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Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Two: John Bellairs

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Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N: John Bellairs This is a new series that will feature sporadically, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. You will either know what I mean by “Appendix N”, or you will have no clue. In the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, Gary Gygax provided a large number of appendices, from random smells to reputed magical properties of herbs and gemstones. Appendix N was a bibliography of works that inspired him. Back in 1982 when I first got hold of this book, there were only a couple of items on there that I’d read, and only a few other authors that I’d even heard of. Many years later, after ,much reading, I returned to Appendix N expecting to have added greatly to the works on there that I’d read; but actually, there were still very few. Many of the authors were obscure or out of print authors of, for want of a better expression, golden age pulp; the kind that feature in Amazing Stories and the like

An Atheist Reads the Bible Part 248: Concluding Thoughts.

Concluding Thoughts Welcome to the penultimate instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version). In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology. For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP And now: The End Over the past year I’ve posted chapter by chapter summaries and discussions of the King James Version of the Bible on pretty much a daily basis. As mentioned in the introductory post, I chose the KJV in part because I knew that a lot of common idioms came from there, and also because, having read the New English Version of the NT, I find the language in the modern versions rather flat and uninteresting. That meant that at times I encountered sections that were all but impenetrable, but then that’s a risk I knew going in. Besides, the website I was using had verse-by-ver