Adventures in Mormonism

…who walked into a bookstore over the past few days and bought the following two books (yes, for myself):

• Eloquent Witness: Nibley on Himself, Others, and the Temple (Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 17) by Hugh Nibley (edited by Stephen D. Ricks)
• Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

Already finished Breaking Dawn, too.  ..bruce..

Sorry for the lack of posts; I’ve actually been busy with work (a good thing), traveling first to Dallas and now to Richmond (VA).

Two books that I’m currently working my way through are Milton’s Paradise Lost and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I’ve never read either before and am very taken with both. Milton’s work, of course, is like a mountain that dominates the landscape of Western literature, but I don’t think you can realize how much it does so until you’ve read it. I’ve got the Fowler annotated edition, which is tremendously helpful. I’m just sorry it’s taken me this long to get around to it; my inspiration for finally doing so was picking up and reading C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, itself an outstanding work (and a reminder that Lewis was a professor of literature at Oxford when that really meant something).

Lawrence’s work is a revelation. Laying aside the disputes over how accurate his portrayal of events is, I am (as a writer) simply stunned at his writing. I’ll read a paragraph and think, “That’s such a wonderfully written paragraph; maybe I’ll quote that on one of my blogs.” Then I’ll read the next paragraph and think the same thing. And so on. Here’s a paragraph chosen at random:

His distance might have been six thousand yards; but the fuses of his shrapnel were Boer War antiquities, full of green mould, and, if they burst, it was sometimes short in the air, and sometimes grazing. However, he had no means of getting his ammunition away if things went wrong, so he blazed off at speed, shouting with laughter at this fashion of making war; and the tribesmen seeing the commandant so merry took heart of grace themselves. ‘By God,’ said one, ‘those are the real guns: the Importance of their noise!’ Rasim swore that the Turks were dying in heaps, and the Arabs charged forward warmly at his word.

I would bleed myself to write that well, and Lawrence goes on that way for hundreds of pages.  ..bruce..

I’ve been hearing rumblings about Stephanie Meyer for some months and saw her books (in several places) the last time I went into Borders. But I had no idea that she’s reaching this level of sales and fan worship:

Stephenie Meyer, formerly a Glendale stay-at-home Mormon mom, is now a rock star of the highest teenage order. She has 25,190 friends on MySpace.com. Girls fly across the world to get her autograph. They sketch her, make rhinestone-studded Stephenie T-shirts and giggle, tremble and even cry when they meet her.

All of this is somewhat surprising considering that Meyer neither is dating Justin Timberlake nor is a Beyoncé Knowles incarnate. Meyer is a 33-year-old author. She has three young sons and a husband. She is shy. She also writes vampire love stories thicker than biology texts, addictive books her twitter-pated fans stay up all night to finish.

Hers are tales that suck you in, despite any objections to vampire love stories.

Her third and latest volume, the appropriately titled Eclipse, came out in August with a whopping initial print of 1 million copies and knocked Harry Potter off the top of USA Today’s best-seller list. Meyer is the next J.K. Rowling, buzz-churners say.

Boy, if the evangelicals hated Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling, what will they do when they face the popularity of vampire love stories written by a Mormon for teens and tweens?

Speaking of which…I just edited the Wikipedia article (about responses to Harry Potter) linked to in the previous paragraph to add a section on Latter-day Saint responses.

Heh. ..bruce..

[UPDATED 01/07/09] Someone deleted that section from the Wikipedia article; I’ve reposted a short version of what I had before. Here’s my full original text (which included three citations, one after each clause in the second sentence; here I’ve put them in as links):

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) has expressed no official or unofficial reservations or cautions about the Harry Potter books — all of which are freely sold at the Brigham Young University campus bookstore. Most likely this is because the LDS Church leaders feel they have more important things to worry about [46], because LDS society places a strong emphasis on education and literacy[47], and because Church leaders trust that LDS children and adults will recognize these books as entertaining and thoughtful literature, and nothing more[48].

If someone who’s a more experienced Wikipedia editor than I would like to help restore this, please feel free.  ..bruce..