A Dance With Dragons (2011) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5) by George R.R. Martin

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read any A Song of Ice and Fire novels yet!

Re-reading both this and A Feast For Crows has been a far different experience than my first time through.

The first time I read A Dance With Dragons was back after its release in 2011. As someone who first read the series in 2010, this is the first A Song of Ice and Fire novel I had the pleasure of reading upon release. I had pretty much the same reaction as everybody else back then; a muffled "meh". Dance introduced some really interesting characters that will strongly impact the books to come, and it has some excellent subplots that it starts up and resolves in just this book, but it doesn't do a whole lot to actually move the plot forward. Rather, it's setting the stage for the coming books and the supposed climax that we may or may not ever read penned from Martin's hand. 

Martin's clearly grown as a writer since 1996, so it goes as no surprise that A Dance With Dragons is probably his best written book if you're strictly looking at his prose. The voice of these characters is as strong as ever, too. But it does have some huge weakness. Its pace as a novel sucks; it meanders a lot. If you love Martin's world as much I do, then that's not much of a problem, because for me learning more about this world is, in itself, entertaining. But I've heard plenty of criticism of its languid plot and I can definitely understand them. However I think Martin's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't at this point, because these middle two books chew on a ton of really important material that is probably going to be necessary to introduce the audience to before the closing books drop, and losing this stuff would make for simpler—and probably poorer—resolutions in later novels.

I've begun to look at A Song of Ice and Fire (hereafter referred to by its popular acronym "ASOIAF") not so much as a series of novels, but as one grand epic that has to be clumsily split into novels to allow it to be printed. A Dance With Dragons, in its currently published form, is basically an unfinished novel by Martin's own admission:

My original intent was to end DANCE with the two big battles, yes… intercutting between the two of them, each told through several different points of view. And both battles were partially written. But NOT COMPLETE, which became the issue. Also, maybe even more to the point, not yet good enough in my estimation. Battles are bloody hard, and I wanted these to be great.

The book had already been scheduled for publication, I had blown through several previous deadlines, and we simply ran out of time. Initially I decided to push one battle back to WINDS to focus on the other, but that did not work either, and neither of the sequences came together the way I wanted them to, so ultimately the choice came down to moving both of the battles to WINDS or cancelling the planned publication and pushing back DANCE. And given how far ahead publishers schedule their releases, the pushback would not have been a few days or a few weeks, but at least half a year, and maybe longer.

Also, DANCE was already very long, and the battles would have made it substantially longer. That could also have affected the pricing.

Did we make the right decision? I don’t know, even to this day. I understand your frustration, and some days I do feel the same way. But back then I had the fans howling after DANCE the same way they are howling after WINDS now, and my publishers really really did not want to push back again. And DANCE, even without the battles, was extremely well received — yes, there were dissenters, I know that, readers who did not like the book as well as the earlier volumes, but out in the wider world, DANCE had extremely strong sales, rode the bestseller lists for a long long time. It was a Hugo finalist, won the Locus Award for best fantasy of the year, and was named by TIME magazine as the book of the year. So even without the battles, it worked pretty well… but part of me still wonders if we made the right choice.

These things are not easy. Those who think they are have obviously never written anything, or had to deal with the realities of publishing.

So we see that he did not originally want to publish Dance as-is, because it lacks a climax, but his hand was forced by both its length and his publishers. I believe this series has outgrown the novel format, which is interesting considering that ASOIAF brought Martin from screenwriting back to bookwriting because it was too vast to put on screen. Now it's grown even too vast for hardcover. I've heard it suggested in the past that an episodic format might work better for ASOIAF, too, but I reject this due to the nature of how Martin writes these books. Since he doesn't outline and writes off the top of his noggin, he's often rewriting material he's already finished to allow for a specific plot point he thinks of later in the process of constructing a novel. Once a chapter in an episodic serial is published, the ship has sailed—it's no longer rewritable. And I think part of what makes ASOIAF so dense and fruitful to read and reread is that Martin does spend so much time rewriting and refining his ideas in this manner. And part of what helps his characters to feel so much like real people is that the plot is driven by them rather than the other way around. Martin doesn't come up with character motivations to suit his outline, he crafts his narrative around what his characters—real, fully formed people in his mind—would do when presented with a certain situation. This is also why he has so much trouble getting them where they need to be in order to move the narrative forward—something that is clearly an issue in Dance since we have a dozen different characters all heading to Meereen, and Martin clearly struggles with keeping the logistics realistic (something the television adaptation Game of Thrones chucked completely out the window since it proved too taxing for their writers to manage) and the sequencing of the characters' arrivals in line with what he wanted to occur in the plot.

So this book was clearly born of difficult labor. Martin has stated as much and you can tell just by reading it. Aside from complaints about its pace and the total lack of a climax, though, Martin's character writing and the themes he explores are as strong as they have ever been. The themes Martin explores and the tone in which he does it is mostly why I'm infatuated with these novels. That interest and my taste for slower, more contemplative media also reflects why I don't care much for the show—which is far more campy, more casual with its violence, more anachronistic with its dialogue, and more bombastic with its action sequences. (I've been regularly accused of snobbery due to this, but I view it simply as a matter of taste: I've always preferred political dramas and over action flicks, wordy cRPGs over platformers, or le Carre over Fleming. This is because I'm a boring sweatpants-wearing nerd, not because I'm an intelligent, superior academic.)

Both Feast and Dance suffer greatly from middle-book-syndrome; they don't really go anywhere since they're busy picking up the pieces of the first books and building steam for the next books, but each contains a lot of smaller, self-contained stories that are extremely worthwhile. In Feast, Brienne's journeys lead her to deal with the common people of Westeros, the minor lords, and the dirt poor, drunken hedge knights—classes of people who are often never mentioned in epic fantasy unless they tie specifically to the protagonist's origins, or they are the protagonist. Spending time in these settings doesn't really further the plot, but it lets Martin examine the effect of war on the lives of the little people and make some important statements about it. This, again, differs from epic fantasy: The War of the Five Kings wasn't a glorious cause hellbent on avenging the fallen hero Ned Stark, it was a collapse of political discourse that led to a chaotic conflict which has now killed and ruined the lives of thousands. It was a net negative, a horrible thing that should have been prevented at all costs but was allowed to continue by the misuse of power to the detriment of all. Another fruitful detour featured in Feast was Jaime's dirty work in wrapping up the war, in which we get to see the uncelebrated after-actions of military clean-up against small pockets of continuing resistance that generally gets left out of epic fantasy as well. War is a messy thing, and GRRM doesn't spare us from its realities in order to make it more glorious and sterile like nearly all other epic fantasy did before he began writing these novels.

