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Jean Ward

It's a wonderful book. Makes you think about everything

It has been a long time since I read Left Behind, but I have one interesting memory of reading it that remains clear and is, I think, worthy of discussion. I'll get to that memory in a second, but first I must digress.I read this book for a student of mine. She was a very nice lady who came into my English classes worried for everyone's souls (and I say this with all honesty). Left Behind was her favourite novel (her favourite book was The Bible, obviously), and she asked me to read it just after we finished Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. So I did. Now back to that memory. Early on I remember thinking, "What a brilliant book this would be if Tim LaHaye was a master of irony on the level of Jonathon Swift." Sure...nothing could save LeHaye's clunky prose, but if he conceived of Left Behind as a commentary on "fundamentalist believers" it would have been a stroke of genius approaching the level of A Modest Proposal. Then I started reading it that way, letting myself imagine the story as a brilliant commentary, and it made the otherwise execrable experience thoroughly tolerable. I knew it wasn't so, and I couldn't really force myself to "believe," but it sure was more fun. I laughed more than I might have, I giggled more than I might have, and I actually wasn't moved to throw this book in our backyard firepit when I finished. Indeed, when this piece of fundamentalist-pop-fiction kindling was over, I eschewed the flames and dropped it on the book swap shelf of our English Department. Drop a book, take a book is the theory, but there wasn't anything there I hadn't read before, so I simply left my copy of Left Behind for some poor, unsuspecting student to stumble upon.And the next day it was gone.I wonder who took that book? Probably a member of LeHaye's choir, but I'd love for one of my colleagues to have picked it up and read it with the same guilty pleasure I did. Perhaps then I wouldn't feel so sheepish.

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