I could write about how just two weeks ago my wife, out of the blue, got offered her dream job in Seattle (we currently live in So. Cal., for those keeping score) and now we are moving next week. I could go on about how we don’t actually have a place to live in Seattle…with much detail on the two days the wife and I spent their only to see our first choice fall through, and even more detail on how she was in the Pacific Northwest yesterday (flying home today) again, trying to locate a place for us to live. I could go on about how, as yet, I am unsure about my prospects; re: making money. Thursday is my last at the current bookmines so… And then last night, Bella says that she doesn’t want to leave our house where, in her words, “everything is perfect.”
But rather than dwell on all that…I mean, that shit is stressful…I’d rather dwell on one of the books I’m reading right now, Unseen Academicals. I’ve decided that as the number of novels Pratchett will write is now definitely finite (for many years I harbored the, some would say “unrealistic,” hope that Pratchett would live/write forever) that I must parse them out over the years. So that, at least for some amount of time, I still have Pratchett novels yet to read (I haven’t read any of the Tiffany Aching ones, for instance). So the other day I finally picked up Unseen Academicals and damnit, if Pratchett didn’t write the most perfect novel for me. It’s a discworld novel about football! I didn’t think it was possible that Pratchett could have ever topped Night Watch. But, as in many things, I have been proved wrong.
For whatever reason, I’ve been reading a lot lately. Maybe I’m trying to “catch up” from having read almost nothing (well, nothing that wasn’t school related) during the past two semesters. In any event, I also just finished reading God’s Problem by Bart Erhman, which is essentially a discussion about various ways in which the Bible deals with the problem of suffering. The long and short of the Erhman book is…
spoiler alert here, if you’re interested in reading it…
that after many years of wrestling with this issue, Ehrman eventually gave up on his Christianity. What is so fascinating to me, however, is that there is a moment where Unseen Academicals intersects with the ideas in God’s Problem.
Specifically, at one point in the book Lord Vetinari (tyrant of Ankh-Morpork) says (and apologies to Sir Pratchett as I don’t hav ethe book right in front of me so this is a paraphrase) “Some say evil exists in the world so that good can be illuminated. There is more to the argument, though I’ve never heard it because I am too busy laughing out loud.”
The final consideration of why evil exists, in Ehrman’s work, is that same idea…that we wouldn’t know what “good” is if “evil” did not exist as its counterpart. Ehrman than uses some extended passages from The Brothers Karamazov to support his argument that, as an intellectual and moral consideration, such a defense of evil/suffering is repugnant.
So for the few of you that saw my facebook update re: Pratchett’s genius, this is what I was talking about. It is things like this that motivate me to get down with the business of actually finishing my first book (not just letting the rough draft sit around) and make some real attempts to get it published.
Perhaps Seattle is just the place for something like that….
sounds like a good read, thanks for the information. i hope things look up for you.