Dance spends a lot of time with these meandering subplots, too. Feast and the first two-thirds of Dance are very similar books in this regard, but I find Feast to be more atmospheric and immersive; a book with a more relaxed pace that lets you more passively take in the sights and sounds. Dance, on the other hand, is more sprawling. It lacks the tight focus of Feast—a book wholly concerned with the devastation of war in Westeros and the political mobilization of those remaining who still have strength—instead bringing us from the Bolton-ruled North, through the sea, through Essos, and to the Eastern city of Meereen, which is ruled by Daenerys, herself the target of several characters who seek to prop her up as a political bastion behind which to stand against the chaos present in Westeros—of which we saw plenty in Feast. If Dance's weakness is its languid plot that spends too much time examining the difficulty of ruling, its strength, then, is that it has much more rewarding and emotionally resonant subplots than Feast does.



Final Warning! Heavy spoilers involving several plot arcs with Dance follow:

Quentyn Martell and the deconstruction of the grand adventure

Quentyn Martell's story is entirely contained within A Dance With Dragons. We know his father and sister already, but for the first time we meet him and his friends. His arc is begun and resolved entirely within Dance, and initially it seemed quite pointless to me. But there's a poignant, subversive story within this arc that I find incredibly important to what Martin's trying to say with this entire series. What happens when the likable hero's journey goes wrong? What happens when his friends die, and he fails? How does he deal with this? Can a hero still be heroic through abject failure? Quentyn gains nothing in this quest—he goes east, his friends all die, he dies, and nothing changes. Are bravery and strength of spirit in the absence of anything else still worthwhile? You've already subconsciously posited your answer to this by how worthwhile you think reading Quentyn's arc was: If you find his story pointless, then things like honor and kindness are completely meaningless in and of themselves and only matter when they lead to success and accomplishment. But Quentyn is so earnest, likable, and naive, that it's impossible for me not to root for him. Reading through a second time and knowing all along where this was headed was sad and depressing, and it's supposed to be. Quentyn dreads his task all along, but has long since resolved that he will either succeed or die. And he does. It's poetic and brilliant and it's a microcosm of the statement Martin has been making all along: The weak, the powerless, and the guileless do not succeed except by exceedingly rare dumb luck or, more commonly, as tools in the vast machinations of their betters. And that this is even true when they're kind and well-meaning.

Jon Connington provides a nice foil for Tyrion

At this point Tyrion's a far different character than the Tyrion of the television series. He's been beaten down and his previously cynical-but-good persona has been warped by the events of past novels. He's lost everything; he's murdered his own father and his lover and he's unforgivably estranged from his brother. He sinks completely into alcoholism and he no longer seems to care about positively affecting the world around him. He rapes a prostitute in one of the most difficult chapters to read in the entire novel. Tyrion has always flirted with the role of Byronic anti-hero, but he finally slips fully into it in Dance. It's painful to read about for the first half of the book, as the lovable, capable underdog has been beaten into cruelty, and most people don't like it for that reason. But this is a common turn for somebody who has seen what he's seen. How else would he react to the events of the previous books? He's been competent and seen success in his given tasks, he's protected innocents, he was exceptionally noble to Sansa when he had complete power over her. In his mind, he's done everything right and he should be a hero, yet still nobody trusts him and the common people view him as an outright villain. The system has failed him, his family has failed him, so he finally breaks and gives in, because why not? Nothing he does will ever change peoples' minds. He may as well become the villain they see him as. So he slips fully into his cynicism.

Theon Greyjoy and the ultimate redemption arc

Theon's arc dives deeper into some of Martin's core themes; namely the misuse of power and violence, and the increasing chaos caused by Westeros' recent political instability. It's also, surprisingly, one of the few heroic arcs in Dance. When I first read this book I never thought we'd see Theon again. When I realized Reek was Theon, I never thought that a redemption arc was what Martin had planned for him. I should have known after how deftly Martin has written Jaime that no matter how detestable their previous actions, no character is beyond redemption. I found myself rooting hard for the broken, insane Theon before the end of the book. His arc is probably my favorite in Dance. Jeyne Poole, occupying the role of faux-Arya, is perhaps the only character who has it worse than Theon in this book. Theon is presumably the only one aside from Roose who knows her true identity, yet his risks something worse than his own death to save her. Martin shows us here that honor and goodness can come from the most unlikely sources; once an arrogant, cruel member of the nobility, Theon now gives up everything to save this one meaningless girl who doesn't matter whatsoever, at the risk of severe suffering, simply because it's the right thing to do.

One of Dance's new themes that a lot of readers seem to have slept on is religion and its impact on society and government in times of crisis. Most folks don't recall this now but one of the harshest general criticisms of ASOIAF pre-Dance was that Martin tended to shove religion—a huge, central portion of many peoples' lives in the medieval period, and a core aspect of the type of feudalistic society that Martin is putting under a microscope—to the rear so he could explore more modern themes such as honor, gender politics, the use of violence, and political power. And when he did deal with religion, it always seemed to feel plastic and lacked the studious examination that he dedicated to other aspects of life within feudalism. He remedies this weakness in Dance with a core portion of the King's Landing plot line dealing with religious fervor that feels genuine and will surely have a huge impact in later books.

It's been eight years since the publication of A Dance With Dragons. Waiting for The Winds of Winter has become an infamous meme; book readers' version of gamers' collective wait for Half-Life 3 (it's never coming out, guys; give it up). Half of ASOIAF's previously hardcore fanbase lies dormant, ready to read but no longer really caring about the series like they did in 2011, when internet message boards were awash with new discussions and new theories seemingly by the day. Yet here I still am, reading and rereading these books every few years.

I'm more positive than most, and I do strongly believe that Winds will eventually release, and that it will be the best book in the series since A Storm of Swords . But if Martin should pass away tomorrow, should we never see another book in this series, it would still be my single favorite piece of media ever. The world, the themes Martin chooses to explore, the tone in which he does it, and the amazing characters that drive it all are all untouched by any other piece of media. It's so enjoyable to me, it aligns so perfectly with my interests and with my own personal worldview, that I can't help but to love every bit of it. I'm nothing but thankful that it exists in its current form, and even if we never see another novel by Martin, I'm content to have read what's been published.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

“I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.”

“Foes and false friends are all around me, Lord Davos. They infest my city like roaches, and at night I feel them crawling over me.” The fat man’s fingers coiled into a fist, and all his chins trembled. “My son Wendel came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord Walder’s bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast with his friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may the Freys choke upon their fables. I drink with Jared, jape with Symond, promise Rhaegar the hand of my own beloved granddaughter…but never think that means I have forgotten. The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.”

“Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.”

“Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths.”

“So young," said Wyman Manderly, "Though mayhaps this was a blessing. Had he lived he would've grown up to be a Frey.”

“Give me priests who are fat and corrupt and cynical,(...) the sort who like to sit on soft satin cushions, nibble sweetmeats, and diddle little boys. It's the ones who believe in gods who make the trouble. (Tyrion)”

“A fair bargain leaves both sides unhappy.”

“When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie.”

“The most insidious thing about bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it.”

