Here are some non-comics books I've read recently:

The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books; 2024) I've never really understood the concept of Christian fundamentalism, the idea that the Bible is literally true, and its contents accurately present the inerrant word of God. Even as a child, I realized that there was a plethora of different versions of the Bible available, and that the earliest scriptures weren't written in English, and that therefore before we had ever gotten our first English Bible, someone had to translate the Hebrew and Greek into Latin and then into English. When I most recently visited Barnes and Noble, I checked, and I saw that there was a whole section of Bibles, with some two sets of shelving units full of versions to choose from. Still, I don't think I had any conception of just how many times the Bible has been translated before reading Bruce Gordon's The Bible: A Global History. Our English Bibles didn't simply evolve (I can use that word, right?) from one language to another, but they have been translated hundreds of times, into pretty much every language you can think of (and probably some you might not think of), and even the translations into particular languages might be one of many multiple translat...