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Mystery Recommendations
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amother
OP


 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 7:15 pm
Can anyone here tell me if DaVinci Code clean? Too much of other religions? Offensive or neutral for a yeshivish (but open-minded) reader?

Thanks.

Edited to change title of thread since we have segued into discussing mysteries...
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amother
Ivory


 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 7:16 pm
amother [ OP ] wrote:
Can anyone here tell me if it's clean? Too much of other religions? Offensive or neutral for a yeshivish (but open-minded) reader?

Thanks.


Lots of xtianity.
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amother
OP


 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 7:42 pm
Oh, well, then...

Did you find it offensive? Or just tangential, I guess?
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amother
Purple


 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 7:49 pm
I wouldn't recommend it. If thats what you are asking.
Aside for christianity theres a s-xual orgy. .
There’s nothing graphic but its there as a key part of plot

ETA.
If you can take the concept- it isnt graphic at all. I found it almost as making letzanus of avoda zara.
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amother
Ivory


 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 7:52 pm
amother [ OP ] wrote:
Oh, well, then...

Did you find it offensive? Or just tangential, I guess?


It's not offensive, but it is the essence of the story.
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icedcoffee




 
 
    
 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 8:12 pm
There's a lot of Christian-based stuff more about the history, artwork, architecture, etc, not actually promoting it as the true religion or whatever. Like amother Purple said, it's more silly than anything, because it's all so ridiculously over the top and not based in reality.
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Amarante




 
 
    
 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 9:05 pm
I tried to read it years ago when it was a best seller. It was so ridiculously stupid thst I couldn’t get through it even as an airplane type of read. There are much better and more interesting books if you are looking for something escapist.
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amother
Tan


 

Post Sun, May 02 2021, 9:23 pm
Amarante wrote:
I tried to read it years ago when it was a best seller. It was so ridiculously stupid thst I couldn’t get through it even as an airplane type of read. There are much better and more interesting books if you are looking for something escapist.

Didn't want to be the one to say it, but yes....
I tried reading it years ago when it was all the rage but it was written so poorly and was frankly boring that I gave up half way through. Never got why it was a huge bestseller.
OP, if you list characteristics of the type of book you are looking for, maybe someone will have a good recommendation for you to try.
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amother
Green


 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 7:20 am
I couldn’t get through it the writing was so awful. Could not figure out why people liked it (how did they even manage to struggle through the writing?!!)
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DrMom




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 7:39 am
Amarante wrote:
I tried to read it years ago when it was a best seller. It was so ridiculously stupid thst I couldn’t get through it even as an airplane type of read. There are much better and more interesting books if you are looking for something escapist.

This (although I did manage to finish it -- you were smart for ditching it early).
How did this become a best-seller??
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sequoia




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 8:00 am
So bad.
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amother
Plum


 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 8:59 am
If you're after a good thriller in that vein, I found James Rollins was much better. Didn't find Dan Brown as good a writer.
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FranticFrummie




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 9:16 am
I HATED that book! It was so bad, on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. I am an avid reader, and can find things of interest in pretty much anything. There was no redeeming value whatsoever.

The only reason I kept reading it, was because I kept hoping it would get better, and I was already halfway through it. When I finished I wanted to throw it across the room, but I couldn't because I borrowed it from a friend. The only good thing I can say about this book, is that I didn't pay for it.

I want those 3 days of my life back. Mad


(If Chef Gordon Ramsay read this book, he'd set it on fire while cussing at it.)
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Amarante




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 10:14 am
DrMom wrote:
This (although I did manage to finish it -- you were smart for ditching it early).
How did this become a best-seller??


It shows how bad I thought the book was because generally I am the type of reader that finishes books even if it is a struggle.