“Proud men might shout that they would sooner die free than live as slaves, but pride was cheap. When the steel struck the flint, such men were rare as dragon's teeth; elsewise the world would not have been so full of slaves. There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave, the dwarf reflected. Their choice may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there.”

“There was an agelessness about him, a stillness; on Roose Bolton's face, rage and joy looked much the same.”

“Every battle is a gamble, Snow. The man who does nothing also takes a risk.”

“Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come. Certain moths live their whole lives in a day, yet to them that little span of time must seem as long as years and decades do to us. An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth's wing, and past, present, and future are one.”

“Up in the hills we say that autumn kisses you, but winter fucks you hard.”

“Many good men have been bad kings, Maester Aemon used to say, and some bad men have been good kings.”

The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I've been here before. I actually read The Great Gatsby in high school, just like every other studious American teenager in the past thousand years. Back in, oh... Let's call it 2000 or 2001.

Yes, I had this book—probably even the same mass market paperback edition, doodled in and mistreated and neglected and discarded back into the bin at the end of the month. I was bored by it pretty much immediately and I skimmed it and cursed its existence and didn't care a fig for Scott Fitpatrick or whatever his damn name was. I just wanted it over and I wanted my passing grade so I could go back to doing whatever it was 16-year-olds do in 2001—a puzzle to me because I don't even remember that far back anymore. Probably the same thing I'm doing now, just louder and more stupidly.

It's occupied a space on my shelf for a while, purchased at a library book sale a while back for a quarter (if even that). And I haven't really seen an urgent need to reread this, since I already read it. It occupies a space on my virtual shelf as well, over on Goodreads, imparting to everyone that I did, in fact, at one point in my life, pick it up multiple times, turn some pages, and put it back down. It occupies that same "I read this but I don't remember any of it and if you asked me what I thought about it I wouldn't be able to say anything substantial that wasn't just common opinion" space as Brave New World, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and a dozen other classics that look great in the "Read" pile but I haven't written reviews for.

I'm quite glad I picked it up and gave it another shot, though, because it sure is a beautiful book. It's one of those books that clock in at fewer than 200 pages, but pack a whole bunch of really good stuff into those pages. Fitzgerald's a genius wordcrafter. His prose immediately blew me away, hitting the highs of his contemporaries (Joyce comes to mind), but hitting them more frequently and remaining there more consistently. Reading The Great Gatsby is like being sung to by somebody with a lovely voice.

I've come to realize that my favorite examples of beautiful prose seem to come when old (dead, actually, more often than not), drunk, lovestruck guys describe stuff. And Gatsby is sure full of that:

"Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered 'Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour." 

"For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk." 

"The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car."

The book's brimming with this superb stuff. There's something like this on nearly every page. So I found it a joy to read just for the wordporny quality of Fitzgerald's prose. But there's certainly more to it than that, if you like your books to be smart as well as pretty.

My favorite classics always seem to be the ones in which really fucked up, shitty people love and hate each other over a few hundred pages. Admittedly, the characters in The Great Gatsby aren't nearly as fucked up as some of the ones in my favorite books. But they're still nowhere near as glimmering and successful as they initially appear. And they certainly do love and hate each other.

Nick Carraway is a way more interesting character than anyone gives him credit for. Before reading this I'd heard a chatter here and there about Carraway perhaps being a repressed homosexual, which I disregarded and immediately assumed was 21st century readers applying vogue 21st century issues to a character 100 years old. Imagine my surprise when it's not only hinted at, but actually pretty freaking strongly thrown right into your face when Nick leaves the party with a woman's photographer husband early in the novel:

Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed. 

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere?”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll be glad to.”

…I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook’n Bridge…”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.

I guess you could read around that, if you want? But it's pretty glaringly obvious to me. Nick's sexuality never feels token, though. It adds to Nick's character and makes him interesting when—as our viewpoint into this story and providing little else—he could have been quite bland. It provides some solid backstory that adds to The Great Gatsby's exploration of these peoples' lives being almost wholly a show for the world, a show hiding something altogether different underneath the surface. If accepted, it explains to us why Nick's marriage failed and why he's made the move to New York. It explains why he seems to float casually through heterosexual relationships with women through the novel, rarely commenting on them to us, choosing instead to focus on Gatsby's persona and his relationship with Daisy.

Daisy's lovely. Fitzgerald manages to introduce her as a charming, bubbly, cherubic figure with just a few words. We never really learn anything about her actual character until the very end of the book, but the way Fitzgerald uses his prose to color Nick's view of her tells us all we need (at least in the beginning) and makes us equally as entranced with her as Gatsby. Daisy doesn't spend much time in view in the first half of the book, but when she does, she owns its pages. It stunned me to realize I'd been so firmly grasped by a character with only about a half dozen paragraphs of description in the first 100 pages or so. Descriptions of Daisy encompass the majority of my personal wordporn-highlights in the book, a telling tactic that Fitzgerald uses deliberately in order to make the climactic pages of the book hit as hard as they do.

And they certainly do. This isn't just nice prose, it's a fantastic story as well. Fitzgerald has a way of lulling you into this reverie, encapsulated by his gorgeous, authentic depiction of 1920s New York, before pulling out the rug from under you and kicking you in the balls. His pal Hemingway does the same thing with far different themes, flirting with romanticism to get you swooning before splashing some water on your face and waking you up with a climax that leaves you chucking his book out a window and waking your parents up in the middle of the night in order to complain.

So it's got a lot going for it: It's got amazing prose. It tells a fantastic story that hits like a gut punch. Its characters are well-crafted and a little fucked-up under their sheen of gold and their ripples of velvet and lace—they're a joy to love and hate and read about. It also contains a historically relevant fictional depiction of a noteworthy time in American history. What else?

Well, Gatsby is also a scathing critique of the American Dream and the excesses in the roaring '20s. It's a story about a fabulously wealthy man who has everything—and who can buy everything he doesn't already have... Except a life with his one true love, and blah blah blah you've all heard this crap already in English Lit so I'm not going to drone on about The Great Gatsby's social and cultural critiques or its themes or its literary merits and echo what millions of other people have already said over the past 100 years. Mrs. Jones already drummed this crap into your head umpteen years ago and stressed to you how important and beautiful and noteworthy this book was and still is, and why it holds such a high place in the pantheon of American literature. You ignored her then, but it turns out she was right, and you just had to be in the right place emotionally and at the right level of maturity to have it profoundly affect you, like it will now. So just read it if you're considering picking it up again. And then reread it every few years until you die because it's probably as close to perfect as these non-rhyming collections of words ever get.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.

Holy Bible: King James Version (1611)

So it’s taken me almost eight months, but I’ve finally finished reading the King James Bible from cover-to-cover. I can’t claim that I’ve retained all of it, or that my eyes didn’t regularly glaze over, but I’ve done it nonetheless, which I consider a pretty solid achievement considering how difficult portions of it are to grind through and how much of a plebeian reader I remain even after finishing it.

