The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A.J. Jacobs is a master of pop-non-fiction. His writing is entertaining, funny, highly-readable, and effortlessly compelling. He keeps his sections short, so that the book moves very very quickly. The down side of this is there's rarely enough detail to be really satisfying. He is happy to reference the thousands of pages of analysis that have gone into every bizarre and curious aspect of the bible, but hardly ever leaves the reader with any satisfying conclusion*.
And mostly in the text this works, because he's on to the next witty anecdote, and again, it's all very compelling. But at the end, I felt sort of empty, which is too bad, since that's exactly the opposite of what the book is supposed to be about.
This is exacerbated by the biggest the biggest fault of the book: the short shrift given to Christianity (which, unfortunately comes at the end). I understand that Jacobs is culturally Jewish, but one of his goals in writing this book is to study the sort of biblical literalism and extreme devoutness** that infects the right wing of our political system, and those people claim to be Christians.***
So yeah, there are really no answers for those issues, which is too bad because I think those are the most pressing issues we're facing these days. But at the end of the day, I can't really fault Jacobs for that. With all its flaws this is still one of the more nuanced and balanced treatment of religion that I've seen recently. And it was a lot of fun to read.
* Mixed-fiber clothes, anyone?
** Like Representative John Shimkus who says that Anthropogenic global warming isn't a problem because only god can destroy the earth. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/the-crackpot-caucus/
*** I don't believe that the science denying, misogynistic, sex-negative, homophobic, budget hawk nutjobs that make up today's "religious right" are truly Christians. But rather than dwell on that, I'll let John Scalzi do it for me. http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003530.html
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