Well, I’ve desided to try more official book reviews, which should give me enough to say to up my blogging frequency to five times a week. If you all hate my reviews, let me know and I’ll cut back to three days a week. So let us begin.
Title: Lamb: The Gospel According to BiffAuthor: Christopher Moore
Publisher: Harper Collins (Feb 4, 2003)
My Rating: 4 stars
Back Cover: The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years - except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resrrected to tell the story in this divinely hilarious yet heartfelt work "reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams" (Philadelphia Inquire).
Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healing, kung fu, corpse reanimation, demons, and hot babes. Even the considerable wiles and devotion of the Savior's pal may not be enough to divert Joshua from his tragic destiny. But there's no one who loves Josh more - except maybe "Maggie", Mary of Magdala - and Biff isn't about to let his extrodinary pal suffer and ascend without a fight.
My Review: I liked this book, but I didn’t love it. It’s funny, in a sacriligious tongue in cheek kind of way that I expected to love. I’ve read a few other Christopher Moore books and generally think of him as a top notch humorist. I do recommend Lamb and am glad that I got a chance to listen to it. But since I didn’t love it, I’ll list the hang up I had with it.
The story primarily focuses on the first 30 years of Jesus’s (who was called Josuha according to Biff) life, before he became his big bad massia self. Between the ages of 13 and 30, Josh and Biff traveled to the east to seek wisdom from the magi who visited Josh at his birth. The adventures that take place in Afganistan, Tibet, and India are quite funny, but they don’t have a big overarching force driving them forward. The book follows a standard quest model similar to The Odessy or Candid.
Obviously several small stories strung together in a quest is a story structure that works. One of my examples was written before the original Gospels. But it doesn’t do as good a job of gripping readers as single story lines do. Christopher Moore is so funny that the laughs were enough to keep me reading. But there were many points in the story where it would have been easy to put the book down. In fact, I listened to this book over the course of two days, which means at one point in time, I did put it down to sleep. This is something that I rarely do.
Still, I have to recommend Lamb. Unless you are a super devote Christian who would be offended by the truth of the son of man’s adolescence.
Joke of the Day
Why are all the ink spots crying?
Their father was in the pen.
Their father was in the pen.
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