Review: The Good Book, by David Plotz

The Good Book, which is completely titled, The Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible (but which was too long to fit in the title section), was quite amusing. As with The Year of Living Biblically, where the semi-secular author decides to try and live every rule in the bible, while objectively critiquing it, so Plotz, a non-practicing Jew, provides Cliff notes, if you will, to the Old Testament / Torah / Jewish Bible.

Plotz' summaries are simple, well-worded, and work well due to several important factors. One, he skips over the boring parts, aka the 'begats', reiterations, and plain boring stuff. Two, he includes rational questions when confronted with obvious contradictions in text or events that he feels make no sense based on other sections or books. Three, he does this in a breezy, snarky manner that makes the whole thing fairly easy to read, or at least a heck of a lot easier than the actual book itself.

Why would someone read this, rather than the Bible itself? Let's face it, the Bible is looooong. Even the Torah, which I had to read in college, is looooong, and difficult to get through, especially considering the time, cultural, and linguistic differences. Plotz gives the casual reader, say, someone who recognizes the continual biblical allusions in everything from Shakespeare to The Matrix as such, but doesn't know the significance of the linkage, the opportunity to make the connection without having to plod through a thousand pages and potentially difficult-to-parse wording to find out. Also, because the bible as a piece of literature is culturally significant, it's not a bad idea to have a working knowledge of its basic contents. Finally, for anyone actually willing to read the bible itself, beginning here with a plainly written outline isn't a bad idea.

Even so, getting through even Plotz' humorous translation was work, and took me almost a week, whereas I would usually finish a book of this length in about two days. It was worthwhile, and when I finished I had the sense of actually Completing Something, but it was still work.

And besides, the next time I watch The Matrix, I'm going to know where all the seemingly-random names come from.

Rating: five stars out of five. Cleverly worded and well-paced, this is a good basic education in common references and stories, as well as an interesting discussion of questions posed.