I have never felt very strongly about religion or Christianity, personally. But considering that I’m planning to read works like Inferno and Paradise Lost shortly, I felt like I should have a proper basis of Biblical knowledge when going in. And when choosing a Bible, I felt I should choose the most influential one in English-speaking history, thus I picked up a copy of Oxford’s wonderfully introduced and annotated King James Version.

I decided to take copious amounts of notes whenever reading so I could refer to them when finally constructing my review (you can see summarized versions of my notes on every single book of the Bible at the bottom of this review). The only “rule” I set for myself was that I would skip not a single page, no matter the content nor how it was presented. I also augmented my reading with an audio version (readily available on YouTube), which I often consumed when doing menial work such as building marketing plans and other boring busywork at my job, or doing laundry or cooking—things that didn’t require my higher brainpower and left me free to dedicate it to working through the Bible. In the end, I ended up consuming about two-thirds of the King James Bible in audio form, and reading the remaining third in my paperback Oxford copy, which was presented more as a research text than a religious text, which I appreciated, since with each new book I began and finished, I did my own research on its historicity and its meaning both in my Oxford copy’s footnotes and various internet resources. So, in total, I assume I’ve read probably closer to 3,000 pages during this project.

I should probably note here that I am not a Christian, and I am going to review the Bible in a somewhat irreverent, flippant manner. I apologize in advance for anyone who might be offended by this, but please note that you have been warned, and you are free to exit if you think my comments might bother you.

I picked up my massive tome and my resolve was immediately challenged by the glacial pacing and archaic content of the Five Books of Moses (aka the Torah, aka the Hebrew Bible, aka the Pentateuch, etc). The logic guiding morality here seemed arbitrary at best to me. Most crimes are punishable by death, including but not limited to things like stealing sheep, or working on a Sunday. In the latter portion of Numbers, Moses even dictates—with god’s support—that all of the male children of the conquered Midianites are to be executed. Another thing that struck me was how picky this god was about the way he required people to sing his praises. He even finishes the book of Exodus talking about how patient, forgiving, and generally how great a dude he is, immediately after spending dozens of pages dictating how he’s to be worshipped and describing various crimes that should be punishable by death. I grew to see him not so much as a unique, all-knowing deity, but as one of the more meddlesome Greek gods who enjoyed endlessly fucking with his worshippers more than anything else. Maybe he was just lonely.

As far as pacing, Moses’ books aren’t so much paced poorly as they are not paced at all. Throughout these books the overarching narrative is broken by vast, bloated lists of things that must have been important to early Jews, such as lists of people and their ages, proper rules for construction of places of worship, rules on how to construct candlesticks, long lists of people and their families, or the travel log of the Israelites. I regularly felt challenged in my commitment not to skip a single page, but stuck with it.

The Historical books proved a much more manageable read than the Pentateuch. It was during the story of Samson in the Book of Judges that I had my first moment of enjoyment in the entire story, more than 300 pages in. Samson shows some similarities to the story of the Greek hero Heracles, which I enjoyed. The following books were right up my alley. Though they’re religious text, they read more like histories: They depict the various wars, political struggles, civil unrest, and religious schisms within the states of Israel and Judah around the years of 1,000 BC through 500 BC. As someone who lacks Jewish or Christian faith, I took to reading between the lines with this portion of the Bible, seeing it not as the word of God, but as a theological propaganda piece written by later writers, eschewing the concrete, historical and political reasons for the fall of their state and instead providing reason for God’s allowing of it to happen. I found it entertaining despite this, at least until I reached Chronicles, which felt a lot like the Pentateuch in that it’s nearly 100 pages populated mostly by dry genealogical data. I’m continuously puzzled that stuff like this bloats the bible, but I suppose if you believe in the religion, it remains important to you. To me, it was useless, and I retain almost none of it.

I felt the Historical books ended on a high note with Esther, which is a book that mentions almost no religion or supernatural happenings whatsoever, instead relying on reading more like a historical novella of the Persian King’s wife, Esther, that was readable and entertaining. However this leads into the beginning of the Wisdom books with Job, a book I found particularly remarkable. It’s beautiful; poetically written, involving several lengthy but appealingly constructed monologues. It also encapsulates the Old Testament God’s endless cruelty, in which he allows Satan to torture the pious Job by killing all of his children, destroying his property and wealth, and inflicting horrible physical illnesses upon him, all justified by being a test of his piety. Job questions God’s doing so, to which God basically replies “I’m all-powerful, check this shit out:” and listing all the crazy stuff he can do without ever answering Job’s question. There’s also some asshole named Elihu who drops in out of nowhere and rambles on about some banal crap for a dozen pages. I detested the book, finding it cruel without reason. It angered me so much that I took several days off of reading afterwards.

Contrary to Job, I found Psalms somewhat calming to read. Although dry, I can imagine this book being a favorite of practicing Christians and Jews; something they read continuously when feeling particularly pious. The lack of a structured narrative proved a nice break from Job, and I was gobsmacked at the sheer breadth of Psalms that exist. Such a collection must have been compiled over periods of hundreds of years, but I couldn’t find any reliable sourcing information in my extracurricular study. Since I was born a Christian, I am of course familiar with Psalm 23; perhaps the most famous of all the Psalms. Reading it within the context of the entire Bible gave me new appreciation for the beauty of the text—particularly in the King James Version. The drawback of this, however, is that the psalms began to drone since I was receiving no spiritual quality from them. I’m saddened to admit that I skimmed over a great deal of passages and retain little of them; especially in the gigantic books of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Although I found the historical books appealing, the psalms, prophets, and proverbs that follow them—although nicely written—did little for me.

As I finished the Old Testament and looked back, I find it most easily describable as “uneven”. I really enjoyed some of the histories, and I found some of the psalms and lamentations to be beautifully written. Some of the more fantastical passages, such as Jonah, were also entertaining on a level near to that of Homer’s The Odyssey. However, so much of it is bloated with instructions of worship, genealogies, and oddly out-of-date moralizing that made it an absolute chore to grind through—sometimes for hundreds of pages at a time. I’ve never grinded through a book the way I forced myself to grind through the Old Testament, and moving onwards towards the Apocrypha and, finally, the New Testament, I was hopeful that I’d find a greater portion of those books fruitful than I had the Old Testament, which I found cobbled together like a Frankenstein’s monster and, in most places, hopelessly archaic.

I moved into the New Testament and was surprised to see a more focused, coherent narrative in nearly all respects. It’s an easier read and feels like a breath of fresh air after completing the gargantuan Old Testament and the books of the Apocrypha, which felt unfocused and scattered. I appreciated the narrow focus on Jesus in the New Testament books. Jesus-the-dude seems to be a pretty chill fellow, but there are still some of his teachings I disagree with. I find Jesus’ empathetic lessons like “do unto others”, charity, and forgiveness to be appealing. But I dislike certain teachings of his, such as one’s marriage to a divorced woman being considered adultery. Since I have these personal disagreements with some of his lessons, I much prefer thinking of Jesus as a regular guy; a teacher whose heart is in the right place, rather than a divine being whose word is law.

