2011 Books 11

11) The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs: Jacobs is an editor for Esquire magazine who has a niche market of humor books premised around doing something usual. In this first he chronicled his complete read through of the encyclopedia. His third is a collection of essays about a month of complete honest, or pretending to be a woman on a dating service, or pretending to be one of the actors from the movie Shine at the Academy Awards. This one is, as you may have gathered from the title, his attempt to live the bible as literally as possible for a year. In part an effort to understand the biblical literalism movement, it is also an honest, if extreme, effort of an unobservant Jew to come to terms with spirituality. I enjoyed it, but Jacobs is a sort of "If you liked his other stuff you'll like this one" sort of author.