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MAYBE!

no actually i'm pretty spot on when it comes to books because i am always very careful to make selections based on what i know people dig.

actually the magus is a really good headfuck book i would buy for kids in their early 20s having existential crises and all that. but it's also just a really good headfuck book.

Point of order! smacky, I don't think it's biologically possible for you to be a sumnabitch without major surgery. You might go with the biologically correct bicjasdottr, which is some Norse language (possibly rendered incorrectly, though) and sounds cooler.

You could be using a voice recognition software and a screen reader! No literacy required.

i liked the magus a lot more than the french lieutenant's woman but i do also appreciate fowles' difficulty with relating to femininity in general. or, the beauty of the magus is that i don't know if that's the message of the book or my personal brainpan drippings interfering with my reading of it, as everyone else i've loaned it to gets something else from it.

hell, i really like the collector as well but that's not existential crisis so much as bleak despair and horror.

but keep in mind that i really like celine.

but yeah i love verbal back and forth and clever wordings so Rushdie is basically pure gold. i know a lot of folks don't like him, and i don't really know why. (outside of those who don't like him for political reasons)

When it comes to mid- 20's existential crises, I think Camus is an absolute must - especially "The Stranger" & "Exile and the Kingdom". And if you still wanna ride on then "The Plague" and "The Fall" will also do what's neccessary. They don't work so well once you start paying the mortgage so read them while you can.

It also seemed to me that you would have to be a Koranic super-scholar to get all references to the point of taking umbrage at them.

nah. it's fairly straightforward: the prophet most certainly did not consider letting a bunch of she-demons into islam under any circumstances.

it seems pretty simple to non-muslims, but the last temptation of christ was probably pretty unremarkable for most non-christians.

no, they're considered apocrypha by islam proper.

hence the outrage.

edit: this doesn't explain the outrage in america among secularist and related non-muslims, especially within academia, who basically blamed rushdie with varying degrees of "he knew this would happen" isms. it's actually pretty sick to read stuff from that era.

Still, there is plenty of apocrypha about Christianity, but you don't see Christians throwing fatwas around at people who acknowledge it.

Tell that to the Reformation.

Don't rain on my misplaced historical jokes!

Fine

Tell that to the Reformation Inquisition.

{Little Green Fascist} That's because those ragheds live in the 7th century and want to drag us all back to it with them, smacky! {/Little Green Fascist}

Yeah, though, modern Christianity, pace Dawkins, is pretty benign.

Interesting that you say that, because I was recently at a debate where a man made the point that, while many people say "the Muslim world needs its Reformation", in his view the Muslim world has already had its Reformation. The Muslim world is extremely fragmented, and every individual religious leader is free to make his own proclamations.

Our chief weapon is surprise!