Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult - and potentially controversial. Was it enough to walk up to an adulterer and gently touch them with a stone? Even that could be grounds for accusations of assault, especially with female adulterers in Manhattan. So what's a good Bible-reading boy to do? Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in head first and attempt to obey the hundreds of less-publicized rules. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.Jacobs immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, fights idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations - much to his wife's chagrin. His beard grows so unruly that he is mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He tours a Kentucky-based Creationist museum, dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and studies scripture with Jehovah's witnesses.
And he wrestles with the seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first century brain, yielding unexpected ephiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers secular and religious, "The Year Of Living Biblically" is part York Notes to the bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down...
A.J. Jacobs is a journalist and editor of Esquire magazine, who has some really interesting ideas for memoirs. I first heard about Jacobs by a friend who read his book; The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, in which he all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. While I’m yet to read this book (but I will) I decided to read The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.
The book follows the journey of A.J’s alter ego; Jacob who read through the bible and then spent a year trying to live by it. Jacob tries to be honest, give up the Sabbath, pray daily, go forth and multiply, and any of the bazaar laws from the old testament, such as; trying to stone people, blowing a ram horn at the beginning of every month, tassels on his clothing, binding money to himself, even wearing white and never trimming his beard.
The Year of Living Biblically is a funny journey, A.J claims to be agnostic, so it makes the book interesting the way he tries to find the real intent behind every rule he follows. I’m a big fan of A.J’s wife, who while wasn’t pleased with him turning into a crazy man, accepted his choice to do this and even have some fun with it. If you are interested in reading an amusing memoir or just interested in seeing the effects reading the bible can have, I highly recommend this book.
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
17 July, 2011:
Finished reading
-
17 July, 2011:
Reviewed