Reading Wednesday
Jul. 1st, 2026 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyJust finished: Killing Shakespeare by Koom Kankesan. This is a weird one, friends. After a fairly lighthearted concept you'd be expecting a time travel romp but our protagonists are quickly thrust into the sheer grimness of the era, with quite a bit more gore than one typically gets in YA. (That said, it's something I would have appreciated as a teenager.) Not to mention a sophisticated reckoning with the dark colonialist side of the period, where Suresh, who has grown to idolize John Dee, realizes the role he plays in the expansion of the British Empire and the eventual genocidal war on the Tamils.
Then it gets weirder? Because as the story progresses, the kids seem less concerned with getting back to their own time and the interior first-person narration of the kids gets progressively more sophisticated, something that feels like an inconsistency until you realize that while the characters think that this is their first go at time travel, these are not the versions of them that we met at the beginning, and they're basically in a time loop that is rewriting both history and the characters. Which is a fun twist.
The end goes full sci-fi with the Spanish Armada being dropped on London, and while two of the three characters make it home, the changes they've made to history stick and the timeline has irrevocably changed. And also Isabel's terrible poetry is preserved forever hahah.
Currently reading: Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God by Robert Charles Wilson. This has some interesting takes on belief and atheism, and in particular a defence of the idea of "intuitive atheist," which has more or less been my standpoint for the last few decades (the less said about my stint as an Internet Atheist, the better). There are a few things that I'm learning while reading it, like that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest.
That said it almost immediately does the thing that I hate in atheist writing, which is using Christianity as a stand-in for all religion. I have a pet theory that all self-proclaimed atheists are actually Christians who have decreased the number of gods they believe in by one. It's not that I'm not an atheist myself so much as I think most other atheists are being just as silly as most of the religious people who like to enforce their beliefs on others.
Look, when I was 13 I read the Satanic Bible and went, oh, that's just Christianity but goth, and I feel the same way when I read a lot of atheist writing. It's not racist like New Atheism (the author is quite a lovely guy!) but by advancing a religion=Christianity framework, it erases the diversity and complexity about what much of the human race believes. So it's a non-starter for me.
Then it gets weirder? Because as the story progresses, the kids seem less concerned with getting back to their own time and the interior first-person narration of the kids gets progressively more sophisticated, something that feels like an inconsistency until you realize that while the characters think that this is their first go at time travel, these are not the versions of them that we met at the beginning, and they're basically in a time loop that is rewriting both history and the characters. Which is a fun twist.
The end goes full sci-fi with the Spanish Armada being dropped on London, and while two of the three characters make it home, the changes they've made to history stick and the timeline has irrevocably changed. And also Isabel's terrible poetry is preserved forever hahah.
Currently reading: Owning the Unknown: A Science Fiction Writer Explores Atheism, Agnosticism, and the Idea of God by Robert Charles Wilson. This has some interesting takes on belief and atheism, and in particular a defence of the idea of "intuitive atheist," which has more or less been my standpoint for the last few decades (the less said about my stint as an Internet Atheist, the better). There are a few things that I'm learning while reading it, like that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest.
That said it almost immediately does the thing that I hate in atheist writing, which is using Christianity as a stand-in for all religion. I have a pet theory that all self-proclaimed atheists are actually Christians who have decreased the number of gods they believe in by one. It's not that I'm not an atheist myself so much as I think most other atheists are being just as silly as most of the religious people who like to enforce their beliefs on others.
Look, when I was 13 I read the Satanic Bible and went, oh, that's just Christianity but goth, and I feel the same way when I read a lot of atheist writing. It's not racist like New Atheism (the author is quite a lovely guy!) but by advancing a religion=Christianity framework, it erases the diversity and complexity about what much of the human race believes. So it's a non-starter for me.
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Date: 2026-07-01 10:13 pm (UTC)HAH! O yes.
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Date: 2026-07-02 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-07-01 11:22 pm (UTC)Later, when I was in high school, one reading assignment was a news article concerning the results of a worldwide poll on various topics. Japan, the pollsters claimed, was “the most atheist country.” This confused me—I’d seen shrines and temples everywhere, and plenty of people visiting them. Some years later, I came across another mention of that poll which noted the question had been framed as “which religion do you belong to?” and with no option for ticking two boxes, a lot of Japanese responders had picked the “no religion” answer.
