Reading Material

I love "Year of..." books. Books like Barbara Kingslover's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," or my most recent literary acquisition, "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible" by A.J. Jacobs. I like that someone else commits to a daunting task, and then tells me about it, so I don't have to.

In "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" a family commits to eating only local food. This involves learning to do things themselves, or do without. Their story is insightful, comic, and motivating. Did you know you can make cheese? In a kitchen. In your kitchen. The book is rife with fun facts and hilarious anecdotes, and I highly recommend it as winter-into-spring reading. Prepare yourself for garden-lust.

Today, I picked up "The Year of Living Biblically." I'm only a few dozen pages

in, but the story of an agnostic mentally, physically, and spiritually embracing a literal translation of the Bible, is both humorous, and moving. He hires a shatnez inspector to clear his closet of cotton/wool blends, he learns how to pray, he grows a truly epic beard, and he drives his wife nuts. I appreciate his respectful approach, and that he can still laugh at himself. Mostly, however, I appreciate that he wrote it down, so that I can share in the experience, while sitting in my armchair, wearing cotton/poly blend, drinking milk with my ham sandwich.