My first book of the year was Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. It was, if you’ll pardon the expression, one of hell of a way to start of the year in reading. This book had been recommended to me by a number of friends as being remarkably funny, and one of those friends graced me with a copy for Christmas. Their descriptions of the book intrigued me (the image of a six-year-old Christ resurrecting a lizard by sticking it in his mouth is hard to resist), but I was worried that it would be stupid funny, and I’m not generally a fan of stupid funny. Hearing a few podcasts featuring Christopher Moore didn’t exactly help matters.
I should have trusted my friends a little more. This book was amazingly funny, and not stupid funny. When you’re writing a humour book about the childhood of Jesus, there’s a fine line you have to walk between funny and offensive, but Moore walks it without a single misstep. His portrayal of Jesus (here going by Joshua, the English translation of his Hebraic name—Yeshua—rather than the more common Greek translation, Jesus) is strikingly true to the spirit of the man described by the Gospels, and he keeps our reverence (if we have any) from getting in the way by humanizing Christ in ways that are too numerous and subtle to describe here. It’s an excellent book, and one of the funniest I’ve ever read. I can heartily recommend this book to anyone, believer or otherwise.
Next up, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
