Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Lamb

The subtitle of Christopher Moore's Lamb, "The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal", is about as clever as this complete waste of time gets. Incredibly, more than 600 people on Amazon rave about it, and it's got a 90% positive rating on Facebook's Visual Bookshelf application. This should tell you nothing about the book, but it does say a great deal about the pedestrian reading habits of mainstream America.

Biff was Jesus Christ's best friend back in the day, and he's brought back to life by an angel who wants him to write his version of what happened between Jesus' birth and death. This leads to a bunch of super lame exchanges between the angel and Biff, between which he recounts his story. According to Biff, he and Jesus traveled to Asia, lived with each of the three wise men for a spell, made up the theory of evolution while talking to the Yeti, created Judo (more precisely, "Jew-do", or kung fu for Jews, I shit you not), and had a great deal of witty repartee with hookers and hobos and each other.

This book is terrible. If it's not the worst book I have ever read, it's second only to Ishmael, the story of a talking monkey who hates farmers. However, if you do choose to read it, and especially if you find anything whatsoever redeeming about it, please join us at book club next Tuesday, June 15.

1 comment:

georgia said...

HA HA! I remember Ishmael! That was an awful book!!!