This book was such a confluence of terribleness in so many different ways that it was impossible to even skim to the end because I had not even the slightest interest in how it ended. Very Happy
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Amarante




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 11:02 am
I stumbled upon this bit of insanity this morning while checking out my news sites. Reminded me of the idiocy of the Brown book for some reason. I have read some really excellent books exploring the Middle Ages which touch upon the "Church". I love historical novels as a genre because it is such an excellent way (at least for me) to learn about different times. Wildly different but I thought the Follett books were excellent and I actually enjoyed learning about how they built cathedrals in the Middle Ages and and how architecture evolved and Wouk's Winds of War trilogy was an excellent sweeping historical novel about WW II.

From Papal Gift to Royal Fertility Charm, the Insane Story of Yoshke’ Foreskin

If you were a Christian in the Middle Ages you could not enter a church without hearing a story about the saints whose relics were housed there. Everyone loved relics and there was fierce competition for possession of the remains of those closest to Yoshke or most widely renowned for their holiness. Given that Yoshke had ascended into heaven the closest you could get to the Savior was the body of one of his relatives or followers, right? Well, not exactly. There was one rather sensitive piece of Yoshke’ body that some believed had remained on Earth: his foreskin.

Yoshke was a Jewish man. He preached in synagogues, was called a rabbi, and—like other Jewish men—was circumcised eight days after his birth (Luke 2:21). There was nothing strange or unusual about this event; it was something done in fulfillment of a law handed down by God to Abraham in Genesis 17.

Strikingly, however, the Apostle Paul did not require that Gentile followers of Yoshke circumcise themselves in order to join the movement. Even though many Christians today circumcise their sons it’s not a religious requirement and Paul’s sharply worded letter to the Galatians stresses that non-Jewish followers really should not do this. In fact, he accuses those who do this of mutilating themselves. Paul’s opinion won the day and it’s easy to see why: beyond the fact that circumcision is a tough sell for adult men it was viewed with suspicion by many of Paul’s contemporaries.

Dr. Isaac Soon, an assistant professor of New Testament studies at Crandall University, told The Daily Beast that “many ancient Greeks and Romans treated circumcision like a kind of disability.” “We know of some ancient Jewish men who tried to remove their circumcision, through a procedure called epispasm.” Others tried to fake it by using twine to pull the skin around the aiver forward but this was not always successful. The poet Martial ridiculed a Jewish man whose fibula (twine) fell out when he was at the baths.

Over the following centuries circumcision became increasingly unpopular among mainstream Christians. Dr. Andrew Jacobs, senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and author of Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference, told me that as the most famous marker of Jewish identity circumcision was a way for Christians to distinguish themselves from Jews and from what would later be called “heretical groups.”

Later sources, Jacobs said, refer to groups of unorthodox Christians who allegedly practiced circumcision. The fourth century theologian Epiphanius claims in his lengthy encyclopedia of heresies that at least three groups—the “Cerinthians,” the “Nazoreans,” and the “Ebionites”—practiced circumcision ‘like the Jews.’ Jacobs mentioned that Epiphanius tells us that the Cerinthians and Ebionites claimed to be following Christ's example when they were circumcised. The difficulty is that we can’t be sure that these groups existed, much less that they did the things that Epiphanius claims they did. “Epiphanius is certainly no stranger to exaggeration (and even lying),” said Jacobs, “But other ancient sources talk about forms of Christianity that adhered to the laws of Moses… so we have to imagine at least some people who considered themselves Christian may have been circumcised, and may have claimed they were following Yoshke' example.”

All of this anti-circumcision conversation, however, created a problem. For Christians who used circumcision as a means of distinguishing themselves from Jews the body of Yoshke was something of a rub. “Christians had to figure out,” Jacobs told me “how and why (or even if) their savior had this paradigmatic Jewish mark on his body.” The difficulty was only exacerbated as Christian theologians began to emphasize Christ’s divinity “even as an infant he must have been aware of and in control of what happened to his person!” Why did baby Yoshke let this happen?

