Finished at last

It seemed to take forever for me to finish In the Name of Identity, in part because I kept going back and rereading sections. Maalouf's book is fairly short (~150 pages) but has some huge ideas. His style is very accessible and the tone of the book was philosophical without being dense or reliant on a lot of jargon. Maalouf wonders about the human tendency to narrow identity to a single factor (religion, primarily) and its cause; then moves on to the tendencies to demonized the "Other" which for many people today is modernization; and on to the tension between standardization and uniformity. I thought his observations about the relationship between religion and democracy were interesting, especially since religion is so change-averse. Maalouf also touches briefly on language as identity, which is something I find very interesting.

I've got Maalouf's The Crusades Through the Eyes of the Arabs TBR, but I'm not going to start it until I finish The Assault on Reason and Blackwater, which have been languishing half-read on my coffee table.

On the fiction reading front, I finished Creepin' a paranormal anthology edited by Monica Jackson and published by Kimani. B- from me. Tara Marie loved it, as did Bam. Me, I loved one story, liked two others, and thought the remaining two were less than impressive. ( Blurb and opinion about each story follows. )