(Let me break here and say that I apologize in advance to Christians for what I’m about to say. I know it’s going to rub some people the wrong way. So, I’m sorry about this. Really, I am. But I honestly couldn’t help it.)

As I continued the Gospels I couldn’t help reading between the lines a bit and developing this cynical view of Jesus as a charismatic, inspirational cult leader not unlike a Jim Jones or a Charles Manson. This led to my viewing the New Testament itself as a piece of absurd propaganda created by the leading disciples of such a cult. This notion grew so strong after Matthew and Mark that I could no longer block it out, and most of the rest of my reading of the New Testament became a comical affair. I was no longer able to take it seriously, and it became and stayed ridiculous to me until the end of the Gospels. My lasting thought on the Gospels is thus one of bewilderment and astonishment: How is it that circumstances have allowed such an obscure and seemingly ridiculous, cult-like offshoot of Judaism to grow to such a state that it was able to film the vast power vacuum left after the fall of Rome? It’s amazing to me, and maybe the single most unlikely and astonishing feature of the course of western civilization over the last 2,000 years.

Moving from the Gospels to the Pauline books, I grew to like Paul simply because he seemed so much more human than Jesus, who was such a picture of perfection in these pages that, lacking Christian faith, I was unable to take him seriously. I enjoyed the historical aspect of Acts for this reason, but my cynicism bled through once more, and I couldn’t help but thinking of Paul—a late convert to Christianity, and a man who never knew Jesus—as a cunning opportunist who seized the chance provided by the Jesus movement to make himself its head and promote the dogmatic, organized entity that it became after Rome’s adoption of Christianity as state religion, and after the fall of the Western Empire itself.

As the Pauline books continued I began to see the roots of what the Catholic Church would eventually become. Put into scripture and doctrine are notions only hinted at or touched upon briefly in the previous books: the subservience of women to men because Adam came before Eve, aggressive bitterness towards the Jews, the bureaucratic, ecclesiastical structure of the church, and the unquestionable divinity of Jesus. I found much of what Paul preached distasteful, and the freshness his books initially brought soon dissipated. This peaks in the book of Philemon, in which Paul writes a friend and urge’s him to take back an escaped slave. Paul magnanimously offers to pay whatever damages the slave has caused, but makes no comment whatsoever on the state of slavery and even passively endorses it. You’d have thought something as obviously evil and contradictory towards Christianity’s claims as slavery would have been commented on, if not attacked, by a member of the Jesus movement such as Paul. No such criticism is made, and Christians would wait another 1,800 years before being pressured by Enlightenment era thinkers to abandon the practice. I began the New Testament ready to accept what it had to teach, with my mind open and eager to hear Jesus’ personal philosophy. But I found myself sadly disagreeing with its morals nearly as fervently as I had the Old Testament’s.

The only book I really enjoyed in the New Testament to the level of which I enjoyed some of the fables and histories of the Old Testament was Revelation—the very last. To put it irreverently: This book is metal as hell. Literally. Seriously though, it’s full of intense, dark, mythological imagery that I found compelling. Rather than reading it literally, I read it metaphorically, and greatly enjoyed it in this manner. I finished it wondering how, indeed, anyone could read such a fantastical book literally; by necessity, the last time this thought would occur to me, though certainly not the first.

As I ended my read, I had the striking notion of just how much popularly understood Christianity does not actually appear in the Bible. Satan, for example, appears only a handful of times in the Old Testament—nearly 1,300 pages of text—and assumptions that he is the serpent which visits Adam and Eve are just interpretation. Further, the word “antichrist” hardly appears in the New Testament—and even then, only in the books of John. It’s surprising just how much of our colloquial understanding of Christianity has been formed by those preaching the religion rather than from its own holy book, or from later, non-canon stories such as Milton’s Paradise Lost. My own knowledge of the religion, which arose mostly from popular culture, was almost wholly unfounded in the actual Bible itself. Thus I’m glad to have confronted my own ignorance with this reading of the King James Version.

The more I look back on the bible, the more the historical books and the fantastical fables stand out in my recollection. I found the lessons of ethics and morals distasteful, and they’re quickly fading from my memory because of this. So I suppose what I deem most valuable about this long, cover-to-cover read is just the history and folklore of both Judaism and Christianity that I’ve learned from it—and this has come mostly from the supplemental reading I’ve done alongside it. And while there are portions of the King James Version that are beautifully, poetically written, there are also many examples of clumsy prose, even in some of the more well-written books. One of my favorite examples of this is from a book I liked: Revelation 14:2 “I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps”. You don’t say? Harpers? Harping!?

So, in conclusion, I’d say that if you want to learn exactly what the bible actually says, instead of just what Christians claim in its name? Read the bible. If you’re interested in the history depicted and/or the questionable historicity governing it, then you should read the Bible.

The Bible is a tome that has been studied for thousands of years. At its worst it’s an archaic list of laws calling for the punishment of their violation by extreme violence. But at its best it features surprisingly kind-hearted blueprints of how best to live your life honestly, generously, and with empathy for others. The problem is that you’ve got to take this good-hearted stuff out of its context in order to apply it to your life. This contradictory nature is deep-seated in this book and thus deep-seated in Christianity itself. It led me to view the entire religion as a Frankenstein’s monster of paradoxes, and the Bible as a book in which everything was included—often to its detriment. The bible isn’t a bad book because it contains bad things; it’s a bad book because it contains everything. It’s so vast and inclusive and written by so many different parties spanning thousands of years of clashing social and religious norms that the philosophies it presents in any one chapter are usually contradictable by various other passages elsewhere in the book, and the stuff that’s actually enjoyable to read (ie. the folklore and the histories) is weighed down by the stuff that’s probably going to mean almost nothing to modern day readers (detailed lists of rules of worship and breaks of several pages as the narrator drones on through genealogical trees). I believe that its most fervent supporters would be as surprised by the bad as its most vitriolic detractors would be shocked by the good. You can find portions of it telling you to mercilessly kill those who break god’s laws, and a thousand pages later, it tells you to turn the other cheek to those who’d smite you, and to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

When you read the Bible cover-to-cover, it’s a puzzling mess. It lacks the strong spiritual direction that one might wish to gain from it. It’s a book that is not only vulnerable to selective reading, but almost requires it of the reader in order for them to take any sort of guidance whatsoever from its lessons. After finishing it I can clearly see why many Christians seem to disregard the Old Testament completely in favor of the New Testament, and why they often don’t read their own holy book cover-to-cover, but instead prefer to rely on the spiritual guidance of their priests.

I can’t say I enjoyed my time with the Bible, even if reading the entire thing cover-to-cover provided me with a deeper, more nuanced view on Christianity, Jews, Christians, and their books. And I can’t say that it made me a Christian, either. I still view my best life as one lived without the Bible’s moral guidance. So I can’t call my opinion of the book a positive one, despite certain portions of it remaining an entertaining and/or enlightening read.

