This Week in Books

A day late, but it's a holiday weekend, so it shouldn't count against me, right? And anyway, it gave me more time to finish more... Oh, nevermind. I only finished one book all week. (Again, I blame the food poisoning incident. It left me uninterested in any books, which is always how I know I'm really sick.)


A.J. Jacobs
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.

Really enjoyed it. Of course, I also really enjoyed finding an error in his book when he wrote about what one group does that I know is wrong. I know I'm in the very small group who would have been able to catch it, so it made me smile - ha ha, he didn't check his facts completely!
Petty quibble aside, this was fascinating reading his account of what it was like spending 8 months trying to follow all the laws in the Old Testament, and 4 months the New Testament. I really appreciated that for the most part, he was really respectful of the customs and rules he was trying to follow - I think it would have been very easy to go into it in a mocking way, and he virtually always avoided that. One of my favorite parts are when his wife thwarts him by sitting in every seat in the house, leaving him with no places left to sit (since he can't sit anywhere she has while she is "unclean" a.k.a. having her period). The description of it is great - he keeps trying new chairs and she deadpans "sat there." "Sat there too." "Yeah, sat there." "And there, and there, and there." My other favorite part is where he manages to out-talk the Jehovah's Witness. I had no idea that was possible. ;)