Reading: Nonfiction
Jan. 26th, 2026 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterI've been in a bit of a reading slump lately, hence the sudden surge of more movies in a few weeks than I think I watched the whole of last year. But, feeling unable to commit to any new novel, I've been picking away at some interesting nonfiction:
Millennial Love by Olivia Petter is a collection of musings on love, sex and dating in the digital age. It is of absolutely no relevance to me personally, as a millennial who met her husband young, before either online dating or the concept of mobile phone apps in general had quite penetrated the mainstream, but reading it made me wonder how anyone manages to find a partner anymore now that Tinder et all have taken over the market. It sounds absolutely fucking nightmarish out there. The etiquette around read receipts and double texting and Instagram stories is positively Byzantine; I thought I knew how to use social media, but apparently, I really do not. And I think I might be happier that way. Still, this was a very heartfelt, emotionally open book that gave me some insight into what my younger/singler friends and family have been dealing with.
I did roll my eyes extremely hard at this bit:
Really, Olivia Petter? People not texting you back on your preferred schedule is "sheer unadulterated arrogance"? Come on. Phones are there to help us communicate when we want to, not to force us into a state of mandatory round-the-clock availability. No one thinks we should all be barging into each other's houses uninvited whenever we feel like asking a question or sharing a joke; how does owning a smartphone entitle you to a degree of control over your friends' social schedules that you wouldn't dream of demanding face to face? I plan to continue restricting my use of the device to when it bloody well suits me, and I give all my loved ones my full-throated blessing to do the same; if that puts the damper on friendships with people who see digital unavailability as "arrogance", so much the better for both of us.
I think, though, this is probably a good example of why the whole online dating world described in the book sounds so unbearable to me. I seem to have missed the cutoff for a generational shift that has embraced technology as core to our social lives rather than incidental. I can't imagine getting worked up about somebody texting me twice in a row or taking their time to respond to a non-urgent message, any more than I can imagine getting offended by a salesperson telling me "no problem" instead of "you're welcome"; my older friends would probably be equally baffled by the automatic pang of anxiety and hurt I feel when they end a short text with a period. Etiquette is always so culturally specific; impossible to grasp intuitively from the outside, and almost as hard to recognise as subjective from within.
Murder Under the Microscope by James Fraser is the memoir of a forensic scientist and a selection of the major UK criminal cases he worked on in his career. I've read books in this genre before that seemed to be largely about self-aggrandisement: look at all these important cases I've worked on, and how clever and brave I was in solving them. This is not one of those. Fraser is intensely critical of the whole criminal justice system, and especially of the police; he is less interested in recounting personal triumphs (in most of his case studies, the forensic work he did ended up being irrelevant, inconclusive or intractably problematic) than in debunking myths about the power of forensic evidence. He depicts a field rife with human error at every level, and so poorly understood by the related fields that employ it (ie the police and the courts) that even the highest-stakes investigations are vulnerable to being derailed by misunderstandings and power struggles. In places the writing dragged a bit (the Damilola Taylor case in particular was such a mess of different organisations interfering with each other's work that I kept losing track of who was who) and in other places it seemed at risk of devolving into a hit piece against the Met (Fraser really did not enjoy working with the Met) but overall I found it an interesting, enlightening examination of how what we see as "objective science" is still beholden both to the limits of human skill and accuracy, and to the foibles of the institutions producing it.
-
I've also recently read a couple of books about the historical Jesus and the Bible's contradictory positions on sex and marriage. They're both fact-based, not faith-based, but I'm popping them under a cut anyway for those who've already heard more than they care to about Christianity today.
What Did Jesus Look Like? by Joan E. Taylor is a fascinating medley of art history, church history and bioarchaeology aimed at establishing what the real Jesus Christ may have looked like, exploring along the way the various historically inaccurate but culturally revealing depictions that today have coalesced into our mental image of an Obi-Wan lookalike in flowing white robes. I'll skip to the ending first: the conclusion Taylor arrives at is that the real human Jesus was most likely a short, unremarkable Palestinian man, neither handsome enough nor ugly enough to be worthy of note. He'd have had the mid-brown skin and black-brown hair you'd expect from someone born in that region, probably close-cropped and with a short beard. His clothes, which unlike his body we do have some direct evidence of in the Bible, were modest (no bare chest) but scruffy and unimpressive (no flowing excess fabric and certainly no crisp white bleaching). In short, he'd have looked pretty much like everyone around him, with a strong lean towards the visibly lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
But this was a case where the journey was as rewarding as the answer, and I was especially interested in the ways that Jesus' portrayal in early art was influenced by contemporary modes of painting and sculpting the pagan gods. Long, curly or wavy hair was completely out of fashion among real human men throughout the Graeco-Roman world, but ubiquitous in portrayals of senior male gods like Zeus and Apollo; early Christians who wanted to communicate their Lord's supremacy leaned heavily on this association, resulting in the first depictions of L'Oreal Jesus that have retained their influence through the ages. Other ancient tropes, such as the androgynous young god (ala Dionysus) and the shaggy, unkempt philosopher (Plato), intermixed with this styling (perhaps partly due to early Christians in a pagan-dominated world wanting to show how their god was equal to ALL the other gods and great teachers put together) and went on to influence the later Medieval and Renaissance European artists who combined this visual language with the beautiful, ethnically white artist's models available to them. Thus, today: Kenobi.
Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire by Jennifer Wright Knust is not the strongest critique I've ever read of the biblical (mis)interpretations that prop up conservative social agendas, but it was an interesting deep dive on the topics of sexuality, marriage and family as they appear at various points in the Old and New Testaments.
Old Testament-based analysis makes up the large bulk of the book, and since I don't know any Hebrew or really much at all about the relevant Jewish social context, I can't comment on its soundness. I did find some of the New Testament-based thinking annoyingly fuzzy. For instance, Knust correlates the explicitly patriarchal social program of the pastoral epistles with the Augustan constitutional reforms aimed at strengthening Roman patriarchy. Her argument is that the pastorals differ from the authentic Pauline epistles on the topic of women's subjugation because the pastorals are responding to cultural trends triggered by the Augustan reforms. But those reforms were complete by 2 BC; there's nothing in them that could have influenced the pastorals but not Paul. Of course, the pastoral letters were in conversation with the cultural trends of their time, to which the Augustan reforms contributed a lot. I think what Knust means to say is that the pastorals are more concerned than Paul with upholding cultural norms, and the norms were so-and-so...but the way she orders the information is kind of sloppy.
Her comments on some of the linguistically difficult parts of the New Testament are also unhelpfully vague, though this may be more a pet peeve of mine than an actual flaw. Knust is clearly well studied in Greek, and it's not hard to guess why someone writing for a general (largely non-ancient-Greek-speaking) audience might choose not to get bogged down in (for example) the arsenokoitai debates, but if literally all you're going to say is "this is a difficult word to translate" then I can't help wondering why you bothered to bring it up at all.
Still: the more books challenging the suffocating dominance of Christian sexual conservatism, the better. Read with a critical eye, I think this is as useful a starting point as any for questioning our received "wisdom" about the Bible's social program. The book's overall argument is that the Bible says many conflicting, context-specific things about sex and that it's not fit for purpose as a guide for modern-day sexual behaviour, and quibbles aside, I do very much agree with that.
Millennial Love by Olivia Petter is a collection of musings on love, sex and dating in the digital age. It is of absolutely no relevance to me personally, as a millennial who met her husband young, before either online dating or the concept of mobile phone apps in general had quite penetrated the mainstream, but reading it made me wonder how anyone manages to find a partner anymore now that Tinder et all have taken over the market. It sounds absolutely fucking nightmarish out there. The etiquette around read receipts and double texting and Instagram stories is positively Byzantine; I thought I knew how to use social media, but apparently, I really do not. And I think I might be happier that way. Still, this was a very heartfelt, emotionally open book that gave me some insight into what my younger/singler friends and family have been dealing with.
I did roll my eyes extremely hard at this bit:
I've heard the 'I'm shit with my phone' line so many times. Not just from Fuck Boys (see previous chapter) but from friends, too. It's only recently that I've realised it has absolutely nothing to do with being good or bad with your phone. In fact, this phrase is about arrogance. Sheer unadulterated arrogance that leads a person to believe their time is more valuable than someone else's.
Really, Olivia Petter? People not texting you back on your preferred schedule is "sheer unadulterated arrogance"? Come on. Phones are there to help us communicate when we want to, not to force us into a state of mandatory round-the-clock availability. No one thinks we should all be barging into each other's houses uninvited whenever we feel like asking a question or sharing a joke; how does owning a smartphone entitle you to a degree of control over your friends' social schedules that you wouldn't dream of demanding face to face? I plan to continue restricting my use of the device to when it bloody well suits me, and I give all my loved ones my full-throated blessing to do the same; if that puts the damper on friendships with people who see digital unavailability as "arrogance", so much the better for both of us.
I think, though, this is probably a good example of why the whole online dating world described in the book sounds so unbearable to me. I seem to have missed the cutoff for a generational shift that has embraced technology as core to our social lives rather than incidental. I can't imagine getting worked up about somebody texting me twice in a row or taking their time to respond to a non-urgent message, any more than I can imagine getting offended by a salesperson telling me "no problem" instead of "you're welcome"; my older friends would probably be equally baffled by the automatic pang of anxiety and hurt I feel when they end a short text with a period. Etiquette is always so culturally specific; impossible to grasp intuitively from the outside, and almost as hard to recognise as subjective from within.