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Date: 2026-07-02 12:08 am (UTC)Yeah I think my biggest critique of this so far is that by centring Christianity as the representative of all religion, it doesn't allow for any nuance in the role of spirituality in people's lives or their relationship to it.
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Date: 2026-07-02 03:17 pm (UTC)yes 100% - even my dad - and he is Hindu culturally... but think in his point, he is also adding the colonialism intersection - Christian beliefs impacted his life more than Hinduism did. Our families going back generations were not religious much at all - UNTIL his mom/my grandma's husband (grandpa) died and her brothers pretty much treated her as they would in Hindu culture (except some family members and friends who got her through).
But I do avoid reading - although I see it as making sense, as majority of the readers would be familiar with Christianity? And an atheist can still be a Hindu - so, it would need a whole different explanation/context to be included.
OK am rambling - but yes, to your point!
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Date: 2026-07-02 03:29 pm (UTC)Yeah, when I swear, I say "Jesus fucking Christ," as do most Hindus I know (at least the ones who grew up here).
But I do avoid reading - although I see it as making sense, as majority of the readers would be familiar with Christianity? And an atheist can still be a Hindu - so, it would need a whole different explanation/context to be included.
That's the thing. Part of what he's trying to do is differentiate between agnosticism and atheism by offering a proof that the existence of God is improbable. But it's God as defined by Christians. You can be an atheist and a Jew, though the actual conception of God is still a lot closer to the Christian one since they cribbed our notes. The proof that he gives, though, really wouldn't work for Hinduism and definitely wouldn't work for, say, West African animism.
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Date: 2026-07-08 08:05 pm (UTC)Rolled back to this post because I realized I had missed your initial engagement with this book and it sounds to me as though I would bounce screamingly off it despite its good points because the conflation of "religion" with Christianity is the main reason I am exhausted to death by this entire conversation. (The other is the need for a defense of atheism at all because as far as I can tell it is the factory setting of any number of people and needs no more intellectual basis than the spectrum of human sexuality.)
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Date: 2026-07-08 09:09 pm (UTC)That was one of my big breaks with Internet Atheism right from the beginning of my involvement with it. It seemed like a lot of Americans who had never meaningfully interacted with anyone other than Christians, and they were in a perpetual state of rebellion while not even conceiving that many, many other people are not even operating with the same framework.
Whereas I was raised atheist with Jewish characteristics and attended a lot of different faith gatherings, with the understanding that I didn't need to agree with them but I did need to respect them and learn about their worldview. So atheism has both seemed default to me and not inherently a rebellious stance.
To be clear, I do basically get the vibe from the author that he is chill with religious people in general, but the framework is just fundamentally different than mine.
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Date: 2026-07-09 05:25 am (UTC)(You could be reading it out of personal interest and I would not judge! Distinction understood.)
Whereas I was raised atheist with Jewish characteristics and attended a lot of different faith gatherings, with the understanding that I didn't need to agree with them but I did need to respect them and learn about their worldview. So atheism has both seemed default to me and not inherently a rebellious stance.
+1. My grandfather was a Jewish atheist, my grandmother a Jewish agnostic, my mother identifies as a Jewish pantheist, and the closest thing to a religious influence on my father was the Ethical Culture Society of New York City. (He also feels at home in Black churches, but it's a community rather than a theological thing.) I agree with you that it renders absurd any conversation that starts from a presumption of rejected belief. Everyone in my family has wanted to drown Richard Dawkins in a bucket for decades.
To be clear, I do basically get the vibe from the author that he is chill with religious people in general, but the framework is just fundamentally different than mine.
I feel I have never seen a book on the subject written from the same framework that I live inside. Maybe the other kind just take up all the oxygen in the room.
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Date: 2026-07-09 01:16 pm (UTC)The closest I've gotten was Molly Crabapple's, which is...not even about that. But I also feel like a purely philosophical book would be very short or have to be an epic tome individually addressing multiple religions and worldviews.
For me the really interesting questions are the ones that make me behave differently. "Was the Big Bang a spontaneous fluke of physics or the hand of God" does not affect my life in any way. "Is human nature fixed or fluid?" does.