/lit/ - Literature

>>22297568
Any of Ray Bradbury's short story collections including >>22297596, Penguin Highway (or again, any of Morimi's stuff), Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou if you're open to manga suggestions (it's the best for what you're looking for, trust me). One Hundred Years of Solitude isn't really about friendship or innocent fun but it feels very much like Haibane Renmei in some way I can't explain that goes beyond the shared magical realism. Interested in other people's suggestions as well.

>>22297575
>>22297581
The WORLD of Haibane Renmei is based on Hardboiled Wonderland. It's very different tonally. I enjoyed Hardboiled Wonderland well enough but if you go in expecting Haibane Renmei you'll be sorely disappointed.

>>20773820
The Old Testament is a mix of Jewish creation and foundation myths which slowly shifts into what is likely to be a fairly accurate history of Israel, interspersed with various prophets and proverbs. It's important to know that to the Jews (and especially the Jews of the time), despite being a holy book, it is first and foremost a "book of Israel", with all that entails. They believed in their foundation myths as much as they believed in the reign of previous kings, and as a result the book isn't written to be entirely theological. It's a historical document of the way the Israelites perceived their own history, combined with some moral guidance.

The New Testament is a much more "coherent" work, written over a much shorter period of time, with a much more precise purpose (though even then, it is full of contradictions as the various writers were not all knowledgeable of each other or in agreement about some of the basic tenants of the religion). It also only a more modern idea that the entire OT be viewed as a work written with an express purpose, and not as a collection of disparate Israeli writings around a few common themes. The Christians pioneered this view, going back and reading the OT as being not about the history of Israel, but about the fall of man from paradise, the fall of Israel into moral decay, and then the coming of the messiah as predicted by the prophets. This is a reading so different from the Jewish reading that the very order of the books is different: the Christian "Old Testament" ends with the prophets as a nice lead-in to the New Testament fulfilling those prophets, whereas in the Hebrew Bible they appear a while before the ending, their importance to the work being seen as somewhat secondary.

Obviously there have always been some exceptionally devout rabbis who view all of the HB as a divinely inspired work, with each sentence having holy importance with and within context, but it wasn't the prevailing opinions amongst Jews at any period of time that we're aware of.

Hope this helps.