Funny and thought-provoking, but disturbing
So, I just finished The Year of Living Biblically, and I have to say...I hated it. Or, to be more precise: I really liked a lot of parts, individually...I just didn't like what it all added up to. And I didn't care much for him. He should have either stuck to the idea of it being basically a stunt memoir and tried to make it as funny as possible, or taken it really seriously---I just couldn't buy him trying to have it both ways. I think a big part of my problem was that I couldn't really relate to him, an issue I've been thinking a lot about lately in terms of identifying with fictional characters, but it applies in real life, too. I can see that maybe for someone who is also approaching religion sort of from the outside looking in, it might have had more emotional resonance. But I prefer something more along the lines of Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God, where she grew up with religion and went on a more genuine (it seemed to me) "spiritual quest," eventually ending up as a contented atheist---partly because I can identify more with that narrative, but also because she was much more sincere and a lot better philosophically. I had a lot of other problems with A. J. Jacobs. For one thing, I thought he sounded like about the worst parent I've ever heard of, alternating wildly between obsessive-compulsive overprotectiveness and almost criminal neglectfulness. His first attempt at discipline, by ignoring his son for hitting him with the bowling pin until he apologizes, seemed like a really bad idea to me. It might be effective occasionally, but using it as a standard disciplinary method I think could be even more psychologically damaging to the kid than physically beating him. (And of course, it would become increasingly ineffective the older the kid got, and by the time he was a teenager having his father ignore him would be a positive incentive!) And it seems like there was such an obvious way to discipline him in that situation that would actually fit the crime, namely, put him back in his crib for time out and take away the bowling pin! Of course, I know next to nothing about child-rearing and I could be way off, but on just a common sense level the guy is an idiot. If his kids somehow manage not to turn out to be meth addicts in prison, as he so deeply fears, it will be a miracle---or at least thanks only to their mother. And then there was the whole circumcision thing at the end, which pretty much ruined it for me. So he has actually done research on the subject professionally, knows very well that it's a barbaric practice (so much so that he can't even stay in the room and watch or even hear it done to his first son) based on primitive superstition akin to the animal sacrifices that he has denounced but even worse because it's a piece of his child's sexual organ that he's sacrificing, and that there's no compelling medical reason to have it done---and he does it anyway. Why? Because his father did it, and his father's father, and so on back to some mythical patriarch because he was commanded to by some invisible god (in whom Jacobs doesn't even believe!), according to some ancient religious text. Now, Nazi comparisons are generally totally hyperbolic if they're even slightly true, so I want to preface my next comment by stating very clearly that I am not comparing what he did to what they did---obviously, mutilating your child's genitals, as bad as it is, isn't even on the same scale as mass murder and ethnic cleansing. But his reason for doing it was exactly the same as the Nazi whose defense was, "I was only following orders," except maybe even one step worse because in his case the orders came from somebody who didn't even exist. He abandoned his own independent judgment in deference to the group (in this case, to the literal tribe), because, well, because he is a coward, plain and simple. Some people can be excused for that sort of thing because they really don't know any better, but he should have known better, and did, but went ahead and did it anyway. That really bothered me, as you can possibly tell. The whole red heifer thing also seriously disturbed me, but he was just reporting there. One thing I will say for the book, it did for some reason make me want to read the Bible again, which I haven't done all the way through since I was seriously religious myself, more than a decade ago. And one thing I could relate to him on was the beard thing, with which he started the introduction. I grew an Old Testament beard once in college for a while, and I got called the Unabomber a couple of times, too. Then someone called me Jesus, and it had to go.