Perhaps the one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that I’ll never read it again.

Most-liked books: Judges, Esther, Tobit, Judith, Revelation

Least-liked books: Genesis, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Chronicles, Job

Progress diary:

October 25, 2018 – Started Reading

October 27, 2018 – 

page 34

 

 1.88% "Very much not a fan of Genesis."

November 3, 2018 – 

page 51

 

 2.82%

December 3, 2018 – 

page 74

 

 4.1% "Finally grinded through Genesis, and it only took me 2 months! Only 1,725 pages to go!"

December 21, 2018 – 

page 106

 

 5.87% "It will be a hell of a day when this one is finally cleared from my "Currently Reading" shelf. Uh, no pun intended."

January 24, 2019 – 

page 118

 

 6.53% "I am not enjoying myself. Hopefully it's just the old testament, but I have a feeling it's not.

Genesis and Exodus in the bag, Leviticus up next.

I'm looking forward to never having to read this again, but I'll give it as fair a review as I can."

January 25, 2019 – 

page 263

 

 14.56% "Books of Moses are now in the rearview, thank god (heh).

Since I decided to read and review this, I decided also to write my review alongside my read since the Bible is so long. I'm already at 7 pages and nearly 3,000 words, but only 15% done. Whoops.

Not sure what Goodreads' review character limit is, but this will probably be pushing up against it at best."

February 1, 2019 – 

page 294

 

 16.28% "Joshua, in general, was probably the easiest read I've had since the beginning of Genesis or the beginning of Exodus. I was coming near to enjoying myself until it devolved once again into an lengthy list, this time of the lands conquered by Joshua. If we could get past this type of cataloging I think I'd be enjoying this read much more than I am. These names and lands mean almost nothing to me."

February 1, 2019 – 

page 330

 

 18.27% "Book of Judges done. A more structured read when compared to previous books.

I find the idea of a book about the Israelites defending their newly gained territory with the appointment of military "Judges" (warlords?) compelling.

Samson and Heracles similarities.

The Israelites swaying from the disciplines required by their covenant with god seems to be a notable recurring theme.

No long, monotonous lists!"

February 4, 2019 – 

page 371

 

 20.54% "Ruth: Small book. Alright.

1 Samuel: I liked this one. We're moving further away from the Pentateuch's tendency to instruct worship over telling a story.

One noteworthy occurrence is God getting angry with Saul for his refusal to commit genocide against the Amalekites.

Hey, I've heard of David. In fact I've seen a few statues of the fella.

RIP Jonathan. (That's my name too.)"

February 5, 2019 – 

page 406

 

 22.48% "2 Samuel: The ambiguity of David and Jonathan's deep, mutual affection provides the potential for a homosexual relationship between the two. Quite the interesting possibility that adds depth to David's backstory.

I enjoyed David's humanity and fallibility in this section. I find myself disregarding God's direct intervention and instead viewing David's misfortunes as typical political machinations common to monarchy."

February 6, 2019 – 

page 446

 

 24.7% "1 Kings: Solomon's got 700 wives and concubines. Seems reasonable.

This book sees depiction of civil war and religious schism among Israel and Judah. The more human civilization changes, the more it stays the same, I suppose. Makes you wonder if we'll ever get past this kind of thing that's been happening now for 3,000+ years."

February 6, 2019 – 

page 485

 

 26.85% "2 Kings: Prophets magicking things. Queen Jezebel sleeps with the fishes. Er, dogs. Those blasted Assyrians roll on through Israel. Then those blasted Babylonians roll on through Judah, once against dispersing our heroic (?) Israelites into the wind. And God is pretty mad at everyone throughout because they do evil by not listening to him."

February 6, 2019 – 

page 522

 

 28.9% "1 Chronicles: True to its name, it's a chronicle the various genealogies of the Israelites who came out of Egypt. The driest, most monotonous mess of nonsense I've encountered in the Bible thus far--beating out even the Pentateuch.

It has almost no relevance to modern day readers and, at best, serves only to catalog events already described. Worthless for my reading purposes.

I'm going to need a break pretty soon."

February 7, 2019 – 

page 566

 

 31.34% "2 Chronicles: The first named appearance of Satan (that I can recall, anyway) as a servant of God who commands the taking of numbers.

I don't recall him mentioned specifically by name in any of the prior books. Interesting just how strong a presence he has to modern Christians considering his lack of screen time in the actual freaking Bible.

I wonder if Milton anticipated his impact on the religion. Doubtful."

February 8, 2019 – 

page 597

 

 33.06% "Ezra: I discovered during extra reading (which I do for each book) the blueprint of the temple here is physically impossible.

Some more genealogy and dry religious law in this one, too. Yuck.

Nehemiah: The capable Israelite helping to run a wider empire (Moses, and now Ezra/Nehemiah) is emerging as a common theme in these books.

The Israelites' reluctance to intermingle with other societies is interesting."

February 8, 2019 – 

page 607

 

 33.61% "Esther: A short book, but far more enjoyable read than the previous two chapters. No mention of gods or religious rules, no genealogies. Some politicking, a memorable heroine, and lots of drama.

Notable is the whole "every man should bear rule in his own house" crap that still hamstrings us even today. Funny how Christians who take this as gospel are actually living (probably unknowingly) an ancient Persian custom."

February 8, 2019 – 

page 640

 

 35.44% "Job: A beautiful but appalling book in which Job is mercilessly punished for no reason, further displaying the cruelty of the Old Testament's God.

I find the entire thing detestable, I reject the idea that pointless suffering is praiseworthy so long as it's done in the name of God.

Made more interesting by Satan's appearance, as I still find him intriguing. Hurt by Elihu's banal, curiously out-of-place droning."

February 15, 2019 – 

page 692

 

 38.32% "Psalms: This is the longest book I've seen thus far, and I didn't get as much time to read this week. Thoughts to come next week upon finishing."

February 19, 2019 – 

page 723

 

 40.03% "Psalms: I'm ashamed to admit I zoned out for most of this entire book. It's incredibly long and most of it is just recorded verse celebrating religious statutes. It really did nothing for me, though I can see why it'd be an oft reread portion by worshipers."

February 20, 2019 – 

page 751

 

 41.58% "Proverbs: Pretty much what you'd expect given the title, a set of Christian-inspired proverbs and moralistic stories."

February 20, 2019 – 

page 765

 

 42.36% "Ecclesiastes: An odd book. Seems to want to be focused on living in the moment and enjoying life, but constantly contradicts such a notion with orthodox thoughts lifted from prior books.

Song of Solomon: Alright, I was completely unprepared for this one. To summarize; they're talkin' about fuckin'."

February 27, 2019 – 

page 827

 

 45.79% "Isaiah: Very long book. Portions of it were difficult to read but it did include some nice poetic passages.

