need to be reading “What to do from the very start”? Or maybe the advice would be the same. Getting a headache which I shall blame on pollen not the post.
(It’s always so fretful to have to wait for the next in a book series! Sounds like you’ve been through some good ones recently )
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It’s been a good streak, yes.
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