Murder Under the Microscope by James Fraser is the memoir of a forensic scientist and a selection of the major UK criminal cases he worked on in his career. I've read books in this genre before that seemed to be largely about self-aggrandisement: look at all these important cases I've worked on, and how clever and brave I was in solving them. This is not one of those. Fraser is intensely critical of the whole criminal justice system, and especially of the police; he is less interested in recounting personal triumphs (in most of his case studies, the forensic work he did ended up being irrelevant, inconclusive or intractably problematic) than in debunking myths about the power of forensic evidence. He depicts a field rife with human error at every level, and so poorly understood by the related fields that employ it (ie the police and the courts) that even the highest-stakes investigations are vulnerable to being derailed by misunderstandings and power struggles. In places the writing dragged a bit (the Damilola Taylor case in particular was such a mess of different organisations interfering with each other's work that I kept losing track of who was who) and in other places it seemed at risk of devolving into a hit piece against the Met (Fraser really did not enjoy working with the Met) but overall I found it an interesting, enlightening examination of how what we see as "objective science" is still beholden both to the limits of human skill and accuracy, and to the foibles of the institutions producing it.
-
I've also recently read a couple of books about the historical Jesus and the Bible's contradictory positions on sex and marriage. They're both fact-based, not faith-based, but I'm popping them under a cut anyway for those who've already heard more than they care to about Christianity today.
What Did Jesus Look Like? by Joan E. Taylor is a fascinating medley of art history, church history and bioarchaeology aimed at establishing what the real Jesus Christ may have looked like, exploring along the way the various historically inaccurate but culturally revealing depictions that today have coalesced into our mental image of an Obi-Wan lookalike in flowing white robes. I'll skip to the ending first: the conclusion Taylor arrives at is that the real human Jesus was most likely a short, unremarkable Palestinian man, neither handsome enough nor ugly enough to be worthy of note. He'd have had the mid-brown skin and black-brown hair you'd expect from someone born in that region, probably close-cropped and with a short beard. His clothes, which unlike his body we do have some direct evidence of in the Bible, were modest (no bare chest) but scruffy and unimpressive (no flowing excess fabric and certainly no crisp white bleaching). In short, he'd have looked pretty much like everyone around him, with a strong lean towards the visibly lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
But this was a case where the journey was as rewarding as the answer, and I was especially interested in the ways that Jesus' portrayal in early art was influenced by contemporary modes of painting and sculpting the pagan gods. Long, curly or wavy hair was completely out of fashion among real human men throughout the Graeco-Roman world, but ubiquitous in portrayals of senior male gods like Zeus and Apollo; early Christians who wanted to communicate their Lord's supremacy leaned heavily on this association, resulting in the first depictions of L'Oreal Jesus that have retained their influence through the ages. Other ancient tropes, such as the androgynous young god (ala Dionysus) and the shaggy, unkempt philosopher (Plato), intermixed with this styling (perhaps partly due to early Christians in a pagan-dominated world wanting to show how their god was equal to ALL the other gods and great teachers put together) and went on to influence the later Medieval and Renaissance European artists who combined this visual language with the beautiful, ethnically white artist's models available to them. Thus, today: Kenobi.
Unprotected Texts: The Bible's Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire by Jennifer Wright Knust is not the strongest critique I've ever read of the biblical (mis)interpretations that prop up conservative social agendas, but it was an interesting deep dive on the topics of sexuality, marriage and family as they appear at various points in the Old and New Testaments.
Old Testament-based analysis makes up the large bulk of the book, and since I don't know any Hebrew or really much at all about the relevant Jewish social context, I can't comment on its soundness. I did find some of the New Testament-based thinking annoyingly fuzzy. For instance, Knust correlates the explicitly patriarchal social program of the pastoral epistles with the Augustan constitutional reforms aimed at strengthening Roman patriarchy. Her argument is that the pastorals differ from the authentic Pauline epistles on the topic of women's subjugation because the pastorals are responding to cultural trends triggered by the Augustan reforms. But those reforms were complete by 2 BC; there's nothing in them that could have influenced the pastorals but not Paul. Of course, the pastoral letters were in conversation with the cultural trends of their time, to which the Augustan reforms contributed a lot. I think what Knust means to say is that the pastorals are more concerned than Paul with upholding cultural norms, and the norms were so-and-so...but the way she orders the information is kind of sloppy.
Her comments on some of the linguistically difficult parts of the New Testament are also unhelpfully vague, though this may be more a pet peeve of mine than an actual flaw. Knust is clearly well studied in Greek, and it's not hard to guess why someone writing for a general (largely non-ancient-Greek-speaking) audience might choose not to get bogged down in (for example) the arsenokoitai debates, but if literally all you're going to say is "this is a difficult word to translate" then I can't help wondering why you bothered to bring it up at all.
Still: the more books challenging the suffocating dominance of Christian sexual conservatism, the better. Read with a critical eye, I think this is as useful a starting point as any for questioning our received "wisdom" about the Bible's social program. The book's overall argument is that the Bible says many conflicting, context-specific things about sex and that it's not fit for purpose as a guide for modern-day sexual behaviour, and quibbles aside, I do very much agree with that.