The bible is such an odd "book". Messy, weird pacing, retreading events already covered at seemingly arbitrary places. I pity whomever had the actual task of organizing all of these books.

Jeremiah is next but I'm traveling to Southeast Asia for the next couple of weeks, so don't expect another update soon."

March 18, 2019 – 

page 897

 

 49.67% "Jeremiah: The story of a prophet whose warnings of destruction are ignored is a very compelling story. There remains a tone of hopefulness throughout but, as usual, this being a religious text renders most of its potential storytelling impact dry and unengaging to me—a non-Christian."

March 21, 2019 – 

page 903

 

 50.0% "Lamentations: A short poetic book centered on Jeremiah's sadness at the fall of Jerusalem. At face value, Jerusalem is destroyed—its people raped and tortured—all because of their failure in their covenant with their god. However, when looking at the book as a cry of misery after a sacking, it takes a significantly different shape from that which is present on paper."

April 1, 2019 – 

page 968

 

 53.6% "Ezekiel: Quite the scatterbrained book. A bit abstract; I found it difficult to keep track of the actual narrative. Humorously, they read like the ramblings of a mad prophet more than anything concrete or meaningful to non-believers.

I was unable to locate the famous quotation Jules makes in Tarantino's famous film Pulp Fiction, but I did find several Ezekiel passages which clearly inspired Tarantino's pen."

April 2, 2019 – 

page 987

 

 54.65% "Daniel: Jewish resistance to foreign tyranny. Egyptians and Babylonians mostly, seems a recurring them, one which again appears in Daniel. Interestingly, the bible inspires much of Western culture—itself including an innate anathema and fierce resistance to the encroachment of the tyranny of foreign powers.

I'm happy to see the emergence of history I'm familiar with; namely, Alexander of Macedon's conquest."

April 2, 2019 – 

page 996

 

 55.15% "Hosea: Angry tones discussing literal and symbolic adultery, YHWH's unhappy relationship with his worshipers, who continually seem to turn to other deities."

April 3, 2019 – 

page 1006

 

 55.7% "Joel: Short book in which the infamous plague of locusts appears that everyone always talks about, continuing the narrative of YHWH's wrath with his Israelites.

Amos: Another short book containing ruminations on the destruction of Israel. Odd that these prophets were supposedly all active in the same era, yet were unaware of the others. Was there no Prophets' Club where they all hung out at the Temple?"

April 3, 2019 – 

page 1016

 

 56.26% "Obadiah: Shortest book thus far. More of the same; this time a vision specifically regarding the fall of Edom, one of the smaller Jewish states in the area.

Jonah: I like the more narrative-driven books and enjoyed the fantastical nature of Jonah, which reads more like a Christian version of the Odyssey despite its brevity. Oh, and god is still kind of a dick.

Micah: Short book. Added detail of the fall Jerusalem."

April 3, 2019 – 

page 1024

 

 56.7% "Nahum: My Egyptian history is pretty fuzzy so it's always nice to have the opportunity to learn more about it, even from religious texts. Nahum discusses the fall of the great Egyptian city of Thebes to the Assyrians.

Habakkuk: Short book mostly focused on the prophet Habakkuk's faith, including a psalm towards the end.

Zephaniah: Another short book discussing the broken covenant and god's wrath."

April 3, 2019 – 

page 1039

 

 57.53% "Haggai: Another short book concerning the building of the second temple of Jerusalem, later destroyed by the Romans under Titus during their sack of Jerusalem in the 1st century AD.

Zechariah: Concerning the return of the Jews to Judah, signalling the end of the Babylonian captivity.

Malachi: Endcap to the Old Testament focused on the Israelites once again making commitment to follow god's laws post-exile."

April 3, 2019 – 

page 1039

 

 57.53% "**END OF OLD TESTAMENT**

Well, that was a grind. I've never grinded through so much sheer text as I did with the Old Testament—1,000+ pages! Some of it (histories, psalms, fantastical passages) was enjoyable; much of it (genealogies, endless minor rules of worship) was not. I'm glad to have it in the rearview.

Apocrypha (248 pages) up next, followed by the New Testament (319 pages). Then I can move on with my life."

April 3, 2019 – 

page 1062

 

 58.8% "**APOCRYPHA**

1 Esdras: I felt like this book was retreading some of the ground already covered, and on doing some quick googling it turns out Esdras is actually just an older, Greek language version of the Book of Ezra, covering the end of the Babylonia Captivity and the conquest of Babylon by the Persians.

I didn't find much use for this 1 Esdras, but I suppose I can see why it's valued by biblical scholars."

April 4, 2019 – 

page 1097

 

 60.74% "2 Esdras: Like 1 Esdras, this book arrives from translation; this time Latin, from Jerome's late 4th Century Vulgate. Interesting note in the beginning—what I assume to be Christian alterations or earlier work: God rejects the Jews and alludes to the Son of God.

I've begun to grow affectionate of the Bible's Frankensteinish composition, and the game of trying to guess what was added by later writers and translators."

April 5, 2019 – 

page 1108

 

 61.35% "Tobit: I can't imagine a lamer way to be blinded than by having a bird accidentally poop in your eye. Regardless, this fantastical story is a great example of how entertaining the Bible can be when it's telling stories rather than vociferously moralizing, or describing the endless draconian minutiae that are the rules of worship as dictated to the Israelites. I liked it, aside from the lengthy "son of" portions."

April 5, 2019 – 

page 1127

 

 62.4% "Judith: I'm familiar with this story through Caravaggio's famous painting. Judith's badassery inspired many, despite this book being relegated to the Apocrypha, at least in the KJV I'm reading. This is the second story I found greatly entertaining in the Apocrypha (Tobit, too). Hopefully this a sign of things to come."

April 5, 2019 – 

page 1151

 

 63.73% ""The rest of Esther": Apparently some additions in Greek that are not present in the original Hebrew text. I liked this book originally, but restarting the narrative again from here was completely jarring and I barely followed it.

Wisdom of Solomon: Solomon pontificating and moralizing to other rulers on how best to rule. Not much to say. I don't care for the Wisdom books and didn't like this one much either."

April 8, 2019 – 

page 1201

 

 66.5% "Ecclesiasticus: Another long-ish wisdom book. Not my favorite, but I suppose it's better than a lengthy discussion of genealogy or a detailed description on how best to construct a temple or the ark.

As a non-Christian reader I never have much to say about books of wisdom, other than I greatly prefer histories and moralistic narratives for obvious reasons.

I do like the mention of medicine over prayer in this book."

April 8, 2019 – 

page 1210

 

 67.0% "Baruch: Another prophet book. Supplemental reading proved interesting: Turns out this book was not included in the Vulgate by Jerome, but later added around the 9th century. Sometimes the historical context of these books (apocryphal books in particular) is as interesting as the contents themselves."

April 8, 2019 – 

page 1219

 

 67.5% "Song of the Three Children: A lyrical excerpt taken from the end of Daniel. Meh.

