When I attended the American Library Association midwinter conference in Seattle earlier this year, I picked up advance copies of several books, which publishers give out to promote their upcoming titles. It makes for pretty good swag. I’m finally getting around to reading them; I admit that my procrastination does defeat some of the value of an advance copy, since most of these books by now have already been published and released to the retail market.
One of these books I recently read is 40 Days and 40 Nights by Matthew Chapman, who happens to be the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The book tells the story of the intelligent-design case in Pennsylvania, Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education. Obviously there’s a slant to the book, but it does provide an interesting look at all the people involved in the case. Here’s a quote, which basically sums up how I’m feeling about religion right now:
I would not be against any religion that had the humility to admit that it was just one of many equally valid “fairy tales of conscience” (to use philosopher George Santayana’s definition of religion) or, in other words, “just a theory.” But I fear all religions that claim sole ownership of absolute truth. With no evidence except that of ancient hearsay, they can only persuade through appeals to the most vulnerable aspects of the human mind, through menacing insistence on blind faith at the cost of reason, and ultimately through violence.
Tina, one of my former co-workers, was at the most recent ALA annual conference a few months ago in Washington, D.C., and picked up a book for me: Hero. She even had it signed for me by the author, Perry Moore, who was there promoting the book. Aimed at the young-adult market, Hero is about a gay teen superhero coming to terms with his sexuality, his family, his powers, and so forth. It’s a good story, though I have to admit, with so much of what I read lately being nonfiction, I think I’m out of practice reading and judging fiction. Anyway, it’s definitely refreshing to see gay themes treated this way; I wish there were more books like this when I was growing up!
There’s an article about Moore in yesterday’s New York Times: “A Novelist’s Superhero Is Out To Right Wrongs” (via Jeff).
By the way, advance reading copies are usually uncorrected proofs, which means they can contain several typos. I have to fight the urge to get out a red pencil and mark up my copy!
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