By the middle ages Christians had worked out sophisticated arguments for why Yoshke’s circumcision was not about his Jewishness. They argued that he was circumcised to prove that he was actually a human being; to put an end to the law by fulfilling it once and for all (a similar idea about sacrifice is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews); or his circumcision confirms his masculinity. The medieval bestseller The Golden Legend even claimed that the day of circumcision has salvific function as it was the day when Yoshke began to shed blood for humanity. It was, Jacobs said, “anything but a concession to Jewish law!”

This theological maneuvering allowed Christians to reclaim the foreskin of Yoshke as a holy relic. But there was still a problem—where was it?

The Bible doesn’t tell us, but for medieval Christians who were fascinated with the power and intimacy of relics, the idea that a piece of Yoshke’ body was still on Earth was ripe with potential. One second century apocryphal story known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas tells us that the foreskin (and umbilical cord) was taken away by an “old Hebrew woman” and preserved in an alabaster box of oil. According to tradition it then somehow ended up in the bottle of perfume that the sinful woman used to anoint Yoshke’ body before his death in Mark 14. This is the earliest example, Jacobs said, of Christians thinking about the kinds of unique Yoshke-relics that might still be around. Other abandoned body parts like toenail clippings or hair might also be out there: one divine man’s trash, as they say, is a regular person’s treasure.

As with all relics, the holy foreskin (or prepuce as it is loftily known) began to multiply. The first example showed up at the beginning of the ninth century when Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, presented Pope Leo III with one. According to St Birgitta’s The Lord’s Foreskin, the Virgin Mary had kept Yoshke’ foreskin in a leather pouch before bequeathing it to the Apostle John. It then languished for 700 years before it ended up in Charlemagne’s hands. By the 13th century it was on display at the Vatican.

Charlemagne’s relic was not the only one; during the Middle Ages at least 12 could be found in European churches. One famous example includes a holy foreskin from France that was placed in the marriage bed of Henry V of England and Catherine of Valois on their wedding night as a fertility charm (and you thought finding an old band-aid in your bed was gross). Over the centuries, however, many of the holy foreskins went missing or were stolen. The last known example was stolen out of a church in Calcata, Italy, in 1983. Interestingly, the local bishop didn’t attempt to recover it and let the whole matter slide. Some have speculated that the Vatican itself had stolen the relic in order to stop people talking about Yoshke’ aiver.

As a relic, the holy foreskin was the object of religious veneration. Medieval Christianity was a sensory religion in which participants communed with God in an embodied way. Somatic encounters with the remains of saints and the body of Yoshke were a common occurrence and even today Catholic Eucharist services involve ingesting the body of Christ. There is a precedent, therefore, for tasting the body of Yoshke. The Swedish nun St. Birgitta records a vision in which she ate the then-millennium-old holy foreskin. Chapter 37 of her Revelationes describes the experience in some detail: “Now she feels on her tongue a small membrane, like the membrane of an egg, full of superabundant sweetness, and she swallowed it down…And she did the same perhaps hundreds of times. When she touched it with her finger the membrane went down her throat of itself.”

While this might seem somewhat extreme, Harvard academic Marc Shell writes that tasting Yoshke’ foreskin was one of the few ways to test the authenticity of a holy prepuce. Whereas we might perform carbon dating tests, ancient physicians, known as croques-prépuces would taste the “shrivelled leather in order to determine whether it was wholly or partly human skin.” Shell notes that the foreskin was just one of many Yoshke cast offs to make a splash on the relic scene: sweat from the Garden of Gethsemane, lost baby teeth, breast milk from the Virgin Mary, and even urine and faeces made appearances. The 12th century Cistercian monk St. Bernard was famous for drinking the breast milk of the Virgin. Digestive practices like these give a whole new meaning to the phrase “cafeteria Catholic.”

