The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

The first thing to say is that A.J. Jacobs' wife deserves a medal. Seriously. If my husband told me he was going to stop shaving for a year (we're not talking about a tidy little Abe Lincoln beard here; we're talking terrorist facial hair), wear only white garments (sometimes in the form of a shepherd's robe), carry around his own seat (one of those old and infirm cane-with-built-in-seat contraptions) so as not to sit anywhere "impure," carry unleavened bread upon his back (even if only for a day), and eat no fruit grown on tree less than five years old, there is a distinct possibility that I would file for divorce. I would certainly insist he have his mental health examined. And that's before you consider the constant nattering about the Bible, amending "God willing" to virtually every future-tense statement, or replacing certain choice words with "sugar" or "fudge." That his wife merely takes to whistling the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show is a testament to at least one virtue, patience. I'm sure it helps that this quest was undertaken for the purposes of writing a book, which undoubtedly pays a good many bills.

That said: The Year of Living Biblically was referred to several times in Good Book, I like The Know-It-All (A.J. Jacobs' previous book about reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from a-z) well enough, and Clio recently listened to it on tape and heartily recommended it. All good enough reasons for me to pluck it from the library shelves. Parts of it were definitely laugh-out-loud funny. Even greater parts were head scratchingly bizarre. But, I'm sure because I read them so close together, I couldn't help but compare these two Bible books, both written by secular East Coast Jews, and sprinkled liberally with humor and irony, as well as Biblical scholarship. In a head-to-head contest, Good Book comes out ahead, although I can recommend them both, but maybe not in immediate succession.

Both Jacobs and Plotz note that their religious studies/immersion/projects changed them intrinsically in ways they couldn't necessarily articulate, but which definitely were spiritual in nature. This phenomenon, if you will, makes me curious about earlier decades, when society was, on a whole, more religious. Essentially, my question is this: Were people simply more religious because they spent more time with the Bible? And did they spend more time with the Bible simply for lack of Nintendo Wii and the Internet, or was there something inherently different about them? My guess is the former, but I think I'll pass on undertaking the research myself. I wouldn't want to turn into a Bible thumper.