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

A.J. Jacobs is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically. His most recent work is The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment—a collection of his articles, both new and previously published. He is the editor at large at Esquire magazine. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, and is an occasional correspondent for NPR. He lives in New York City with his wife Julie and their children. You can visit his website at ajjacobs.com.

Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also, to obey the hundreds of less-publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers. To grow his beard. To stone adulterers.

The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal. Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally, including the Amish and the Hasidim. He discovers ancient Biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the 21st-century brain.

Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. Sure to charm listeners both secular and religious, The Year of Living Biblically is part Cliffs-Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to stop listening.

The New York Times - Hanna Rosin

If I were to write this review while trying to live biblically, here are some of the rules I would have to follow: Love thy neighbor. Jacobs is a fellow journalist and thus a neighbor of sorts. I would have to strive to be as generous as possible, and point out right at the outset that this book is an inspired idea and that Jacobs is alarmingly adept at keeping the joke alive for 365 days. Thou shalt not covet. I would have to confess my jealousy that Jacobs already had a movie contract in place before the book had even been published, and that even though I have spent much more time around young-earth creationists than he has, he thought of a much funnier way to describe them…