Reading Recommendations?

[drcpunk]

Anyone want to recommend books for me to read once I'm done with ranking my finalists for Mythopoeic? Here are the rules.

1. Limit of one recommendation per person.

2. No modern fantasy (which I'm defining, for these purposes only, as anything from the 20th century or later). Fantasy is what I don't screen out. Hard sf, mystery, general fiction, and non-fiction are all fine.

3. I'm not promising to read it all. Just so you know.

Comments

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Hm, that should be "Simeon", not "Simion", correct?

[bercilakslady.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's all transliteration. (Meaning I'm too lazy to look it up right now.)

I'm reading the JPS translation of the Tanakh, myself, as that's what I have. So that would be the pentatuch, the prophets and the writings. The ISBN is 0827603665 if you are interested. I'm interested in getting a Chumash at some point with classic commentaries, but that will have to wait for me having a job. I tend to think of the Bible as being the Tanakh, with the NT being a wholely separate thing. I'm not biased at all, you see.

I think it's in the book of Esther that we get the only mention of Jews as being Jews and not Hebrews or the Children of Israel. Noted that during the yearly reading of the Meggillah on Purim.

And on another note, reading the story of David and Bathsheba with someone who knows the references to the way certain things worked and the referenced used makes the story so much clearer and more disturbing. I've always thought of David as a hero, but really, he's not so much.

I'd be interested to see that comment on the non-suicide of Samson.