A year or so ago my brother gave me a previous book by A. J. Jacobs entitled Know It All about the author’s journey to read the entire Britanica Enyclopedia from A-Z. Hands down, that has been one of the best books I have read for some time. A. J. has a very dry humor that can hit like a fish in the face and leave you laughing well into the next couple of pages. Couple that with the opportunity to learn more stuff than ever thought possible in a relatively short book. Laughter and education almost always warrants a 5 star effort in my rating system.
Ron also bought me A. J.’s latest offering entitled The Year of Living Biblically. Honestly, this title concerned me when I first saw it, but based on his last book, I was definitely going to give it a chance. I think his previous novel may have had more humor, but definitely an equal amount of education and entertainment. Once again, I lost a hefty share of sleep while consuming every page of this book because there were times I just could not put it down – this from a somewhere less than devoted religious individual. Ron must be trying to tell me something 8^)
Although not up to the Know It All level, I still give it a 5 star effort based on the tremendous amout of knowledge gained about the Bible (my baptized religion doesn’t really encourage self-reading of the Bible so a lot of this was new – apparently we are not qualified to interpret the Bible … or more likely, they do not want us to because quite frankly there are lots of jaw dropping passages in there. I have never considered the Bible a literal life pattern, but rather a moral guideline – you do not have to be extremely religous to understand the morality behind “Thou shall not kill”. Sidebar – about 7 years ago I was talking to a coworker and was describing a discussion I saw on TV with someone who believed the Bible should be accepted as literal truth and required compliance to get to heaven. To my astonishment my coworker stated he believed the same. My jaw dropped, but I let it pass in accordance with good advice previously given on not engaging in politics or religion at work – I was aware of some things in the Bible at that time and would have enjoyed questioning him about those, but now I am more armed.
So in this book, Jacobs spent 8 months trying to live the Old Testament as literal as possible and same for 4 months with the New Testament. I can’t believe his wife put up with him during this endeavor especially while dealing with the birth of twins. To help him on this effort, He had a number of different spiritual advisors in different religous camps in an effort to understand all of the nuances and interpretation conflicts. With the exception of Bill Bryson, I think there are few people who put as much effort into their writing craft.
Now on to the stuff that stuck:
