Returning to my office once again, I'm overwhelmed by the number of books I haven't read or thought about in years and years. We don't recognize each other! So it seems like a good time to winnow. For my first purge, I chose the suite of rapture-ready Left Behind books I used for a course on "Cultures of the Religious Right" in 2005 and 2008. (Some students still remember how teams took us through all ten sensationalistic volumes.) Will there come a time I wish I had kept them? I doubt it - though there are arguably not fewer folks today whose reality is congruent with Left Behind's amalgam of Book of Revelation and thriller fiction. Not fun anymore.
