Rice & Beans

I hate Anne Rice. Don't get me wrong, I hope she has a happy life and never gets audited by the IRS, but I want back all the hours I spent reading The Witching Hour. Nearly 1000 pages of itty bitty print and at the end I find it's the first in a series! So idiot me goes back to the library and snags the second book, Lasher, a mere 600 pages. Apparantly there's a third book, but I'm not going to bother.

1600 pages and not a damn thing happens. And yet I read all 1600 pages. I hate her. Why can't I be that brilliant? Her writing is hypnotic, like a LSD trip (don't ask me how I know), very very pretty but no plot to speak of.

Oh, you know who Anne Rice is. She's The Interview With A Vampire babe, remember? She recently wrote a wonderful novel with a plot based on the early life of Christ. It, too, is to be the start of a series. A series we already know the ending of, incidently.

And then, musing on Anne Rice and her dreamy plotless novels, I realized that's why I could never get into The Bible. I've read it all, cover to cover, in two versions and after finishing it for the first time I thought "That's it?"

I read it the second time to be sure I didn't miss anything. I didn't.

The whole Old Testament is apparantly to set up for the coming and going of Jesus. And quite frankly, Jesus is not that much of a due ex machina. No publisher in their right (or left) minds would publish the New Testament if, say, it were submitted today. No Jewish independence, no lawyers, no car chases. And Jesus is a bit of a wimp. Great storyteller, but who could understand Him? Miracle man, but only did a very small ammount of miracles to a very small corner of the earth. Hell, he could've invented pizza! Very few souls are saved when there's no pizza in the cards, let me tell you.Having the power of God and not trying to break into the movies? Not very realistic. And why are only people talked about? What about the animals? That's why I reject the New Testament as reading material--no cute dogs. Not even the donkey He rode to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday is given a name or a chance to save a diciple or two from drowning.

Maybe Anne Rice can spice it up a bit for me now. She knows beans about keeping interest...I just hope she sticks a cute dog in that's not murdered by the undead. And, come to think of it, would Jesus technically be a zombie?