Many Christians, though, were skeptical of the claims about the foreskin of Yoshke. The sixth century Severus of Antioch was the first, Jacobs told me, to argue what would later become the standard view: that the foreskin rose with Yoshke at the resurrection and is now in heaven. This view is not just about protecting the integrity of Yoshke’ resurrection, it’s about the resurrection of everyone else as well. Early Christians worried about the aesthetics effects of people leaving bits and pieces of themselves behind after Judgment Day. They wanted to ensure that amputated limbs, hair lost through male pattern baldness, and so on all made its way to heaven. Leaving pieces of you behind presents a philosophical problem: Have “you” really been resurrected if your body—in its entirety—isn’t raised from the dead?

Even so, the holy foreskin has elicited more than its fair share of humor and criticism. Martin Luther was a skeptic; Voltaire made fun of the concepts in the 18th century; and even BuzzFeed has explored the story. The somewhat liminal view of the 17th century theologian Leo Allatius that the foreskin of Yoshke left Earth only to expand and form one of the bands of Saturn has particular comic appeal. Over time, therefore, the Roman Catholic church became concerned. In 1900 the Vatican issued a ruling that anyone referring to the “true sacred flesh” could be subject to excommunication. In its 2,000-year history the foreskin of Yoshke has shifted from from biological debris, to controversial identity marker, to relic, and, finally, sacred taboo. The cultural journey of this small piece of skin marks Christianity’s own passage from Jewish sect to medieval socioeconomic powerhouse to modern religion.
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amother
OP


 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 2:51 pm
I enjoy cozy mysteries (as opposed to scary or gory) and somewhat magic & fantasy but not those really complicated worlds where you have no idea what's going on. Not sci-fi though I liked it in my youth.

I have enjoyed historical fiction but I don't like the depressing kinds of books where there's abject poverty & misery. Also NOTHING holocaust, gives me awful nightmares.

This sounded something like a puzzle to solve but I think I will pass.

(Sometimes I find two books I want on ebay and there's buy 2 get 1 free so I just browse the selections. Wish there were more reviews to help figure out what I'd enjoy but all the info above is very helpful so thanks to all those who replied & saved me $3.50 or so.)
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amother
Plum


 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 3:16 pm
amother [ OP ] wrote:
I enjoy cozy mysteries (as opposed to scary or gory) and somewhat magic & fantasy but not those really complicated worlds where you have no idea what's going on. Not sci-fi though I liked it in my youth.

I have enjoyed historical fiction but I don't like the depressing kinds of books where there's abject poverty & misery. Also NOTHING holocaust, gives me awful nightmares.

This sounded something like a puzzle to solve but I think I will pass.

(Sometimes I find two books I want on ebay and there's buy 2 get 1 free so I just browse the selections. Wish there were more reviews to help figure out what I'd enjoy but all the info above is very helpful so thanks to all those who replied & saved me $3.50 or so.)


Fantasy-Melissa Mcshane was quite calm and I enjoy her different series. I found them easy to get into and not too complicated.
Jenn Mckinley was nice for cozy mysteries. I also enjoy Rhys Bowen. There's always Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers for classic mysteries.
And I've enjoyed many more authors, I just can't bring them to mind right now.
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DrMom




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 3:27 pm
Amarante wrote:
I stumbled upon this bit of insanity this morning while checking out my news sites.
...(snipped (no pun intended) for length)


Well, that was bizarre.
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amother
OP


 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 3:37 pm
Quote:
Jenn Mckinley was nice for cozy mysteries. I also enjoy Rhys Bowen. There's always Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers for classic mysteries.
I have all of Christie & Sayers.

Also Lillian Jackson Braun, Mary Stewart (well, I read the Arthur series long ago when I went to the library. Haven't collected them but thinking about it, but have all her other books.)

Also almost all of Erle Stanley Gardner & Rex Stout.

I will have a look at McKinley & Bowen. 100% clean?
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watergirl




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, May 03 2021, 4:08 pm
I thought it was a fun page turner thriller.
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