The History of Susanna: Another excerpt of Daniel. From my understanding this is only Apocryphal to Protestants. It is canon to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. Daniel saves Susanna from a false accusation of promiscuity.

Bel and the Dragon: Another fantastical excerpt of Daniel's book.

The Prayer of Manasses: A short prayer."

April 9, 2019 – 

page 1290

 

 71.43% "1 and 2 Maccabees: Possibly the most interesting clash of historicity so far. From what I understand, these books survive to us as separate Greek translation of the original Hebrew, which is lost to us. The two disagree in several aspects with one another.

In addition to this, the books recount the narrative of the Jewish rebellion against the Seleucids and the reestablishment of Jewish Israel. A compelling read."

April 11, 2019 – 

page 1290

 

 71.43% "**APOCRYPHA FINISHED**

With that, I'll likely take a break from this one until next week. New Testament is up next. Just about 300 more pages to go!"

April 12, 2019 – 

page 1331

 

 73.7% "**NEW TESTAMENT**

Matthew: What a refreshing breath of air to leave the Old Testament's colossal, archaic, sprawling, genealogy-polluted, dogmatic books in the rear view for the more brief, focused narratives of the new testament books.

Matthew was a far easier, quicker read, and I hope other New Testament books are similar. Noteworthy: Matthew's apparent distaste for the Jews is made clear in 23-27."

April 15, 2019 – 

page 1357

 

 75.14% "Mark: I'm not sure I'm educated enough in Christian theology to comment on the comparison between these gospels that depict similar narratives. Mark includes a bit more detail and seems to view Jesus as a more obscure teacher than Matthew.

Reading these, I can't help my cynical view of regarding Jesus as a cultlike, charismatic, inspirational figure. Forgive me blasphemy, please, Christians. I can't help it."

April 17, 2019 – 

page 1401

 

 77.57% "Luke: A relatively striking turn from the glum, pessimistic book of Mark if the more literary and rhetorical book of Luke. I enjoyed it quite a bit more. It was meatier in its narrative and characterized Jesus more as an innocent, kind teacher than the brainwashing cultmaster he seemed in Mark's book. I found it similar to Matthew, but better written and more filled-out. Not bad."

April 17, 2019 – 

page 1434

 

 79.4% "John: Features some of the best dialogue of the entire book, along with some of the most direct and harshest criticism of the Jews. Supposedly this book did a lot to shape medieval opinion of the Jews throughout Christendom. I can see why. But it's also loaded with some of the most well-known stories of the bible. I'm guessing it's one of the most famous, and one of the most read among Christians."

April 18, 2019 – 

page 1476

 

 81.73% "Acts: The break from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is a bit overdue, as those books began to wear me down about halfway through.

Paul is a far more interesting figure to follow than Jesus, as he seems more human and less Mary Sue. His writing is tinged with pride and irritability, and just due to that he's more interesting to read about than Jesus was, in all of his smugness and haughtiness."

April 24, 2019 – 

page 1493

 

 82.67% "Romans: I find Paul fascinating. An egotist, a man who never knew Jesus but swears by him as his lord and savior. I find myself viewing Paul in a cynical light; as a man who seized the opportunity provided by the Jesus movement, and set it on the path to the strictly structured, dogmatic entity it is in the modern day. I'd kill to see his reaction to how gargantuan and influential the church has been on Western civ."

April 25, 2019 – 

page 1520

 

 84.16% "1 and 2 Corinthians: Paul seems more introspective in this letter. I particularly enjoyed his comparisons of the Jewish reliance on "law", or "the letter"; versus the Christian practice of worshiping on faith and reading their holy books allegorically.

Noteworthy: What I assume is the first usage of the phrase "through a glass, darkly"—Which I did not know originated from the bible. I love finding stuff like this."

May 6, 2019 – 

page 1531

 

 84.77% "Galatians: Paul seems more insecure in this letter, defending his apostleship and retierating the unnecessary act of circumcision among gentiles joining the Jesus movement.

Ephesians: Beginning oddly with an enormous single sentence, this book stresses the otherworldliness of Jesus and lays out some dogmatic principles stressing the holy justification of the church, rather than allowing it to remain a manmade entity"

May 6, 2019 – 

page 1539

 

 85.22% "Philippians: Interesting how quickly the charismatic, non-threatening, cult-leader-like Christ has disappeared after the Gospels to be replaced by the divine one in this book. The aggression shown towards potential heretics is equally striking.

Colossians: Doesn't differ much from prior Pauline books. Supplemental reading indicates it is now believed this and Ephesians were not actually written by Paul. Interesting."

May 7, 2019 – 

page 1552

 

 85.94% "1 & 2 Thessalonians: The books are growing shorter as I continue. Most notable are some of the most direct attacks on the Jews in the New Testament so far are found here.

1 & 2 Timothy: Did you know the Bible forbids women from teaching or holding authority positions over men? You do now. This book is chock full of discussion on ecclesiastical organization and rhetoric damaging to gender equality."

May 7, 2019 – 

page 1555

 

 86.1% "Titus: Echoing Timothy in its distaste for the Jews (although Cretans are included, which I found humorous), and its stressing the coming bureaucracy of the new church.

Philemon: A single page but a vastly important book to me. Inside which Paul discusses an escaped slave of a friend, and urges the friend to take the slave back. No commentary whatsoever is made on slavery being inherently evil and wrong. Laughable."

May 7, 2019 – 

page 1567

 

 86.77% "Hebrews: What stuck with me most from this book was the grasping at straws to relate Jesus-as-divinity to the oldest books of the Hebrew bible. Great effort seems to be made to tie continuity to the New Testament here."

May 8, 2019 – 

page 1579

 

 87.43% "James: A book that reads like the wisdoms and seems to disagree with those Pauline books preceding it in terms of redemption via faith vs. good works.

1 & 2 Peter: Supplemental reading casts doubt that these were actually written by Peter, as the Greek is fluent and the prose poetic even though Peter was an Aramaic-speaking Jewish fisherman. The second book is particularly aggressive in its criticisms of the lapsed."

May 8, 2019 – 

page 1585

 

 87.76% "1, 2, & 3 John: Ugh. These books are representative of the chaos of early Christianity, launching into tirade against heretical teachings while at the same time featuring striking contradictions within its own texts (example: man will always be a sinner and must repent / man is born of god and thus cannot sin).

It's indicative of the growth of Christianity and the need for a more organized, bureaucratic orthodoxy."

May 8, 2019 – 

page 1606

 

 88.93% "Jude: A short book in which Jude continues John's rants against what were seen as movements heretical to Christianity.

Revelation: The closing book of the Bible, and an important one. Apocalyptic, complex. Surprisingly, I rather enjoyed it. I read it metaphorically, and I can see how troublesome and damaging it could be to read it literally. Yikes, Christians.

Also—finally, "666" appears. yay!

Review forthcoming."

May 9, 2019 – Finished Reading

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